This project was inspired by the pornographization of the murder of Junko Faruta, a seventeen year old girl who as held captive for forty days by a group of young men. The kidnappers, led by Hiroshi Miyano, who had recently been declined a date by Faruta, brought the young girl to the house of one of their parents where she was repeatedly
raped and tortured from November 25th, 1988 to January 4th, 1989. The parents, afraid of the boys who became increasingly violent towards them, allowed Faruta to be held captive at first under the guise that she was their son’s girlfriend, but when the truth soon came to light, they continued to allow her to be held there out of fear of their Yakuza connections. Upon finding out that the girls parents had reported her missing, Hiroshi
Miyano forced her to call her mother and say that she had chosen to run away. Over the course of her stay at the Minato residence, the boys would invite their Yakuza friends to come over and join in on the torture. It is said that no less than one hundred people knew of Faruta’s captivity. According to their confessions, the boys raped Faruta over four hundred times, starved her, beat her, strung her from the ceiling to be used as a
punching bag, dropped weights onto her stomach, forced her to eat live cockroaches and drink her own urine, among numerous other heinous acts. Sixteen days into the captivity, one friend of the boys was bullied into raping her, upon feeling guilty for his actions, he confessed to his parents who would report the crime to the police. The police visited the Minato house, but didn’t feel it necessary to go inside. Had they, the crime would’ve only lasted sixteen days and Faruta would’ve lived, In December,
Faruta made an attempt to call the police. She was intercepted and as punishment the boys doused her with lighter fluid, lit her on fire and sodomized her. Beaten beyond recognition, Faruta would lose control of her bowels and bladder which would result in more severe beatings when she soiled the carpets. The boys stopped raping her only
after they became disgusted the smell that her body gave off. They abducted another girl to rape at this point. The day of her death, Faruta beat the boys in a game of Mahjong. Out of frustration, they beat her for two hours with an iron barbell, they again lit her on fire. Her severe burns and infected wounds leaked pus that also disgusted the boys, instead of killing her as she begged for death, the boys wrapped
their hands in plastic bags to continue the beatings. She succumbed to her wounds. The boys wrapped her in blankets and shoved her in a duffel bag before ultimately putting her into a fifty five gallon drum and filling it with concrete. Upon being arrested for the kidnapping of the second girl, out of confusion, Miyano confessed to the Faruta crime. All four boys refused to plead guilty to murder and instead plead guilty to committing bodily injury that lead to death. Hiroshi Miyano was sentenced to seventeen years in prison as the ringleader of the crime, the other three were sentenced to less than eight years each. In 1995, Katsuya Matsumura made a pornographic film about the case.