At the end of May the Cine Pathos movie theater in Ginza was scheduled to run "Concrete," which is based on a "nonfiction novel" that itself is patterned after an incident that took place in Tokyo's Adachi Ward in 1989. Four teenage boys abducted a high-school girl and kept her prisoner for 40 days, raping and beating her. She died and the boys placed her body in a concrete-filled steel drum and dumped it at a landfill site. Later, they were arrested, tried, and sent to a correctional facility.

In April, users of several Internet chat rooms started complaining about the film. According to the June 10 issue of Shukan Shincho, the anonymous protesters said that the producers had not obtained "understanding" from the dead girl's family. They were also incensed that a woman who had posed for "hair nudes" had been selected to play the victim and that the four boys were humanized. None of these protesters could have seen the movie since it hadn't been publicly shown anywhere, and, by all accounts, were not in contact with the victim's family, who did not speak out publicly against the film.

Cine Pathos started receiving letters demanding that it cancel the film. Some contained threats of vandalism and violence. On April 26, the management removed "Concrete" from its schedule, saying it could not guarantee its patrons' safety.