Police said Monday they have found the body of a teenage girl at the home of a woman who was taken into custody after causing a disturbance at Fukuoka Airport.
According to police, the 58-year-old woman was taken into protective custody after she arrived at the airport at around 1 p.m. on Saturday without money or a passport and tried to board a flight. TBS quoted police as saying that the woman had only a few yen on her person and next to nothing in her bank account.
After detaining the woman, officers visited her Kumamoto home and found the decaying remains of a girl, believed to be the woman's 16-year-old daughter, in her kitchen. An autopsy on the girl's partially skeletal remains revealed she died between two and six months ago, police said.
The girl's mother had reportedly not seen her best friend or husband, who was living and working elsewhere, for a number of years. She had removed her daughter from the school system several years earlier and refused to accept visits from state welfare officers, TBS reported.
Police said she has been rambling and kept repeating, "I wanted to go overseas."
© Japan Today
26 Comments
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Disillusioned
Hope they have a vacant padded cell for this one.
gogogo
RIP little girl, your crazy mother will be going to hell. So sad, I seriously think the system killed her daughter.
There should be laws in place to project children, state welfare officers should be given the power to enter homes and or search for missing children like that. The daughter could have been saved from such an evil woman.
techall
I don/t see any cause of death in the story so why are you immediately blaming the mother for her death?
Cricky
Mum rambling incoherently at an airport! Remains of Daughter found in kitchen? It's not a Rubics cube?
SauloJpn
Too many unanswered questions!
sillygirl
@ gogogo - yes, there should be laws. People should not be allowed to refuse if there is suspected negligence, abuse. It does not make sense.
Realization
Japanese people just running behind money, they don't like true relations , relative, friends. No where to reduce stress. As a result became cruel to son or daughter.
iskysong
A developed nation with seriously malfunction systems...... what a sad state of uncheck and denial by relevant authorities.
How can a school going girl not attending school for so long period? How could a corpse die for so long and unknown to neighbours (can't they smell anything at all?) How can we have so many unanswered questions???????
Get Real
In some other countries heads would roll in social services.
Time to give a damn, people!!
Kurobune
As SauloJpn and others have said, too many unanswered questions. Kumamoto is probably the best prefecture in Japan for social service organizations. Something is missing in this story.
Scnadal.Lova
how can you kill your daughter and then try to leave?
Jeremy Rigby
It's sad they both didn't get help in time.
smithinjapan
This is one of the reasons why the system here needs to change. You should not be allowed to 'refuse visits' from welfare officers when a child, and by Japanese law they are still children until 20, is involved, a police officer assisted welfare officer should have the right to enter the home and check on a child or children. Hope this woman rots in prison.
shilo
Whether she killed her by knife or negligence. She still killed her. Is it her fault is to question. Her husband had to know something about her mental state. Her neighbors had to know she had a daughter. It would be easy for her to tell neighbors and authorities that the daughter went to live with the husband. It is still people's fault for not following up on the issue. We can all point blame and say laws need to be changed. Isn't it our responsibility to make sure laws get changed or put in place. In a society that sees people with depression or other minor problems as weak minded something needs to change. It is a society as a whole that needs to change it. Rest in Peace young woman. As for the mother, I hope she can get some help so the authorities can find out what happened and put better measures into place to prevent this from happening again.
JoiceRojo
what does that mean? that in the house only lived the girl and her mother?, how come when the lady make a disturbance they got to know about her bank account, the house and the girl, if she was discovered just now, how come they know she was dead for 6 months?
taiko666
... so the officers just said 'shouganai' and left?
Shocking, but not surprising for a developed nation in the 1950s.
MarkG
And the father did not keep contact to his daughter? Post, email, telephone, a visit? No woman would stop me if she were my daughter.
Gaijin Desi
looks like a tragic story... RIP girl
rickyvee
NO! no one is to blame but her mother. the "system" was working because people came to check on her. what else could they have done if there is no evidence of a crime. if anyone else is to blame, it's the husband and her family.
i don't understand why people always expect the gov't to solve these types of problems, but then these exact same people will deride the gov't for being a nanny state.
Heza!
Poor girl :( I hope she rests in peace. So many unanswered questions its not right. :(
ka_chan
The system didn't fail? Really.
There must have been a reason why the "state welfare officers" had tried to visit more than one. By law, the girl had to be in school until 16, there probably are alternatives but refusing the visits of the welfare officers didn't send up red flags? Seems the State welfare office failed both the mother and the girl. As for the mother being crazy, living with the dead decaying corpse of your daughter in the kitchen for day after day for 60 to 180 days. See her every time going into the kitchen probably would drive most people crazy. Then it is also had that the mother had no money and noting in the bank. Isn't the husband supporting her and their daughter? BTW, nothing in the articles says she killed her daughter, just that the daughter skeletal remains were found in the kitchen.
LFRAgain
Agree with Smith. The system needed a drastic overhaul if social services can simply be "refused," even when the health and wellbeing of a child is concerned. That no one said anything about this woman's abrupt withdrawal from society is stunning. All of her neighbors new about it. All of her neighbors knew about the husband not coming home for years. They all gossiped about it and openly speculated about why the woman wouldn't divorce the absent husband. A neighbor even gave 1000 yen to the daughter sometime before she had passed away, when she came around crying about how hungry she was. He offered to give her some food as well, but she refused and left. Yet, he said NOTHING to the police or social services.
And now all of these bastards are talky-talky in front of the media cameras about how they all suspected something was wrong the entire time -- yet they never thought to press the issue with the appropriate authorities.
The mother may or may not have killed this child, but that entire neighborhood is most certainly complicit in her death.
kimuzukashiiiii
RIP poor girl
Ms. Alexander
Useless city officials. People shouldn't be allowed to refuse visits when officials are there to check on someone's well-being. If they knew the daughter was "missing" - as in not going to school and no one had seen her in a while, then the police should have been called. Had they been proactive, they could have saved this young girl's life.
ChibaChick
Sadly not all fathers are like you. I think "living and working elsewhere" may be a euphemism for "gone and no longer gives a crap".
therougou
I don't know the exact rules of "the system", but sometimes it could be the people and not the system that are the problem. It is possible they could have saved the girl by going through a bit more trouble, and consulting the right people, instead of just giving up after being denied a visit.
Of course I don't have the details of this case and therefore don't have any right to make assumptions, but I think we can all agree that people in Japan can often be indifferent and do only what they are told without asking questions. So this might be more of an issue than the system which could be just a set of basic rules that are meant to be bent.