Liberal Japan

According to Japan Today:

Osaka man held for abducting 12-year-old Nagasaki girl
A 20-year-old man was arrested Saturday in Osaka Prefecture on suspicion of kidnapping a 12-year-old girl from Nagasaki Prefecture and confining her to his house for eight days, police said. Police identified the suspect as Yusuke Sakamoto, of Osaka City’s Fukushima Ward and said the girl was rescued unhurt Saturday. (Japan Today)

Here are some more details from the Asahi Shimbun:

• The abductor did not think he was abducting anyone, because he loved the girl. He characterized his relationship with here as, お互いに恋愛感情を抱いていた。 (otogai ni ren’ai kanjou wo daite ita). This is hard to translate correctly, but it means something like, “we both strongly held feelings of amorous love for one another.”
• The abductor states he was utterly unaware that he was in some sense kidnapping or abducting the girl.
• They met by chatting on a site for fans of Anime. After chatting with each other, they began to exchange off site messages with one another. They exchanged pictures. They then established verbal communication.
• At one point, the abductor told the abductee that “うちの部屋が空いている”. A literal translation of this might be, “My room is open.” I’m not sure exactly what a more colloquial translation might be. The context in which he said this is not given.
• They met for a date on the 6th. According to the abductor, he had no intention of taking her home with him. However, she said she did not want to return home, so he took her with him to his apartment.
• After the arrest the girl stuck up for the abductor saying many things, such as, “お兄ちゃんは悪くない。長崎に帰りたくない”. This literally translates as “Big brother is not bad. I don’t want to go home to Nagasaki.” The use of the expression “big brother” towards an older, but still relatively young male, is near universal in Japan.

This seems a case of stupidity on the case of the abductor. It’s hard to say who took advantage of who, really.

Is a 12 year old girl old enough to make decisions about going to live with a 20 year old male? Conceivably there might be some cases in which this is true, but it certainly would not be true in every case, would it? So a law against this serves a purpose, right? There are many dangerous predators out there, right? [No sarcasm intended here.]

Certainly the couple should have known society would never tolerate what they were doing. So whatever they were thinking, it was unrealistic and stupid.

In any event, is kidnapping or abduction the correct label for what happened? How deserving of punishment is the abductor? What would be the appropriate punishment?

What’s troubling is this being seen as a problem with the Internet. The Internet is being seen as the culprit here. Is that really the case?

The police are now warning parents to watch what their kids do on the Internet. Given that Fukuda’s already promised to do something about assisted suicide sites, maybe he’ll take on this too … we’ll see.