A roundup of arrests and court verdicts from the past month in Japan that you may have missed:
- The Tokyo High Court upheld a ruling sentencing a former top bureaucrat to six years in prison for murdering his socially reclusive son in 2019. The court rejected an appeal by the defense team of former vice farm minister Hideaki Kumazawa, 77, who claimed he’d feared for his life and acted in self-defense.
- A Sapporo court ruled that the now-defunct eugenics protection law was unconstitutional, but it rejected a claim for damages sought by a man in the city. The ruling last month was the fourth in a series of lawsuits filed across Japan regarding the forced sterilization of people with intellectual disabilities.
- A woman was arrested in Kumamoto Prefecture for allegedly hitting her 3-year-old son in an incident that ultimately led to his death, police said. The mother is accused of punching her son in the stomach, resulting in him hitting his head as he fell to the floor and losing consciousness. Police suspect Yuki Saito may have hit her son frequently, based on forensic evidence.
- About 30 Japan residents have been indicted for allegedly laundering stolen NEM cryptocurrency, sources say. Some ¥58 billion-worth of NEM was stolen from Coincheck in 2018, and the arrested group apparently used an exchange on the dark web to swap the NEM for other cryptocurrencies.
- Police have arrested a 48-year-old woman on suspicion of abandoning the body of her mother in a freezer at their former Tokyo apartment. Yumi Yoshino was quoted by police as saying she hid the body 10 years ago after she returned home to find her mom dead, and feared she would have to move out of the flat.
