June 7, 2024
SINGAPORE – The bizarre relationship of a Japanese couple with their emotionally unstable daughter was revealed this week at a trial involving the headless corpse of an elderly man, found in a hotel room in Hokkaido prefecture in 2023.
Appearing before a court on June 4, Hiroko Tamura, 61, recounted having come across a man’s head one day in the bathroom of the home she shared with her husband Osamu, 60, and their 30-year-old daughter, Runa, in Sapporo city.
The head belonged to 62-year-old Mr Hitoshi Ura, whose headless corpse was found in July 2023 inside a room at Hotel Let’s in Sapporo’s Susukino entertainment district.
Investigations led to the arrest of Runa, who was said to have stabbed Mr Ura.
Runa’s father, Osamu, a doctor, was also arrested for purportedly helping her sever Mr Ura’s head in an attempt to cover up the crime.
According to investigators, a saw was used to decapitate Mr Ura and his head was later smuggled out of the hotel room inside a suitcase.
Runa’s mother, Hiroko, was arrested for supposedly helping in the cover-up.
Hiroko told the court on June 4 that when she saw Mr Ura’s head inside the bathroom, she found it “so out of the ordinary”, reported Japanese media.
“I couldn’t tell my daughter it was good or bad, and I couldn’t condemn or accept it,” she said.
She testified that she was asked to take photos of the severed head, “but I didn’t know what of and I didn’t comply”.
Police investigations and court records painted a picture of a couple who doted on a daughter suffering from bouts of unchecked mental illness.
Hiroko and Osamu’s world revolved around Runa, prosecutors said.
Their tiny home was filled with things they bought for her.
They called her “ojosan”, which means “young lady” or “miss”.
She, in turn, called her father “Mr Driver” and her mother simply as “kanojo” or “she”.
They bought whatever things or food their daughter wanted and they made plans according to whatever they thought would make her happy.
However, they were always wary of Runa’s wild mood swings and Osamu always asked Hiroko to keep tabs on whatever Runa was doing.
They never scolded her.
It was, prosecutors said, a “Runa-first” family dynamic.
The family’s defence lawyers leaned on her deteriorating mental health in seeking to justify her actions.
“When she became mentally unstable, Runa would yell unintelligible words as if she were going mad, punch holes in the walls of their home, commit self-harm and attempt suicide,” one of the lawyers told the court in an opening statement.
Not knowing any better, Hiroko and Osamu “tried to meet their daughter’s desires within the scope of what was possible”, the lawyer said.
“In this way, they ended up with a parent-child relationship that was very peculiar,” he added.