Playback ’94] Bonded Only by Thinner…Osaka, Aichi, Gifu Serial Lynching Murder: Perpetrator Boys’ and Girls’ “Disorderly Conduct”.

What did “FRIDAY” report 10, 20, or 30 years ago? In “Playback Friday,” we take a look back at the topics that were hot at the time. This time, we will introduce the article, “Three people were slaughtered in a series of lynching murders in Aichi and Gifu, eight of whom were soaked in paint thinner,” which appeared in the November 4, 1994 issue 30 years ago.

From midnight of October 6 to midnight of the following day, October 7, 1994, three men died after being assaulted by a group of people. The three men arrested were all minors aged 18 or 19, and the case is said to be “one of the most heinous cases in the history of juvenile crime” (the descriptions in parentheses below are taken from past articles).

The three were charged with assaulting two complete strangers.

One of them was covered with blood from his neck to his shoulder, and it looked as if he had been decapitated. The other’s pants were torn from the base of his thighs, and his waist was stained with blood. Even from a distance I could see that their faces and legs were pale.

On the evening of October 7, a group of six men and six women attacked Mr. A and Ms. B at a bowling alley in Inazawa City, Aichi Prefecture, saying, “Where do you guys come from? They took them around in a car and killed them by beating them to death with iron pipes and other weapons. The bodies were left on the riverbed.

On October 13, the Gifu Prefectural Police arrested Yuto Sato (pseudonym, 21), an unemployed man, and a girl (19), also unemployed, both of Inazawa City, for this crime. After further questioning of their fellow boy and girl, another lynching murder was discovered, and these two were also arrested. As per their statement, Mr. C (22 at the time), a civil engineer from Inazawa City, was found in a riverbed of the Kiso River in Aichi Prefecture, in a state of disarray.

In the late evening of the 14th, the main suspect, a boy named X (19 at the time), who was wanted for the two murders, turned himself in, and on the 15th, Shinji Akiyama (pseudonym, 20 at the time), who was also wanted, was arrested, resulting in the arrest of seven persons.

The article in this magazine gave the following summary of the case.

They doused him with paint thinner, set him on fire, and pushed him down an embankment.

The group of boys committed their first lynching murder on the 6th of this month. They gathered at Sato’s house and smoked paint thinner and drank alcohol. During the course of the meeting, Ms. C and Mr. X got into an argument due to a dispute over a female relationship, and Mr. X, who was upset with Ms. C, punched her. The remaining five members of the gang saw this and joined the leader, X. They beat Ms. C. to a pulp with beer bottles and other objects, put her in a car and drove her to the Kisogawa riverbed, where they further assaulted her, doused her with paint thinner, set her on fire, and pushed her down an embankment.

A friend of Mr. C’s mother gave the following testimony in response to this magazine’s interview.

“C-kun went out on the evening of the 6th and we didn’t hear from him again. But on the 7th, I received a phone call from Sato (the suspect) asking if C was there. From then until his arrest, he called me every day. I can’t believe that he would kill her himself.

Some of the suspects knew each other through paint thinner, and some of them hardly knew each other. Sato was a thinner addict as well. There was a testimony that the store smelled of paint thinner after he left. Mr. C, who had been socializing with the Sato suspects, was said to have been in a different state of mind immediately before the incident.

After his father’s death in June of this year, he stopped using paint thinner and was working very diligently.

Mr. C.’s attempts to become a straight shooter were cruelly trampled upon. What is extraordinary about the group of murderers is that the day after they killed Ms. C, they also killed Mr. A and Ms. B, who were complete strangers to them. A teacher who knew Ms. Watanabe and the others in junior high school was outraged.

They were both very serious kids.

The futures of these three young men were all too easily trampled upon by a senseless lynch mob.

A fourth murder was also uncovered.

The case did not end there. Later, from X’s statement, it was discovered that on September 28, eight days before the incident with Mr. C in Gifu, he had murdered a man, D (then 26), who was passing by in Minami, Osaka, and dumped his body in Cape Muroto, Kochi. Y (then 19) and Z (then 18), who had been close to X since that time and were believed to be involved in the Aichi and Gifu incidents, were also involved in the case. Y was arrested in Osaka in another case, and Z was arrested in Wakayama City on January 18, 1995.

Ten men and women were arrested in a series of incidents. The main suspects, X, Y, and Z, were all minors at the time of the incidents, but all three were sentenced to death by the Nagoya High Court in 2005, and in April 2011, their appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected and their death sentences were confirmed. Sato was sentenced to three years in prison and a four-year suspended sentence for aiding and abetting murder in March 1996, and Akiyama, who was the driver when he took Ms. A and Mr. B around, was sentenced to three years in prison and a four-year suspended sentence (with probation) for aiding and abetting injury resulting in death and robbery in March 1997. As of October 2007, X is incarcerated at the Tokyo Detention Center and Y and Z at the Nagoya Detention Center.

The three main perpetrators had been together for only about a month from the time they met to the time of the incident. The other perpetrators had only met a few times with only “thinner” in common.

At the trial in March 1995, it was learned that X had told one of the boys that he was going to kill them both because they were going to talk about the case, about the two girls who were in the criminal group. The boy told the girl about it and tried to get the police to catch X. He was interviewed and C’s case was discovered.

In addition to the fact that X was feared by his peers, some pointed out that the group mentality of such tenuous relationships may have lightened the weight of the crime of “murder. However, the crime of robbing four young people of their future will never be lightened.