Japanese businesswoman who beat male employee to death walks free
PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 23 February, 2016, 9:00pm
UPDATED : Tuesday, 23 February, 2016, 8:59pm
Julian Ryall in Tokyo
Nagoya Courthouse. The ruling was met with shock and disbelief on social media, both for the leniency of the punishment and for the perception that Miyuki Muto had escaped lightly because she is a woman.
Japan’s judicial system has come in for fierce criticism after a court gave a suspended sentence to a businesswoman who assaulted a male employee so severely that he died of his injuries.
The attack took place in Nagoya in August, with Miyuki Muto, the 47-year-old president of a fish wholesale company, assaulting Haruhiko Masumoto over his attitude to work.
Muto and 23-year-old Masumoto had previously had a disagreement over money, the Nagoya District Court heard, and Muto flew into a rage at what she saw as a lack of the appropriate degree of remorse on the part of her employee.
According to the police report, she kicked Masumoto dozens of times in the head, face and abdomen in the parking lot of the company. The following morning, at around 3am, the victim was found unconscious in the back of his car nearby. Masumoto was taken to hospital but pronounced dead three hours later.
Muto admitted all the charges against her, with her lawyers appealing for the court to be lenient as she had expressed her remorse and immediately taken “life-saving measures” after Masumoto was discovered unconscious.
The prosecution had demanded a six-year prison term, but the judge disagreed and set the punishment at a three-year prison sentence, which she will not have to serve if she completes five years of probation.
The ruling was met with shock and disbelief on social media, both for the leniency of the punishment and for the perception that Muto had escaped lightly because she is a woman.
“If it was the man who killed her, he would have been immediately thrown in jail,” wrote one commentator on the RocketNews 24 web site. “Murder is still murder, regardless of if she tried to ‘help’ him or not.
“This woman is cunning because apparently money solves anything, the man’s life is only worth five years of probation.”
A poster on the Japan Today website pointed out that a man who cut the hands of two members of the all-girl band AKB48 during a meet-and-greet event was given a six-year prison term.
