The murders of 13-year-old Natsumi Hirata and 12-year-old Ryoto Hoshino in Osaka last month sparked a heated conversation in the media about the state of parenting in Japan.
Hirata and Hoshino were caught wandering the streets on security cameras during the wee hours of Aug. 13 before they were presumably picked up and killed. Neither child was homeless, and the question became: What were they doing out so late? In interviews, Hirata's classmates said that she often went out at night and hung around on the streets, sometimes not returning home for several days.
What made the story incomprehensible to most reporters is that Hirata wasn't considered furyō (delinquent) or even a runaway. Her wandering ways had less to do with typical adolescent rebelliousness than with the fact that she could go out, which means her death was implicitly tied to a lack of adult supervision. She didn't seem to be the product of a broken home, though it's been pointed out that her father is unemployed and her mother works late every day to provide for the family. Some media suggested that the parents often fought and that maybe the girl wanted to escape such an atmosphere, but there appears to be something else, a parent-child dynamic that doesn't fit the usual complaints about permissiveness.