42-year-old man arrested for attempting to strangle 6-year-old son to death

This is atrocious!

Oh, man. I hate these stories. For the poor young boy, I hope he recovers, but given that he was strangled and is in coma, I would imagine the prognosis is not good.

And even if he does recover, one wonders if he suffered any brain injury from depravation of oxygen. And then there is, of course, the knowledge that his own father strangled him.

I also feel for the grandmother, having to report her own son's actions. Her son is arrested, her grandson is in a coma in the hospital and it is a few days before the New Year's holidays.

What a tragedy.

Moron man, killing for fun? He deserved to be punish badly & hang to death seriously!

I honestly don't see the point in posting so many of these stories except that they are easy to write, as a mere repetition of a few bare facts, and generate reliable clicks. That's all I came here to say.

@shallots,

I honestly don't see the point in posting so many of these stories except that they are easy to write, as a mere repetition of a few bare facts, and generate reliable clicks.

Fair enough. However, in JT's defense, Japanese news programs also cover these stories as a matter of course, including NHK on a national basis. So, in that sense, JT would be providing a filtered view of the news if it did not cover items that were being covered in Japanese-language news.

Poor kid. How many are they out there?! I hope he will recover asap and live far from his scumbag dad.

"Okudera... attempting to STRANGLE his SON to death at their home... the boy is in a coma"

Well done to the mother for reporting it!!

As usual suspended sentence ....

What a scumbag coward...Let's hope he commits suicide soon...as he should have from the very beginning.

@zones2surf Yes, I see your point. Still, they run a handful of stories as headlines every day. Do you think they could be highlighting something else? Or do you think they'd be misrepresenting the day's news if these weren't headlined? Seems to me there's two or three of these a week as a headline. I think journalists should report on crime of course.

Where is the child's mother? If the father was the one that was more fit to take custody of the boy, than that's even more sad...if they are divorced, of course.

@shallots,

All very good questions. Here is the thing. When I watch Japanese news, particularly when NHK does its national news summaries, they tend to cover crime as a matter of course. And, inevitably, this tends to be dominated by either violent crimes, crimes involving politicians, or crimes related to money, fraud or the like.

I think generally there is a view that these sort of crimes are of interest to society as a whole. And that the audience actually would find it strange if they were not covered.

Truth be told, when it comes to news, people tend to gravitate to these types of stories and this seems to be true the world over. Reminds of that old song, "Dirty Laundry", by Don Henley.

@zones2surf Yes. I wonder if the J Times does as much of it? I stopped reading it when they put up a paywall. I think you're right. People do gravitate. I just think it's kind of like the weather. There isn't much you can really say about it. Unless there is enough information to draw a bigger conclusion about society (which there mostly isn't). I tend to be more interested in crimes that happen as schools, because the way schools and communities respond to them says a lot about society and policy. Whereas stories like this just don't say that much to me by themselves. They do raise a few questions I suppose. But they don't contain enough information to make the questions really specific or trenchant. Anyway, maybe there's some purpose to it.