Murder in Juvenile Delinquency

A murder of a teenager group in Kawasaki city, Kanagawa, shook Japan. High school students killed a mid-school student of thirteen years old at riverside on Tamagawa in the midnight. The victim had been sending signs requiring help. His friends and people in the community regretted their indifference on them only in vain. The suspected killers looked like ordinary students in appearance. Some Sicknesses of Japanese society exist in the incident.

The victim moved from a small island offshore of Shimane to Kawasaki two yeas ago. He had been popular to his classmates, with his bright smile and determination to basketball club. After half of a year passed from his entrance in a mid-school, he joined a juvenile delinquency group with an introduction of a man twenty years old. Many people witnessed the victim, when he was with those high school students in a park late at night.

The victim tried to get out of the group many times, tired of being forced to commit thefts in shops and wanting to get back to school, where he had been absent from the beginning of this year. “I can be killed, because I resisted to elder members,” he told in his LINE message to his friend. But the leader of the group, eighteen-year-old ex-student of a high school, did not allow it. Nobody including the victim could resist the leader’s order, because he was too brutal toward his colleagues.

The murder was actually nothing but brutal. The killer striped all of the victim’s clothes, and deeply stubbed his throat. One report indicated that the killer let the victim stand on his knees and cut his throat, reminding of the execution of hostages by Islamic State. They burnt the clothes in a public restroom located in a park nearby to erase evidence of the crime.

Responses of the society were regrets on not noticing the victim’s help. The classmates visited the place he was killed and put flowers on the land with messages of “We will not forget you” or “I’m sorry.” But, those messages cannot compensate a lost life. The victim will never come back. Every word of regret, apology or anger is vain after he was dead. His friends, relatives, teachers and people in regional community need to understand that no action brings no achievement.

Politicians are always hungry for their own interest. The policy leader of Liberal Democratic Party indicated that the party might be starting discussion for lowering the age of adult from twenty to eighteen. That was pointless. It is how to construct a society in which people are curious about happiness of each other and communicate each other without hesitation.