Bullying for More Than Milk Money

The boy was a psychological prisoner of war held captive by his own classmates. And it happened in a country considered so safe that 6-year-olds routinely take the subway to school alone.

The 15-year-old victim, repeatedly tortured with burning cigarettes and beaten so badly that he was hospitalized twice, wound up forking over half a million dollars to his teenage tormentors to keep them at bay.

The bullies ultimately planned to kill the boy and make it look like a suicide, a plot that was foiled not by authorities but by the sympathetic son of a mafia chief.

It is a saga that has placed a spotlight on Japan’s increasingly troublesome problem of schoolyard bullying. And it has prompted public apologies and soul-searching by national and local police and school officials, who knew about the bullying problem but failed to stop it.

Although the size of the payoff in the case grabbed headlines, police, social scientists and children say extortion routinely accompanies bullying in Japanese schoolyards. And the children are easy prey in this cash-oriented nation where checks and credit cards are seldom used and automated teller machines dispense up to $30,000 at a shot.

Moreover, the case shows the emergence of a new strain of bullying that goes well beyond the systematized classroom ostracism that is commonplace in Japan. In a society that values group conformity perhaps above all else, often there is a kind of tacit acceptance that the bullied kids are targets because of their own weakness.

The super-bullies virtually enslave their targets, keeping them as literal whipping boys while demanding payoffs, said Kojiro Imazu, an educational sociology professor at Nagoya University. In this case, they even tried to extort money from the victim while he was hospitalized with injuries they had inflicted. That move would prove to be their downfall.

Ringleader Demanded $50 Over a Juice Stain

Ask Motohiko’s classmates outside Ogidai Middle School in central Japan what he’s like and two girls pipe up, “He’s chubby.” His terror began last June, on a school excursion to the mountain town of Nagano. The lead bully, Yosuke, blamed Motohiko for a juice stain on his hat and demanded that he hand over $50, which he did.

It wasn’t long, however, before the bullies demanded more. Motohiko exhausted his own savings and then began dipping into his mother’s account. She became suspicious that he was being extorted after a bank clerk alerted her that her son had withdrawn $5,000.

Motohiko’s father had died three years earlier, leaving his mother the beneficiary of a $300,000 life insurance policy. Perhaps the bullies knew the family had money. They certainly knew the boy kept coming up with it on demand.

Motohiko insisted to his mother that he had squandered the cash himself. In early July, at a meeting his mother arranged with teachers, he still refused to ‘fess up. “He couldn’t tell the truth because he was so scared of being attacked,” said the family’s attorney, Shoichi Onishi.

The mother took her son to the police office in the quiet, affluent suburb of Midori. The mother claims that Motohiko ultimately gave police the names of three bullies but said only that he had lent them money. Onishi said the police did nothing, telling Motohiko’s mother that lending money wasn’t a crime. But the police turned the names of the boys over to the school, he said.

“The police were so lazy,” Onishi said. “We interpreted that they didn’t want to work.”

For their part, police say no names were given and that their hands were tied because the boy didn’t tell the truth. “He looked so quiet. It was summertime and he had on a T-shirt that revealed no bruises, and he didn’t look scared,” said police official Tamiya Yoshimi.

The bullies accused Motohiko of tattling, making sure he knew that they were watching his every move, attorney Onishi said. They demanded he meet them outside his house--large by Japanese standards--and they beat and threatened him.

Over the next several months, the extortion intensified, as did Motohiko’s beatings. The pack of bullies--about 10 in all--spent the money on brand-name goods and in restaurants, red-light districts and game centers such as Grand Bowl, with its deafening arcade the size of a football field.

Yosuke was the ringleader. He was considered terminally cool by his classmates, who had voted him second-most-popular sixth-grader three years earlier. In his yearbook photo, his face is a Japanese version of Michael Jackson--he looks older than 15, with delicate features, arched eyebrows and shoulder-length dyed-brown hair.

In a class essay a few years ago, he wrote that he wanted to become a world-class comedian because he liked to make people laugh, according to the Chunichi newspaper.

Police and schools were well aware of these bullies’ activities, attorney Onishi said. Yosuke and three of the others were involved in an $8,000 extortion case last fall, although Yosuke played a smaller role in that case.

As the months wore on, Motohiko’s mother instinctively knew what was happening to her son but felt powerless to do anything about it. She gave him money, which he would use to pay off his tormentors. She even borrowed more from relatives. Occasionally, he would hit her and beg her: “Just one last time. I will pay you back when I grow up. Please, save me.”

She grew more isolated and distraught, attorney Onishi said. He hints that she was near-suicidal. “Each day, she thought this might be the last time she’d say hello to her neighbors,” Onishi said.

Takaaki Takeuchi, father of a 14-year-old who was the victim in the $8,000 extortion case, empathizes with Motohiko’s mother. He watched his quiet son grow more withdrawn, stop eating and become “emotionally shaky” as the bullies shook him down, he said. The father didn’t want to press his son too hard, for fear he’d kill himself: Bullying is often a factor in teen suicides in Japan.

“Half of me is furious with my son for not telling me the truth,” Takeuchi said, “and half of me wants to apologize to him for not being the kind of father he could confide in.”

He pointed out that those who question whether parents should give money to their children to pay off extortionist bullies, as Motohiko’s mother did, wouldn’t question paying off kidnappers. “If your child is kidnapped and you have that much money, you give it. You can’t exchange 50 million yen [$500,000] for your kid’s life.”

In January, Motohiko’s bullies really started upping the ante.

Though Motohiko turned over $30,000 to them that month, they broke his nose and hit his face so hard it swelled to 1 1/2 times its normal size, landing him in the hospital. The following month, he returned to the hospital with broken ribs.

His second hospitalization, when he was put in a room with seven others, turned out to be fortuitous. His roommates saw through his initial braggadocio that he had decked several attackers but that one had managed to lay him up.

And when the bullies came to the hospital and summoned Motohiko to the roof, demanding more money, the roommates followed and ordered them to leave.

Over the next several days, he gradually began telling his roommates of his torment. “Still, it took 10 days, he was that scared and isolated,” attorney Onishi said.

As it turned out, one of the roommates was the 22-year-old son of a yakuza, or mafia, chief. Remorseful over his own misspent youth, he decided to take matters into his own hands. It was a good thing, because the bullies had hatched a plot to kill Motohiko, suspecting he had ratted on them. Although some of the bullies were initially opposed to it, they planned to get Motohiko to write a suicide note, then kill him, some of the bullies later confessed to police.

An Ominous Car Outside the House

At about 9:30 p.m. on March 5, the 22-year-old and two of his friends went with Motohiko and his mother to the home of lead bully Yosuke.

“We saw a big foreign car,” said Yosuke’s mother--an ominous sign in Japan, because the yakuza are said to favor Cadillacs and Mercedes-Benzes. “It looked like a yakuza car.”

The three men accompanying the victim and his mother also “looked like yakuza,” the bully’s mother said. They were very polite, she said. “They didn’t say any violent words and they used a soft tone,” telling them that their son had extorted $200,000 from Motohiko--the other bullies had also taken large amounts, for a total of $500,000--and he had to return it.

Whether or not they were threatened directly isn’t clear, but Yosuke’s mother says the threat was implied. Soon after the visit, the family began getting threatening calls, saying, “You’ll be in trouble if your house burns down” and “You have a daughter, don’t you?”

The men told the family that if it paid the money back, they wouldn’t go to the police. But Yosuke’s father advised that “it wasn’t right to pay such people,” the mother said. He said, “If our son did this, then we must take responsibility, but we have to go to the police or he’ll do it again.”

When the parents confronted Yosuke, he owned up to his crimes. Not wanting to deal with people he perceived to be yakuza, the bully’s father called the victim’s mother and urged her to file charges against his son. She initially resisted, telling him to deal with her “representatives”--the 22-year-old and his friends.

Finally, on March 14, Motohiko and his mother went to a downtown police station and filed charges.

Yosuke’s mother, 48, a nurse at a nearby hospital for the last 20 years, blames herself for her son’s delinquency. Sobbing at the gate of her two-story home--which sports a brand-new lock--she said: “It’s completely my fault. I made him such a boy.” How? She says she didn’t have enough information about what her son and his friends were up to.

“I thought if parents showed an attitude of working hard and having an ordinary life, children should naturally look up to them and that we didn’t need any special instructions,” she said. “I now understand I didn’t know about children at all.”

She said her son started to change sometime in middle school, when he began to skip classes and became withdrawn.

“Even if he had a hard time, he wouldn’t tell us, so we didn’t know what was going on with him,” she said. Several times, Yosuke would come home with injuries on his back, his mother said. When she and her husband asked him if he himself had been bullied, as some press reports have suggested, he wouldn’t tell them anything, she said.

She and her husband, a manager at an auto parts company, vowed to pay all the money back, even if it takes the rest of their lives. They thought of moving but concluded they would just be running away.

“No matter how hard,” she said, “it is our duty to stay and take responsibility.” She wants her son to get treatment, she said, then apologize face to face to the victim and his family, as is customary in Japan.

Now it is they who are being bullied, with threatening phone calls from neighbors and others telling them to get out. Yosuke’s older sister, 20, lost her job as a swimming instructor and has become depressed.

“Some say we are just a cruel, cruel family. We can tolerate that, but for my daughter, it’s just too much,” the mother said. “My daughter didn’t do anything wrong, but people treat her as if she were a criminal.”

Ironically, the mother said, the family has become closer than ever. Her husband told her he realized he had left her to shoulder all the child-rearing duties. “He said, ‘Let’s take responsibility together,’ ” she said. And her daughter, whose dream is to go to New York to become a dancer, said she would donate the money she had saved to help repay the victim.

Yosuke and nine others arrested so far are being held at juvenile detention centers or in police halls. Because of the nature of the crimes, they may be tried as adults in criminal court, where they could face up to 10 years in prison. Otherwise, the harshest penalty they’re likely to face is reform school.

Motohiko’s attorney says he is doing fine and attending a vocational cooking school.

Personal Redemption for a Criminal’s Son

Helping Motohiko also helped his rescuer.

The 22-year-old son of the yakuza chief had done “evil deeds since he was a junior high school student,” later dropping out of high school and attending reform school, his mother said in the one interview she has given, to TV Asahi. She verified that the boy’s father is a yakuza chief. Her son deliberately brought the victim and his mother along to the lead bully’s home because he didn’t want his act to be seen as threatening, she said.

In a telephone interview, she said her son has since been seriously injured in a car accident and would speak out “when the time was right.”

In the TV segment, she mentioned a letter her son had written that appeared to be intended for Motohiko: “What I said to you from my hospital bed, with tears in my eyes, was what I have kept to myself since I was 16 years old. I was treated coldly by teachers in a private high school and once stayed in my darkened room for three days listening to the Beatles’ ‘Imagine,’ ” it said. The letter went on to say how he had decided to quit school, and was sent to reform school after beating up someone.

His mother is grateful that her once-wayward son had gotten a chance to right his course.

In a sense, it harks back to the historical role of the yakuza in Japan, who at one time were something of anti-heroes: While not exactly Robin Hoods, they were usually on the side of the little guy against the big guys.

“By helping them, my son became a man who would not be able to do something shameful in the future,” she said in the TV interview. “The weak boy influenced my son, who now tries to be an upstanding human being.”

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Makiko Inoue of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.