The Osaka District Court sentenced a 28-year-old former hospital employee to life in prison on Tuesday for raping 10 girls between the ages of 8 and 12 and injuring them as a result.
Tomoya Yanagimoto was convicted after he pleaded guilty to breaking into the girls’ homes or the common areas of their apartment complexes and raping them between March 2016 and May 2022.
“What you did is despicable and beyond the realms of maliciousness,” presiding Judge Hiroki Ito said as he handed down the sentence.
Life imprisonment is the maximum penalty for the crime of rape resulting in injury.
According to the ruling, the majority of the girls were alone when Yanagimoto attacked and threatened them with a box cutter while saying, “Shut up, or I’ll kill you.”
“He targeted girls who were meant to be growing up in peace and wounded the very foundations of their being,” Ito said.
“Quite a lot of planning went into these attacks,” the judge said, noting that Yanagimoto had spent long periods watching the girls’ residences to confirm their daily habits before attacking them.
The terror and mental damage inflicted upon the girls are beyond imagination, with some still unable to talk about what had happened even years later, while others have experienced stunted development, Ito said.
“The scope of the crime is such that it cannot be contained in a definite term sentence,” he said.
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