The Bloody Truth, Part Nine

Born January 18, 1971, in Misato, Saitama Prefecture, Junko Furuta was an average girl. She had attended Yashio-Minami High School in Saitama Prefecture in Misato, where she met Hiroshi Miyano. Miyano found Furuta to be attractive and told her as much. When she rejected his offer to take her on a date. He took it personally and wanted revenge.

November 25, 1988, would be the beginning of his revenge. It was an act that would take forty-four days to complete, but Miyano would get his revenge. He and a friend, Nobuharu Minato were wandering the streets of Misato, looking for women the pair could rob or rape when Hiroshi Miyano saw her pedaling her bicycle away from her part-time job. Miyano saw the opportunity and ordered Minato to knock Furuta off of her bike and run off. Minato did just that and Miyano swooped in like the hero and offered to walk her home. He, instead of ensuring her safe return to her home, forced her into an abandoned warehouse and raped her. It was there, lying on the cold warehouse floor, that Hiroshi Miyano told Junko Furuta of his ties with the Japanese Mafia, or the Yakuza.

Hiroshi took Junko from the warehouse to a hotel and raped her again. He used the hotel phone to call his friends, Jo Ogura, Shinji Mineto and Yasushi Wantanabe, to brag about the rape. Ogura asked Miyano to keep her so that the whole gang could have a turn with her. Miyano agreed, and day one of her forty-four days of hell was over. At three o'clock in the morning, he took her from the hotel to meet his three friends in the local park.

Junko had been missing for two days when her employer informed her parents that she hadn't been to work. They contacted the police and filed a missing person report. When word of the missing woman got out, Miyano forced Furuta to call her mother and tell her that she was at a friend's house, that she was just fine, she had ran away and wasn't coming back. That phone call had the effect that was intended and, at Furuta's forced request, the search for her was called off.

Furuta was held in a house that belonged to the parents of Jo Ogura. At first, when his parents were around, Furuta was forced to act as his girlfriend. Later all pretense was dropped when it became clear that Jo's parents, terrified of their son, would not call police.

Over the following forty-four days, Junko Furuta would be subjected to hell, her death finally coming, mercifully, and relieving her of the pain she had been forced to endure. One of the very favorite things to do was to rape Junko. All four boys, plus at least one hundred other men, raped her over five hundred times during those six weeks.

Junko was starved, her only source of food during the time she was held captive was live cockroaches and her own urine and semen of the men holding her captive to drink.

Scores of men came into the house, though none offered Junko help. In fact, they joined the four men in raping and torturing her. She was forced to strip in front of those men and perform sexual acts on them that were more about her pain than his pleasure. She was repeatedly burned with cigarettes and fireworks were placed and then set off in her ears, mouth, vagina and anus. Her face was held against the concrete floor of the home she was being held in so that the boys could take turns jumping on her head. When they tired of holding her on the floor, they tied her hands to the ceiling and used her five feet, five inch body as a punching bag.

When the men cut her down from the ceiling, they tied her to the floor, arms and legs out in a spread-eagle position, and dropped dumbbells onto her stomach. When she resisted during a rape, they poured lighter fluid on her face, feet and legs and set her on fire.

By the twentieth day, Furuta was unable to walk due to the severe burns inflicted on her. The men responded by beating her with bamboo sticks and a golf club. Her hands were tied to the floor and smashed with weights, her fingernails ripped from their beds one at a time. She was forced to sleep on a balcony in the winter and when her body temperature dropped and she was too cold to rape, the men found other, increasingly sadistic ways to get their pleasure at her expense.

After everything that had been forced upon her, she still found the strength and courage to attempt an escapee. Junko Furuta pulled herself across the floor and reached the telephone, but one of the men caught her just in time and ended the call for help. They punished her by dousing her legs in lighter fluid and taunting her with a lit candle. When they tired of seeing her in fear, they set her on fire, as punishment for trying to run away. She went into convulsions from the shock her body was being subjected to, and the men in attendance would later say that they thought she was faking the seizure. They set her on fire again, then put it out. She survived that round.

Ten days later, the men took the torture up a few notches by putting out their cigarettes in her eyes. They used a hot lighter to brand the eyelids of Furuta and then dripped hot wax in her eyes and nose and eventually covered her face with it. They used pliers to grip and rip off her left nipple, and then spent a few hours inserting sewing needles into the breasts of Junko Furuta.

By that time Junko was unable to urinate properly and had uncontrollable, heavy bleeding after a pair of scissors was used to brutalize her. There was no longer a separation in the vaginal and anal canals. She had suffered so much damage to her body that her brain was starting to shrink from the lack of blood supply and constant trauma.

Just four days before her death, she begged her captors to “kill her and get it over with." Her request was brutally denied.

Junko was alone as the New Year came in. Her body was mutilated beyond anything the imagination could conjure. She was unable to move. She was unable to scream for help.

January 4 would be the last day on earth and the last day in hell. Four of the men challenged her to a game of Mah-jongg, telling her that if she won, they would release her. When she won the game, the men laughed and further mutilated her body with an iron barbell. She was profusely bleeding from her mouth and nose when they lit a candle and stuck the flame to her nose, lips and finally her eyelids, burning them off.

Their final act of torture was to pour lighter fluid onto her legs, arms, face and stomach, and then light her on fire. Junko Furuta died later that day, in excruciating pain and alone. A few days later, they placed her body in a drum and filled it with concrete, leaving her to be found.

Three of the men's identities were sealed by the court because of their age, even though they were tried as adults. They pled guilty to a reduced charge of “committing bodily injury that resulted in death”, instead of the original charge of murder. Jo Ogura, whose name was changed to Kamisaku, was released in August 1999. Nearly five years later he was arrested and served seven years for assaulting a jealous love-rival. According to others who know him and spent time in prison with him, he had been bragging about what he had done to Furuta.

By 2004, Kamisaku, who was already released from prison for Junko’s horrific murder, had allegedly renewed his contacts with the underworld, and was in trouble with the law again.

He was arrested for assaulting a 27-year-old acquaintance, Takatoshi Isono. Upset that a woman in his life might be involved with Isono, Kamisaku tracked the man down, beat him, shoved him in his trunk, drove him from Adachi to his mother’s bar in Misato, Furuta’s hometown, and continued to beat him. During the four-hour beating, Kamisaku allegedly threatened to kill the man, telling him that he’d killed before and knew how to get away with it.

During his trial Kamisaku admitted to the assault, but he denied that he’d referred to any previous murder or had threatened Isono.

Prosecutors wanted Kamisaku to spend another seven years in prison. Prosecutor's were granted their wish, but to no avail, really. Kamisaku has since been released again, free to torture at will.

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