{"id":5969,"date":"2017-11-10T10:56:14","date_gmt":"2017-11-10T09:56:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=5969"},"modified":"2017-11-10T10:58:45","modified_gmt":"2017-11-10T09:58:45","slug":"grisly-murders-in-japan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/5969\/","title":{"rendered":"Grisly Murders in Japan"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a couple of weeks old now, but it serves as a reminder that Japan’s underbelly is seedy indeed<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Japanese police have found nine mutilated bodies hidden in containers with their heads cut off and flesh stripped in a suburban Tokyo flat, media reported Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Tokyo police have arrested 27-year-old Takahiro Shiraishi who reportedly confessed to hacking the flesh off the bodies and throwing it out with the trash, then sprinkling cat litter over the remains in an effort to cover up the evidence.<\/p>\n

According to local media, Shiraishi told police he had chopped up the bodies in a bathroom, while a saw was found in his room.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For some reason, I have always remembered the name of Lucie Blackman, a 21-year old British woman who went missing while working as a hostess in a bar in Tokyo in 2000. Two years later, an extremely wealthy and well-connected businessman named Joji Obara<\/a> was charged with her rape and murder after this discovery:<\/p>\n

On February 9, 2001, Blackman’s dismembered body was found, buried in a shallow grave under a bathtub in a seaside cave at\u00a0Miura, Kanagawa, about 30 miles south of Tokyo, just a few hundred metres from Obara’s apartment. The body had been cut into eight pieces. Her head had been shaved and encased in concrete.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obara was acquitted of murdering Blackman after a trial in 2007; however, he was sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of eight rapes and the rape and murder of a 21-year old Australian model. A timeline of events can be seen here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I remembered the case because Blackman’s father effectively had to travel to Japan and do the investigation into his daughter’s disappearance himself, having found the local police all rather uninterested. The Japanese pointed out that Blackman was working illegally, and if her father had any remarks to make about his daughter working as a semi-prostitute in Tokyo he kept them to himself, but his efforts made the news in the UK and Tony Blair got personally involved. When Obara was finally arrested, they discovered:<\/p>\n

His collection of pornographic videos, 4,000 to 5,000 of which were recovered by police, led police to believe that Obara may have raped anywhere from 150 to 400 women. A recreational drug user, he was reported to have an obsession with western women and developed a sex fetish for molesting unconscious women (to whom he had administered drugs to render them unconscious), targeting both Japanese and Western women. Police found over 200 sex videos showing Obara molesting women in this manner, sometimes wearing a face mask, and they reported that his extensive journals made reference to “conquer play”, a euphemism describing his sexual assaults on women who he wrote were “only good for sex” and on whom he sought revenge, “revenge on the world” drugging them with chloroform.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My guess at the time was that this man’s behaviour was well-known and the police had received numerous complaints, but due to his wealth and status in Japanese society, particularly his Yakuza connections, they simply declined to investigate or move to prosecute.<\/p>\n

I don’t think it’s any great secret that beneath Japan’s ultra-polite and organised society there lies a very nasty element centred around weird sex and violence. When I was in Tokyo the first time I observed<\/a>:<\/p>\n

There seems to be some schoolgirl fetish thing going on in Japan. Okay, all the actual schoolgirls were dressed in short tartan skirts and knee-socks, but so were the women handing out flyers on the streets and the girls on more than a few advertising posters. It seemed to be a recurring theme.<\/p>\n

If you think Russians like their female popstars young, take a look at Japan. I saw a poster advertising some top Japanese star\u2019s latest single.\u00a0 She looked about 12.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And the second time<\/a>:<\/p>\n

We also wandered into a sex shop which suggested that perhaps all is not well in the gloomier corners of Japanese society. Eerie dolls of what looked to be 12 year old schoolgirls, umpteen devices combining latex, gels, and mysterious liquids into which male members can be poked for sexual pleasure, machinery for men and women which made me wonder where they recruit the designers from, and an impressive selection of DVDs through which ran the common theme of the action being slightly, and sometimes not so slightly, forced. Then there were the pornographic comic books which lined shelves in their thousands, many of which depicted various bodily fluids deposited by what must have been a firehose rather than a human being. Very strange indeed, but seemingly no less popular for being so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And if alleged sexism in computer games was enough to upset the SJWs and launch Gamergate, consider what I wrote in 2010<\/a> about Japanese computer games:<\/p>\n

If you want a computer game filled with wanton violence, buy an American one.\u00a0 If you want a computer game filled with wanton violence and a healthy dose of child porn, buy a Japanese one.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

The legislation also applies to dating-simulation video-games, in which the goal is a graphic sexual conquest. One, RapeLay, lets players choose their victims, of any age.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I loved Japan for the two short trips I was there, but this latest story of the nine mutilated bodies serves as a reminder that beneath the surface all is not as well as it seems.<\/p>\n

I just hope Andy in Japan didn’t order his Gyoza from this guy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a couple of weeks old now, but it serves as a reminder that Japan’s underbelly is seedy indeed: Japanese police have found nine mutilated bodies hidden in containers with their heads cut off and flesh stripped in a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[55],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5969"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5969"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5972,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5969\/revisions\/5972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}