Japan - Miyazawa family of 4 murdered, Setagaya, Tokyo, 30 Dec 2000 #4

[Eliver]

From what I remember the cram school was thoroughly investigated and also keep in mind that this is a case that anyone here in Japan knows about even if only by name. This is a case that received a lot of public attention/pressure and has infamously seen involved 200.000+ investigators/policemen in the span of 25+ years.
All this to say that even though victim blaming is indeed a thing here, given the pressure the police has to solve this, it would be really strange (borderline impossible) to think they wouldn't follow any possible lead, including what you suggested.

 

[Witch Doctor]

Hey guys, still a bit obsessed with the case after a week. Reading about the case of Namiko Takaba, I can’t help but think that the killer here was also someone of the extended environment, maybe local but with no clear connection to the family, who knew one of the victims and had a grudge, especially if he indeed never committed such an act again. Reflecting a bit, I’ve realised that the reason I would hold such a strong hate against a person or their entire family (although I would never act on it) would be if I subjectively felt that that person ruined my life or, even worse, the life of someone close to me. For many people, like in the case of Namiko, this type of feeling could also stem from passion, rejection, or jealously. In my country, a woman was acid-attacked by someone she barely knew, because the latter suspected that the victim had an affair with a man she was sickly interested in. I’ve also heard of cases where relatives of patients attacked and killed their close-one’s doctor after an unsuccessful treatment, or relatives of accident victims attacked the person who caused the accident, or students that were failed in a class shot their teachers etc If the killer was indeed underage, I can’t help but wonder if Yasuko’s work as a teacher had the power to affect a student’s academic journey, or at least give him the idea that his path was ruined by Yasuko. Especially given how important educational excellence is in Japan. I’ve attended cram schools in my country, and the number of students that come through every year is often quite large. I wonder if all of them could be looked into. My question is though, do you think that the Japanese authorities, influenced by societal values, would hesitate touching or questioning specific aspects of the victims’ life and past, in order to protect their reputation? I come from a culture where, unfortunately, victim blaming is very often observed. Is this also the case in Japan?

Did you move to this case from the Yuki Adachi one? In that case, we finally saw Western investigative techniques at work. In this case, it almost might as well have been the dark ages.

But yes, I and a lot of other Websleuths are inclined to believe the perpetrator is a former student of Yasuko. What weirdly specific but ultimately limited information that has been released about the murders very strongly implies it. To understand what the information released actually says requires an understanding of aimai, Japanese intentional ambiguity.

It is normal for the Japanese (and for myself as well) to quickly develop hypotheses and test them. For me, this is simply the scientific method and I have learned to keep my hypotheses to myself since even a >60% likely hypothesis, when its about human behavior, is *guaranteed* to elicit powerfully emotional refutations from any given community if stated openly.

For the Japanese all of this is deeply folded into their philosophies of continuous improvement (kaizen) and quiet determination (gambari). It isn't "victim blaming". To continuously improve, people must develop hypotheses about the causes of negative effects and integrate those hypotheses into their lives as they evolve - which is where quiet determination becomes involved.

They aren't going to race to social media to be the first one to point a finger, very much the opposite. They will share their hypotheses with the people they love, in effort to hello their kaizen but that's as far as actual finger pointing will go, or really how anything negative at all will go and that's why regional rumors and stereotypes are still huge there. If someone *does* want to share a hypothesis, they will use aimai and be intentionally ambiguous.

That's how those weird rumors around the Yuki Adachi case got started. Someone vaguely implied that people who live in that region work in animal carcass processing (a thousand plus year old stereotype), other Japanese people who hold that stereotype agreed and then a few token western-style influencers amplified it considerably.

That's the sort of social process that investigators want to avoid in this case. It doesn't actually accomplish anything. Maybe DNA testing will be allowed in exceptional cases like this one soon and they'll go back and test that poop - but Japan still isn't there yet.