The murders of 4-year-old Kazuto Hayashi and his 3-year-old brother Hayato by an acquaintance of their father two weeks ago in Tochigi Prefecture has sparked outrage over Japan's insufficient child-welfare system. Though local police and child-welfare officials were aware the two boys were being beaten, they allowed them to be placed back in the environment where the abuse was taking place. It's a scenario that appears on the evening news with shocking regularity.

The media have held the authorities at least partly responsible for the boys' deaths, but they've been much more forgiving of the father himself. On Sept. 15, the day after Hayato's body was found in a river, Yasunari Kobayashi gave a press conference where he "apologized" to his two sons and expressed his "frustration and anger" at Akihiro Shimoyama, the man who confessed to the murders. However, based on accounts of the press conference, it appears no reporter asked him if he himself felt any responsibility for his sons' killings.

Given the particulars of the case, the reporters' reluctance to ask the hard questions is not much different from the reluctance of the police and child-welfare officials to hold the boys in protective custody after they determined they'd been abused. It was the father, after all, who ignored the welfare officials' request to have the boys stay with their grandmother and took them back to the apartment he shared with Shimoyama, who he knew had beaten the boys.