kazan comments

Wow, what a horrible way to die. I hope the cops find out what happened here, even if it was just an accident.

I doubt paper books will ever be phased out completely. I've got a Kindle because I can't get many English books in Japan, but I definitely still prefer real books. Like Ossan America said, books don't need charging or have software problems - my Kindle likes to freeze, which makes reading difficult. The smell of a book, the action of literally turning pages, things like that are much more comforting than pressing buttons to me. And when it comes to rare books, it's doubtful many of those will be uploaded to the e-readers' library.

I'm with buggerlugs: how are these people getting on the force? I realize that liking women's panties is seen as relatively normal here, but c'mon, he's a cop! Have a little pride in your job, dude!

I think people are taking that "He was so cute" quote out of context. I doubt the mother was cooing over her dead son in the Hello Kitty "ahh, kawaii!" way that little girls do.

“I didn’t know it belonged to a police officer.”

So, if the bike belonged to someone else, messing with it would be okay? And if the key wasn't in the ignition, did the cop leave it somewhere near the bike?

Persons defending this mother either have no kids or are guilty of the same neglect.

Please don't generalize. Plenty of people on JT are parents, and all of us have been raised by parents. When I was four, my parents could trust me not to do anything ridiculously stupid, but again, they had child-proofed the dangerous things in the house just in case. Whether the mother trusted the boy wouldn't climb on the balcony, or whether she left the door unlocked, whatever the case, it's a tragic accident.

I think what surprises me the most about this story is that families with little kids apparently leave them with ready access to the balcony. The kid pulled a chair over to the rail, for crying out loud! The mother should have had more common sense, even if she was just running to the conbini.

Amongst advanced/rich countries, Japan has the lowest rate for women on the pill, and the highest rate for abortions.

What you didn't address here is that abortion has been an accepted form of birth control in Japan since... forever, essentially. And a smear campaign against the pill in the 80s kept it from gaining wide support; it took over 40 years to get it approved for sale here.

So what's going on here is that someone got pregnant and was too afraid to try and seek out an abortion, or someone had the baby and abruptly had a change of heart about wanting it. It's possible a guy could have gotten rid of his girlfriend's baby after she had it, against her wishes. There are a lot of things that could have possibly happened.

Moderator: Readers, abortion is not relevant to this discussion.

Hmm, there's no red date today on my calendar but it appears today is "National Horrific Crime Day". The best we can hope for with this story is that the child was stillborn and the mother wanted to keep the whole deal secret.

I've got broader shoulders and hips than most of my Japanese coworkers, and for a while, they joked around and called me fat. Then when we had to rearrange the office, I moved and carried things that three women couldn't manage. That shut them up pretty quickly.

It's the same all over the world: being too skinny is incredibly unhealthy. But the media image of the ideal women is too irresistible for some girls to pass up. Ironically, guys are evolutionarily predisposed to disliking skinny women because being thin was once a sign of disease.

Instead of being open-minded about thought-provoking literature (I'm talking more about To Kill a Mockingbird than Twilight), people just get uncomfortable with these challenges to their values and try to ban them.

You have to wonder what the motivation behind this was. There's obviously some underlying issue as people don't just randomly stab people.

Debucho makes a really good point. Nip the whole school-girl/uniform fetish in the bud right there. At least in uniform-required schools in some other countries, the girls have the option of wearing pants if they want.

I think there's a potential market here for women's undershorts printed with horrifying insults toward perverts.

mrsynik: Oh man, tell me you're kidding! That's crazy! With the cameras they should have no excuse for not catching pickpockets!

The architecture of so much of Tokyo is so bland and uniform, it's sad to see when people don't take care of interesting buildings to the extent that they get slated for demolition. What a shame.

It still took thirty years to catch this guy, even if people were complaining? Damn, J-cops, just install security cameras on the trains or something. It would save you a lot of headache.

@ Lowly: You're right that we shouldn't speculate over the reason, but regardless, a young girl is prematurely dead, which is the real tragedy here.

@ maxpower: Considering he had to get from the fourth floor to the first floor, all while being badly wounded, he probably couldn't move too quickly.

@ Pukey2: Ipods don't have any internal speakers; if you don't have headphones jacked in, you can't hear the music at all. The guy was just being a jackass.

I'm with you, I've got the in-ear headphones that if people around me can hear the music I'm listening to, odds are likely I am damaging my ears. I've never had anyone give me trouble while using them, although I have had people interrupt me just to talk to me, which is fine.

As for the whole don't-talk-on-the-train, don't-put-on-makeup-on-the-train nit-picky social rules, I've seen plenty of Japanese people breaking them. But the thing is, as a foreigner, you become an easier target, and people sometimes automatically assume that you're acting out of ignorance, which they can correct by scolding you. I usually just explain why I'm doing what I'm doing, or if they're being rude, I snap at them. Having a foreigner tell them in Japanese "I had a long day at work and I'm not making a mess, so let me eat my [censored] onigiri in peace, yeah?!" shuts up most of the meddlers.

How awful. These poor high school students have insane amounts of pressure on them.

I agree with ebisen. The mother obviously loved her daughter but had no friends, family, or community to reach out to when things got really tough.

He's not pulling any punches with his confession either; he wanted them to die. Glad the others are okay, though.

He's got wrinkles around his mouth, looks like an older guy.

I'm glad they identified her, and I hope the Keystones don't blow the investigation.

I never knew what was so special about these pencils but now I want one.

@ shitamachipride: The impression I got from the context of guest's comment was that cops were warping murder investigations to make them look like suicides. I certainly believe that the cops force confessions (I've been stuck in that position myself) and that they're pretty corrupt, but this isn't about that, it's about the suicide vs. murder rate in Japan, and how the suicide rate remains high even as violent crimes go down.

This is a really interesting article. Because the media covers the sensationalist crime stories, violent crime seems to be on the rise, but I completely didn't realize that the crime rate actually dropped.

Japans murder rate is about 3 people a day, but, it's suicide rate is about 100 people a day. Something smells fishy in keystone land.

Contrary to Western cultures, up until recently suicide has been seen as normal, or even honorable in cases. Samurai would kill themselves to honor their feudal lord rather than work for another man, common women and men would kill themselves to protect their honor rather than face arrest and shame, etc. Just because Japan has a high suicide rate doesn't mean the cops are twisting investigations. The Keystones are still kind of incompetent, of course, but there are other explanations for why the suicide rate is so high in Japan.

Well this is just horrifying. Poor woman. If she's on a missing persons list maybe they can use DNA to identify her.

The suddenly warm weather in places is causing trees to bloom way early, then the blossoms die when the weather cools back down. This might be the case here.