The boy's tormentors began brutally, burning him with cigarettes and whipping him with a fishing rod. Then, police say, they committed the unimaginable: They locked the boy in a room and tried to starve him to death. Compounding the horror, one of the attackers was the boy's father.
The sheer barbarity of the case has gripped Japanese attention since a truck driver and his live-in girlfriend were arrested near the city of Osaka earlier this year for attempting to murder the man's 15-year-old son.
The boy -- who remains in a coma -- is not alone. Japan's child welfare centers were awash in a record 23,738 abuse cases in fiscal 2002, an astounding fourfold surge from the 5,000 cases reported in 1997.