Take our user survey and make your voice heard.
Police in Tokyo said Saturday they have arrested an unemployed 25-year-old woman on suspicion of abandoning the body of her newborn baby daughter in a coin locker in the Kabukicho red-light district in Tokyo’s Shinjuku area.
The infant’s remains were found wrapped in a vinyl bag inside a navy blue suitcase in the locker by the police just before 2 p.m. last Tuesday after an employee of the company that operates the lockers noticed a foul smell and called 110, Fuji TV reported.
Police said the woman, Mao Togawa, has admitted to killing the baby after she gave birth in a private room at a nearby manga cafe in late January. She said that when the baby was born, she became frightened someone would find out after the infant cried, so she strangled her daughter with a towel.
She then put the dead baby in the suitcase and put it in the locker, which is outside a building about 200 meters from Seibu-Shinjuku Station.
Police said Togawa had been renting the locker continuously since then and that surveillance camera footage had shown her putting coins in the locker on a regular basis.
Togawa told police she had been living in and out of manga cafes for about a year.
© Japan Today
10 Comments
Login to comment
nandakandamanda
Terribly sad story.
Luddite
Homeless and pregnant.
Michael Jackson
Now our tax dollars will make sure she has a place to sleep and 3 meals a day
BeowulfOkami
I hate stories like these. It always takes me a long time to recover from the heart break. These young mothers need to be taught that if you have an unwanted baby, please give up the baby for adoption rather than killing it! It deserves to live!
There are thousands of childless couples who'd give anything to raise your baby if you don't want to. Don't kill babies.
Strangerland
What a sad story. Living in a net cafe and giving birth in the same cafe... I can't imagine many more depressing positions to be in, in a first-world nation. This is a sad mark on society as much as anything.
lucabrasi
@Michael Jackson
You seem obsessed by ‘tax dollars’.
Are you Canadian, or Australian?
In Japan, we use “yen”.
Michael Jackson
@ luca, seems you're obsessed with pointing out what you perceive to be mistakes committed by others. There's a literary term called poetic license. You might want to look it up
farhaan
And she must have consummated it in manga cafe.