Group Murder on One Person

Young crimes in the United States sometimes take a form of killing multiple people by single person. In Japan, on the contrary, they often appear to be killing one victim by a group of people. A murder case in Hiroshima prefecture, in which a girl in sixteen years old was found dead in a forest in the suburb of Kure city, is suspected to have been done by seven young men and women. The principal of the crime is a girl in the same training school, who were unpleasant for the attitude the victim showed to her. The case proved a tendency of the Japanese, who show extreme brutality with the existence of colleagues.

According to the news reports, the principal girl, with six others, brought the victim to the forest by a car in the midnight of late June. They committed violence, consecutive hitting and kicking, to her in the car and forest, and dumped the body to a valley after the victim was supposed to have been dead. Although some of them deny the involvement of the murder, the most admit the commitment of the lynching.

With a sense of sin, the principle turned herself in to the police with her parents. If she did not do that, it is not sure the case had been acknowledged. She explained the reason of the murder to be victim’s calling name of her in a social networking service. Another possible reason was a money trouble in escorting business they had been involved in.

One problem here is some of the seven criminals were strangers each other, although one of them are a boyfriend of the principle. It is hard to believe that a person could easily support strangers’ murder, or leave it happening at least. All of them except the car driver were nineteen years old or younger, the minorities in Japanese law.

In Japan, news reports on crime are highly dependent on the information leaked by police officers. In this case, most part of the murder story is constructed with confessions of the arrested seven, brought by police. While network censoring is prohibited by law, it is still unclear how the police collected information of dialogues from the network. It is unlikely for police to leak conversation in the network without any verification to the provider.

With the development of social network service, on the other hand, crimes keep on descending down to the underground. It is sure that the police cannot catch up with the spread of various crimes. Without an expectation of brutalization of young crimes, media still report minority criminals with anonymity. Considering the deep regret of victims’ family, newspapers and TV stations need to reconsider that practice.