Disclaimer: This story contains disturbing details of a murder. Please proceed with caution.
One of Japan‘s most horrifying children’s crimes occurred when a girl named Satomi Mitarai (only 12 years old) was killed by one of her schoolmates during a lunch break at Okubo Elementary School in Sasebo. This event took place on June 1st, 2004.
The girl who did it, known due to juvenile privacy reasons as “Girl A,” was just 11.
She tricked Satomi into going into an empty room. Then using a box cutter, she slit Satomi’s throat and then kicked her over and over again. But that wasn’t the end of it. What left everyone even more speechless was her reaction afterward.
Covered in blood, she casually walked back into her classroom and told her friends, “This is not my blood.”
The incident quickly became news worldwide.
It got everyone in Japan talking about youth crimes, kids being mean to each other online, and how young people deal with their emotions. Later, the girl known as “Girl A” said that some things Satomi told her about her on the internet, calling her “overweight” and “prissy,” had pushed her buttons.
She also talked about getting ideas from Battle Royale and a TV show.
A Digital Age School Crime That Shook Japan
The murder of Satomi Mitarai went beyond being a personal tragedy; it shook Japan to its core. It was so shocking that both the girl who was killed and the one who did it were barely even teenagers, which shows how scary even a child’s anger can get.
This came on the heels of other scary things happening with youth in Japan.
Just seven years ago, there was a case in Kobe where a 14-year-old kid had decapitated an 11-year-old. And then, in 2003, another kid, only 12, pushed a 4-year-old off a building in Nagasaki, Japan.
[TW] The Kobe Child Murder: Shinichiro Azuma or Seito Sakakibara, Japan
Anak berusia 14th, memenggal kepala anak SD menggunakan gergaji yang diletakkan di depan gerbang sekolah dan meninggalkan catatan di dalam mulut korban untuk polisi agar bisa menemukannya.
a thread 🧵 pic.twitter.com/2SD0zcvNmc
— dumdum (@Buyung__) February 14, 2025
What happened with Girl A was that she was driven by something she saw online. She had been upset because Satomi had said some not-so-nice things about how she looked on the internet, as discussed.
So, she planned to end her bully’s life for four days.
“She wrote something bad about my appearance several times on the net (…) I didn’t like that.” She reportedly took inspiration from a TV show to determine how to proceed. The Washington Post shared that she had confessed all this to the investigators.
The situation, which was all over the news on BBC and in Mainichi Shimbun, kicked up a fuss about what happens to kids’ brains when they’re bombarded with violent material online and picked on by bullies in cyberspace.
A Graduation Certificate and a Blank Page
The school faced some tough choices after the event. They had a ceremony for Satomi’s graduation from sixth grade, even though she wasn’t there. Her dad, Kyoji Mitarai, took her certificate because she couldn’t. “’I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I can’t put in words what I’m feeling right now. I can’t understand it at all,” he told AP then. “I don’t have a clue.” They even had a chair with her picture, so it felt like she was with her friends.
But the other girl involved in this horrid crime in Japan, aka Girl A, got a certificate, too. The people in charge said it was important for her to move on to junior high and try to live a normal life again. The school had a weird situation with the yearbook. They asked the kids if they wanted Satomi’s and Girl A’s pictures in it.
En esta foto de clase tenemos a Natsumi Tsuji y un poco más allá vemos a una de sus mejores amigas de aquel entonces, Satomi Mitarai, de 12 años, con la que pasaba la mayor parte del tiempo y durante los recreos se iban ellas dos juntas a jugar. pic.twitter.com/LgPlD0lrJG
— Terrores Nocturnos (@Terrores_TRN) November 21, 2023
Ultimately, they included Satomi’s photo but left a blank spot for Girl A so each student could choose for themselves.
A few months later, in 2004, a family court decided that Girl A should go to a state-run facility where they help troubled kids, like a school-prison mix. She’s got to keep her name a secret because of the laws about young people making mistakes.
Now that she’s older and in her 30s, people in Japan still argue about whether this was right.
