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Fukui professor arrested over female graduate student’s murder

Kyodo

FUKUI – An associate professor at a national university in Fukui Prefecture was arrested Saturday on suspicion of killing a female graduate student under his tutelage, police said.

Yasunori Maezono, 42, an environmental education specialist at Fukui University’s Graduate School of Education, allegedly choked to death Miwa Sugawara, 25, around Thursday in her minicar while it was parked on a road in Katsuyama, police said.

They declined to reveal whether the scientist, who also worked for Katsuyama City Hall as an environmental conservation coordinator, has confessed to the murder.

A specialist in red dragonflies, Maezono was previously a part-time lecturer at Toho University in Kanto where Sugawara is enrolled. Sugawara had taken leave from Toho to work with the suspect.

The police determined it was a murder case after receiving a call Thursday from Maezono’s wife reporting that her husband had told her he was taking a woman to the hospital following an accident.

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  • wanderingpippin

    “Fukui professor arrested over female graduate student’s murder”

    Wondering why the gender of the victim, but not that of the professor, is mentioned in the headline. Do you think the gender of the perpetrator is irrelevant? If so, why then is the gender of the victim relevant? Had the professor been female would you have seen fit to include that in the headline? Did you mean for readers to assume all professors are male? Curious about your thought process in writing headlines.

    • shanchan

      I don’t see why it really matters. It’s explained in the first sentence of the article. If I had to guess, people tend to respond more when they hear the victim is female or a child…sexist? Perhaps. But true.

  • wanderingpippin

    Got an email from Disqus saying shanchan replied to my comment saying “They did mention his gender, read it again”. I would say to shanchan to read my comment again. It specifically refers to the headline only. In which the gender of thd professor is not mentioned.
    Does the Japan Times think male professors and students to be the norm and only mention the gender where they feel it is not the norm, i.e. female.