Japan reels at deeds of its killer children

THE violence in Yukiki Hayami's latest book, 14, begins when Kazuki Daido, its teenage narrator, follows instructions from BJ, a homicidal personality that lives inside his head.

Daido starts by jabbing a knife into the dead body of his grandmother as it is laid out for burial; he graduates to cats whose severed tongues he keeps in a jar in his pocket. He attacks two girls with a hammer, killing one and maiming the other.

The book ends with his arrest after the final and most appalling act, a crime that would be far-fetched even in a manga comic book (known for their violent and sexually explicit content). But Yukiko Hayami, a quietly spoken journalist with one of Japan's most respected current affairs magazines, is no pulp crime writer, and the most horrifying thing about the acts described in her book is that they all really happened.

A fictionalised account, 14 tells the story of one of the most awful crimes in recent Japanese history, last year's murder of a 10-year-old boy named Jun Eto in the city of Kobe.

After going missing for a few days, Eto's body was found dumped in a patch of undergrowth; his head was found half a mile away, neatly washed and placed at the gate of his school with a taunting note stuffed into its mouth. The horror of the crime was exceeded only by the shock when its perpetrator was discovered to be a 14-year-old local boy who used to play with his victim.

After interviewing his friends and members of his family, Ms Hayami wrote her book in the form of the killer's diary. Apart from the frankness of its physical descriptions, the most startling thing about it is the sympathy with which the central character is treated. The reader is brought inside his mind when BJ speaks to him: "You're different from those stupid sheep, so eat the meat and drink the blood."

The publication of Ms Hayami's book coincides with a near-frenzy about the growing number of shocking crimes committed by Japanese children. On Friday the Prime Minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto, inaugurated an advisory panel to address the problem. "If we leave these problems unattended," he said, "they will certainly lead to trouble for our country."

The Japanese are proud that their crime rate remains one of the lowest in the industrialised world. But the sense of security has been undermined by almost weekly reports of juvenile outrages. In January, a 13-year-old boy stabbed his teacher to death after she told him off for arriving late. A few days later, a schoolboy knifed a policeman because, he explained, he wanted the officer's revolver. In February a 15-year-old boy shot his teacher in the face with an airgun after being sent out of his class, and a few days later two 13-year-old girls kicked to death an old man who owed them 2,000 yen (pounds 9). A gang of boys arrested last year called the muggings they carried out on middle aged salarymen oyaji-gari - "uncle-hunting".

In 1986 there were 2,800 cases of violence in schools. Ten years later, the figure was 10,500. "It is frightening because children are not perceiving their victims as humans," said a spokesman for the National Police Agency. "It is as if they do not know what was wrong."

In a nation of 120 million, these figures are still low, and they are also low compared to Japanese juvenile crime rates in the postwar years up to the 1960s. Back then, offences were predictably concentrated among the poor and underprivileged. For all its economic problems, Japan is still the second-richest country in the world. It is the affluence of the new juvenile criminals which is most difficult to explain.

This is the subject addressed so subtly by 14. Long before he carries out his awful murders, "Kazuki Daido" (the criminal's real name has not been published) is shown to be a victim, of bullying at school, but also of his parents, who in their well-meaning way are as inadequate as he is. His father is weak and distant, his mother overbearing and disappointed with her son. In them, Ms Hayami sees the image of a generation of Japanese parents, the generation of the economic miracle.

"Kids are not born with these problems," she says. "After the war, the Japanese set themselves the task of building the economy. They worked hard, but they didn't give thought to the future. All they had was work."

The overwhelming importance of the family, beyond the individuality of its members, and the cramped living conditions of Japanese cities create an atmosphere in which anxieties are easily transmitted from parents to children. "If parents have problems about their jobs, for instance, the family environment is uncomfortable for everyone," says Ms Hayami.

Measures to tackle the juvenile crime trend are being taken only slowly. Japan's education ministry supervises a stifling and uniform school system.Journalists are preoccupied with a superficial recitation of the gory facts and do little to analyse the causes of the problem. Of the letters Ms Hayami has received, those from adults tend to be of angry disapproval . The fan mail is all from children.

"I've had letters from school-kids saying they love and admire Kazuki, that he's a hero, and that he did what they have wanted to do," she says. "We need to think very hard about what is on the minds of our children, because this is a reaction that I admit I can't understand."