HeartBroken Story: Murder of Junko Furuta

                                 44 DAYS OF HELL: MURDER OF JUNKO FURUTA

Junko Furuta (古田 順子 Furuta Junko, November 22, 1972 – January 4, 1989) was a 16-year-old Japanese high school student who was abducted, tortured, raped, and murdered in the late 1980s. Her murder case was named the concrete-encased high school girl murder case due to the state of her discovered body in a concrete drum filled with 208 litres of concrete.

                                                 JUNKO FURUTA (NOV 1972-1989)

Junko Furuta was a 16 year old Japanese girl who underwent 44 days of rape and torture before dying in the hands of her captors on November 22, 1989. Known throughout Japan as concrete-encased high school girl, the case of Junko Furuta  drew nationwide attention owing to sheer brutality the girl had to endure before death found her.

Junko Furuta Story

Junko Furuta attended a high school in Misato, in Saitama Prefecture, Japan. She was a good looking, active teenager who enjoyed a lot of attention and that made some people jealous. She did not smoke, did not drink alcohol and did not do drugs which was seen as very uncool in the eyes of more gangster like teens. One of them – Hiroshi Miyano had a crush on her but not looking for a relationship, Junko Furuta turned him down. Hiroshi Miyano was the bully in the school and being involved with the new generations of the Yakuza, nobody dared to oppose him. And Junko Furuta had the nerve to say “No”…

On November 25, 1988 she was kidnapped by 4 teenage boys – one of them being Hiroshi Miyano. The boys took Junko Furuta to the house owned by the parents of one of the kidnappers in the Ayase district of Adachi, Tokyo.

While in captivity, the kidnapers forced Junko Furuta to call her parents and tell them that she’d run away and is going to stay with a friend, but insist that she’s not in danger. Not able to realize what was coming and too scared to remain non-compliant, Junko did exactly as she was told, ultimately forestalling a manhunt which would have otherwise followed her disappearance.

Parents of Nobuharu Minato in whose house Junko Furuta was kept paid their son a visit on a few occasions but under a threat of increased violence against her, Junko was requested to pretend that she was a girlfriend of one of the boys. However even when it became apparent that she was a captive in the house, the parents did nothing for fear of retaliation from Hiroshi Miyano who was known to have the Yakuza connections.

During the course of 44 days following her kidnapping, Junko Furuta was forced to withstand unspeakable suffering. What she went through before murder included:

All of this had happened

DAY 1: November 22, 1988: Kidnapped

Kept captive in house, and posed as one of boy’s girlfriend

Raped (over 400 times in total)

Forced to call her parents and tell them she had run away

Starved and malnutritioned

Fed cockroaches to eat and urine to drink

Forced to masturbate

Forced to strip in front of others

Burned with cigarette lighters

Foreign objects inserted into her vagina/anus

DAY 11: December 1, 1988: Severely beat up countless times
Face held against concrete ground and jumped on
Hands tied to ceiling and body used as a punching bag
Nose filled with so much blood that she can only breath through her mouth
Dumbbells dropped onto her stomach
Vomited when tried to drink water (her stomach couldn’t accept it)
Tried to escape and punished by cigarette burning on arms
Flammable liquid poured on her feet and legs, then lit on fire
Bottle inserted into her anus, causing injury

DAY 20: December10, 1989: Unable to walk properly due to severe leg burns
Beat with bamboo sticks
Fireworks inserted into anus and lit
Hands smashed by weights and fingernails kracked
Beaten with golf club
Cigarettes inserted into vagina
Beaten with iron rods repeatedly
Winter; forced outside to sleep in balcony
Skewers of grilled chicken inserted into her vagina and anus, causing bleeding

DAY 30: Hot wax dripped onto face
Eyelids burned by cigarette lighter
Stabbed with sewing needles in chest area
Left nipple cut and destroyed with pliers
Hot light bulb inserted into her vagina
Heavy bleeding from vagina due to scissors insertion
Unable to urinate properly
Injuries were so severe that it took over an hour for her to crawl downstairs and use the bathroom
Eardrums severely damaged
Extreme reduced brain size

DAY 40: Begged her torturers to “kill her and get it over with”

January 1, 1989: Junko greets the New Years Day alone
Body mutilated
Unable to move from the ground

DAY 44: January 4, 1989: The four boys beat her mutilated body with an iron barbell, using a loss at the game of Mah-jongg as a pretext. She is profusely bleeding from her mouth and nose. They put a candle’s flame to her face and eyes.

Then, lighter fluid was poured onto her legs, arms, face and stomach, and then lit on fire. This final torture lasted for a time of two hours.

Junko Furuta died later that day, in pain and alone. Nothing could compare 44 days of suffering she had to go through.

When her mother heard the news and details of what had happened to her daughter, she fainted. She had to undergo a psychiatric outpatient treatment . Imagine her endless pain.

This story from 1989 is true. Please spread her story around. Everyone should know about the existence of Junko Furuta’s unimaginable and incomprehensible suffering, and this is why this group has been made.

At one point, when the attackers were resting after drinking, she tried to call the police but was caught and punished by having her feet set on fire with burning lighter fluid. Large bottle the perpetrators forced up her anus caused internal injuries and ugly bleeding.

Severe leg burns and badly bruised muscles left her unable to walk after 20 days of her ordeal. She wasn’t able to handle anything with her hands anymore because her bones were smashed with weights and her fingernails cracked. Since it was winter, she was also forced to sleep on a balcony, exposed to cold temperatures.


Junko Furuta’s Death

During the course of 44 days when she was repeatedly tortured, beaten and raped, Junko Furuta begged her captors several times to just kill her and be done with it. They didn’t grant her that favor. Instead, on January 4, 1989, they challenged her to a game of Mahjong solitaire. She won and that pissed the boys off so they treated her to a beating with an iron barbell and fire by setting her legs, arms, face and stomach alight after pouring lighter fluid on them. Being already badly beaten, dehydrated and malnutritioned, Junko Furuta fell into a shock and died the following day.

The murderers stuffed the dead girl’s body in a 55-gallon drum filled with concrete and disposed of it in Koto, Tokyo.

Junko Furuta Captors Identified

The names of four main captors who kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered Junko Furuta were withheld by the Japanese court because they were juveniles, however the journalists from the Shūkan Bunshun magazine dug them out and publish them stating that after what they did to Junko Furuta, they don’t deserve anyone to uphold their human rights:

• Hiroshi Miyano – 18 year old at the time of the crime. Changed his name to Hiroshi Yokoyama
• Jō Ogura  – 18 year old at the time of the crime. Changed his name to Jō Kamisaku (神作譲)
• Shinji Minato (– 16 year old at the time of the crime, some sources refer to him as Nobuharu Minato
• Yasushi Watanabe – 17 year old at the time of the crime

All four perpetrators were caught and tried. However because they were all under-aged when the crime was committed, they were to be tried as juveniles, but eventually faced sentences of adults, except that the court withheld their identities. Still, given the severity of their crimes, the sentences they were handed out were rather low. By now, each of them is already out of jail. Three of the boys served less than 8 years, the leader was originally sentenced to 17 years in prison, but after his appeal, instead of lowering his sentence, judge Ryūji Yanase bumped his sentence to 20 years. The same judge also increased the sentenced for two bore boys who appealed. One didn’t so his sentence stayed as was. Either way, they’re all in their late 30′s and all out of jail.

Jo Kamisaku (not his real name), who was released in August 1999 went back to prison in July 2004 for 7 years for the beating of a guy he thought was luring his girlfriend away from him.

Because forensic examiners found sperm and pubic hair of other people on the corpse of Junko Furuta, few more names were linked to her torture and murder:

• Kōichi Ihara
• Tetsuo Nakamura 

~PRIYANKA HALPATRAO