The suspect is accused of striking a 52-year-old male resident near the face with a sandal around 4:30 p.m. on September 23 at “Sodegaura Hikari no Gakuen”, the facility in Shimoshinden, Sodegaura City where he works as a care worker, and grabbing his upper body and tripping him so he fell backward around 7:50 p.m.
A 58-year-old mother accused of drowning her severely disabled 29-year-old daughter in a water-filled plastic storage container at their home in Mobara, Chiba Prefecture, has expressed regret over the incident. During a Chiba District Court hearing, A described her daughter as “my life, my everything” and said she wished she could “turn back time.” She also apologized to her daughter, saying, “B-chan, I’m sorry. Every day, I apologize to B-chan and pray for her soul… With everyone’s help, I’m living… B-chan, I’m truly sorry.”
A former 31-year-old employee of a disability support facility in Kushiro, Hokkaido, was sentenced to one year and two months in prison, suspended for three years, after being convicted of assaulting residents at the facility. The court said Abe’s actions were “vile and malicious” and had undermined trust in care workers, but noted that he had expressed an intention to apologize and was showing remorse.
A victim of attempted murder in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, central Japan, in 2002 and his wife are advocating for the removal of the statute of limitations on such crimes. The country abolished the statute of limitations for heinous crimes such as murder through law amendments in 2010. Still, the revisions do not cover attempted murder. “Would it have been better if I had died?” said Yoshitaka Yasuda, 61, who was left severely disabled in the 2002 case.
In 2023, a 36-year-old woman was charged with causing injury after allegedly making her husband consume methanol, resulting in impaired vision. The Otsu District Court found her not guilty, saying that it could not rule out the possibility that her husband had consumed the methanol himself.
“It was irresponsible to leave and run away when he could have predicted the risk of collision with the following car,” Judge Yuko Ito of Tokyo District Court said. “The degree of accusation is high considering that he was a professional driver.” Ito added that the accused fault was not serious because he had turned the steering wheel after seeing the victim about 30 meters before the collision.
Late on the night of October 25, 2024, a 20-year-old university student was assaulted by a group of people in a park in Ebetsu, Hokkaido, and lost his life. For approximately two hours, he was punched and kicked more than 100 times. He was stripped naked, and his hair was even set on fire. Most of the six men and women involved in the attack were teenagers. Moreover, many of them did not even know the victim. The alleged ringleader, defendant Yuto Kawaguchi, was 18 at the time of the crime. In court, testimony focused on his upbringing. A medical expert who assessed him testified that he had “an IQ of 58, indicating a mild intellectual disability, and mild hearing impairment.”
The defendant, 29-year-old Kai Takahashi, a former employee of the Kushiro disability support facility Tsurugaoka Gakuen, is accused of assaulting four residents by kicking them around the waist and face and slapping them in the face, among other acts, up until March 2026. One of the victims was a 58-year-old male resident at the time.
On the 12th, the Matsuyama Labour Standards Inspection Office referred a 63-year-old woman, the de facto representative of Godo Kaisha Slow, a company operating a disability welfare service facility in Nishi-Ishii, Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture, to the Matsuyama District Public Prosecutors Office. The company and the woman are suspected of violating Japan’s Minimum Wage Act by failing to pay an employee’s wages.
At a press conference on Thursday, Tomonobu Hasegawa, director of Kashiwa Tanaka Hospital, said, “We deeply apologize” over the murder. “We will thoroughly educate all employees on ethics again,” he added. According to the hospital in the city of Kashiwa, an assistant nurse who worked the night shift with the suspect saw her several times entering and leaving the hospital room of Eiji Aita, 75, who later died.
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