and it’s very graphic and very disturbing if you’re not into that.
You usually just stop listening right now.
So as we proceed from here, there’s going to be some gross stuff.
It’s about a man who’s decapitated and there’s some pretty
graphic details of what actually happens to the body
because there’s some body mutilation that comes later.
For those of you who are like, “Ooh, I want to listen to this.
” Maybe think about some stuff first.
So back in July, July 3rd,
a corpse was founded a love hotel.
A love hotel in Japan is a place where people go to participate
and intimate activities together for short term.
I’ve explained the love hotels before,
but what they are is Japan has a lot of generational households
where you live with your parents, parents live with their kids into old age,
so you might actually have three generations in one house.
It means having intimacy in your place sometimes isn’t always possible.
So they created this system of hotels
where you can stay for one hour, two hour, three hours.
It basically paid by the hour
and entertain yourselves with your friends.
So in July 3rd, so July 3rd, staff went to clean a room and they found a corpse,
but it was a headless corpse that’s been decapitated.
Three weeks later, a family of three was arrested
and the head was found in their residence.
So that’s pretty damning evidence
if they actually find the head of the corpse in your house.
Runa Tamura, who is 30 years old, who is the daughter of the family,
has been accused of murder, mutilation of a corpse, and several other crimes.
Those are the two worst ones that are going to get the most time.
The victim was a 62 year old cross dressing man.
They met in the red-like district of Sapporo.
Now, it sounds like they had had relations multiple times in the past.
The motive of this murder seems to be anger over
the unprotected sex they had the previous month.
So it sounds like they had had sex multiple times.
They had used protection, and this last time, for some reason,
the guy didn’t use protection, and Runa was
really angry about it, so she decided to kill him.
They did an SNM session, where the man, the victim, was bound,
and once bound was stabbed in the neck with a folding knife.
Runa then decapitated the body,
and put this head in the suitcase, and then took it home.
She was picked up by her father, who is a psychiatrist,
who seems to have known what she did.
Now, what we find out later is much more dramatic,
because you could actually say,
“Oh, the father didn’t know what was in the bag.
” So he just picked up his daughter when she asked for a ride
that makes perfect sense.
Once home, she started to skin the head
and remove the eyes she wanted her mother to film her doing it.
So now we’ve gotten to sort of the depths of depravity
that we’re actually talking about in this story.
It is a lot.
The mother was arrested as an accomplice.
She denies doing this or any guilt or any involvement.
The reason I started doing the murder in Japan series
is because when you get the actual court documents released,
usually this is from TokyoReporter.
com, which is an excellent website.
It’s where I get a lot of my news,
or when I get a lot of stories that I want to
follow up on, they release court transcripts,
which is a very interesting insight into the murder itself,
and the actual ongoing of the Japanese judicial system,
which is something we don’t get a lot of insight into.
So that’s actually honestly the part I’m more interested in than the actual murder.
Like the murder is the impetus for this thing happening,
but I really want the insight in how the Japanese system works
when they’re actually prosecuting or crying.
So the first part is about the mother.
So the mother says under oath,
so she takes the stand she’s under oath.
She says I only found out about the damage to the head
after it was brought into the house.
There’s actually an implication there
that she actually knew that the head was coming into the house.
It was the damage she didn’t know about until after.
So it’s not true that I allowed it to be hidden.
When I found out it was already in the bathroom.
It was so abnormal that I couldn’t say anything to my daughter.
I couldn’t blame her. I couldn’t accept it.
And I couldn’t say anything.
This seems sort of reasonable.
It seems sort of reasonable because she’s essentially saying,
this is so beyond the pale off the chain
that I am just in shock immediately.
I was frozen. I didn’t know what to do.
I was just completely lost.
Runa wanted the mother to video Runa doing the things
I’m trying to be gentle about. I’ve already said it.
Runa wanted the mother to video her skinning and removing the eyes from the head.
Regarding the videotaping, she said,
there’s a difference between carrying out the videotaping and approving of it.
I wasn’t told what exactly we were going to film.
I couldn’t bear it, so I asked my husband to film it out of a desire for help.
I had absolutely no intention of helping with the crime.
I had no intention of helping with the desecration.
So she’s saying, look, my daughter was doing this thing.
She asked me to video it. I did not approve of the videoing of it.
I actually didn’t video it. I gave it to my husband.
That doesn’t mean I approved of what was going on.
But again, she’s kind of saying she was in shock.
Her basic defense is that she says she knew,
but she didn’t approve of what was happening.
Therefore, she is not committed that any of the crime she’s been accused of.
The father claims he didn’t know about the murder until
Runa came home with the head, but he did know about the S&M.
And that’s actually going to be a weird little twist we hear about in a moment.
Details about the family dynamic is that basically Runa
ran the house and she was never punished for anything.
She was essentially sort of the queen of this little family unit.
In a recording from October 6, 2020, Runa yells abuse at her father in English
saying things like, “I want to kill you and why don’t you follow my orders?
” So that actually gives you already a sense of the
dynamic of what’s happening in this household.
She’s saying like, “I give you orders.
There’s an expectation that you should follow them.
It doesn’t even make sense to me that you don’t.
” The weird part to me is that her father is a psychologist.
The father being a psychiatrist, a psychiatrist, a psychiatrist.
The weird thing is that her father is a psychiatrist.
He should be vaguely familiar with the results of actually giving kids,
spoiling them and giving them free reign, that
this is the kind of person they grow up into.
But he actually seems to have had some sort of deficiency and then fallen to this trap
that he has with his own daughter.
Now, there could be some other things going on, DNA, genetics, who knows.
Like, I mean, there could be the bad gene.
Or it could just be, this is again a nature versus nurture kind of conversation.
Did they raise her wrong and she ended up a murderer or does she just like,
born bad and they did everything they could to try
to make her a nice person and give her a good life.
And she just like manipulated all that as she grew up.
We’re actually never going to know.
Runa says in Japanese on January 22nd, 2023,
“I’m going to get a little stronger and kill you guys.
” That’s what I’ve always thought my sister and I.
Now, the sister part is very interesting because she doesn’t actually have a sister.
That same day, she says, “I’ll kill everyone. That’s all.
” “Oh, some who responds, don’t kill, I don’t kill any.
” Runa adds, “You’re not even taking responsibility.
Just hurry up and do it. You idiot.
” So this is again, the way she’s talking to her father and the way her
father’s responding to her tells you a lot about the relationship.
She says in Japanese in an apparent reference
to the murder victim on June 1st, 2023,
the other person thinks that he is at my mercy, so I made him think that.
But I am the one in control. She goes on.
I thought it would be like a contest of endurance because
I could pretend to be a bitch as far as I could go.
But I don’t look like that kind of girl. Don’t you think?
She’s basically saying, “I look innocent, I see innocent, so
people don’t assume I’m capable of this kind of level of violence.
” So then they put the father on the stand and
the defense starts questioning the father.
So defense, in one of Runa’s statements, she said, “My sister, did
she have a sister? The father. No. The defense. Who is her sister?
” The father says, “Runa. Runa’s soul.” So when Runa refers to her
sister, she’s almost talking about another version of herself,
it turns out that when she talks about Runa’s sister,
she’s talking, that’s when she sort of switches to English.
So we’re getting kind of a feeling of a dual
personality thing going on in the defense.
Who is the subject of the conversation that says, “I killed my sister?
” The father, I think Cynthia is the main character.
There are many other souls, but Cynthia is the main character.
So now he’s talking about multiple personality disorder.
Defense, who does Cynthia’s soul want to kill?
The father, me and Hiroko, the mother.
Cynthia thinks that Runa’s soul died because of our response.
Defense, have you ever been harmed by Runa? The father, no.
Defense, did she ever wave a knife or a kitchen knife around?
The father, not directly at us.
So she has waved a knife around in the past. The defense.
Regarding the fact that you were forced to take photos of the
victim’s head, could the photo session have been postponed?
The father. He only had one eye left, and although it was Friday evening,
I had to leave for a business trip to Kansai first thing the next morning.
If I returned on Sunday night, I would be away for two days,
and I thought I would have to ask Hiroko to take the photos.
He didn’t actually like even conceive of the idea that you
don’t have to take these photos that you should actually say no.
Just thinking about this kind of damage was enough to send shivers down my spine. Hiroko could
not bear it. It may sound rude, but I thought it would be better for this to end quickly.
On the night of July 1st, 2023, was Samu drove
Runa by car to Susuquino, looking for the victim.
So this is basically where clubs may be the red light district in Sapporo City. It’s a security
camera footage of Samu is shown inside the club several meters from Runa and the victim.
So he’s driven her to a club where the victim is. He’s dropped his daughter
off and he’s kind of hanging out in the club waiting for them to come out.
The defense asks, what did you want from the victim? I thought that if she
confronted him and there was an apology, the situation could be repaired.
I thought that if he didn’t apologize, that would be an end of it. So he’s just hoping there’s going to be some kind of
confrontation about this sexual relationship they had and it’s just going to end that night after they have maybe an argument.
What were your thoughts when you looked for the victim?
I hope that he wouldn’t be found that she would just give up on it.
So he’s actually like the whole time going, I hope she doesn’t find this guy. I hope we don’t have
to talk to this guy. I hope this doesn’t actually work out the way I think it’s going to work out.
He knows something bad is going to happen if she actually finds him.
The defense. I don’t think you know anything about the victim.
So how did you look for places he might be? The father. I didn’t get any personal information from
him at all. I heard his nickname and that he often goes to clubs for older people on weekends.
So I looked for him based on those conditions. The defense. When Runa went looking for
the victim, she called him Sheikah, which is Japanese for deer on the line chat app.
How did she start calling him Sheikah? The father. When we were looking for the victim, neither my daughter nor any of the family knew him. So calling him by his nickname didn’t sound good to my daughter. I guess she thought there were other ways to call him. My daughter asked me to call him Sheikah
just before we left. I don’t get the relevance of that. It’s an interesting point that they started talking about. This guy has a nickname in what people should be calling each other. So Runa had bought the equipment. She bought a bunch of knives, several knives, and the father bought a suitcase.
And a saw because she told him to. She’s like, I want you to get a suitcase that holds a hundred kilos and a
saw. And I’m not going to tell you what it’s for, but we’re going to go see this guy that I’m really angry at.
The father and daughter practiced SNM before the murder.
So that’s actually going to be the bit that comes up.
Defense. Who is the one who started talking about SNM practice? A father. From my daughter, after
making an appointment with the victim, my daughter practiced saying I was attacked last time.
So this time I’ll be the attacker. The defense. How long did it take?
I think it most it was one to two minutes. Defense specifically. The father.
I was sitting upright with my hands handcuffed behind my back and wearing an eye mask. And my daughter approached
me from behind touching me here and there. I remember her asking me how it felt in interacting with me.
So she’s got her father tied up in an SNM kind of bondage scenario. She’s taken a knife for some kind
of tool and she’s just touching him with it saying like how does this feel? How do you feel right now?
And she’s trying to figure out what the best
way of executing this murder would actually be.
Osama’s internet history search on June 25th, 2023 shows that he
researched the purchase of a large black suitcase during questioning.
He said it was to be used for Runa’s doll collection, which numbers over 100.
So she has 100 like toys, stuffy animals, dolls in her room.
He’s saying the suitcase was for that. The defense did Osama’s search for suitcase
load capacity 100 kilograms and suitcase load capacity 50 kilograms. The father.
I don’t remember exactly, but I was asked to look what could fit in it. So I did type it in myself
or click it maybe. How many dolls can fit in a black suitcase? I think 20 to 30 can fit in it.
What about the 70 centimeter tall ones? I think about 15 can fit in it.
How much do they weigh? Each one weighs four to five kilograms. These are heavy.
So these aren’t stuffy animals like I thought. These are big
heavy dolls and seven decentimeters is about half my height.
So that’s like two three feet tall. So if there’s no
cushioning or anything, it could weigh about 50 to 70 kilogram.
Were you told to clearly film the destruction?
I was told to film without being told what was inside the bathroom.
So this is interesting a thing the defense is doing what they’ve done is gone through. Did you buy the suitcase? What could
fit in the suitcase? And then switch immediately back to where you told clearly to film what she was going to do to the head.
And he has to like pivot back and forth. That might be to throw the person
on the stand off so that they have to answer questions without thinking.
I’m just again, I’m interested in the court proceedings and the
tactics that actually take place when you’re actually on trial defense.
At what point did you realize that the mutilation of the head would occur? The father I took the camera to the
bathroom and when I was shown the damaged bottles and other things and I was told the eyes were still in the head.
I thought that the mutilation would occur. I didn’t know until I got to the bathroom, but that does
indicate that he knew there was a head in there and he hasn’t stopped this and he hasn’t called the police.
During the trial the prosecution’s explanation of evidence revealed that before the incident
Osamu had searched the internet for fingerprints can be erased with bleach. Very telling.
And suitcase load capacity 100 kilograms. For her part, Hiroko sent a line message to Osamu asking, “By the way, will the GPS record of the car be saved?” She then deleted the message.
She’s asking like, “Is there going to be a record of where the car goes that night? Can we delete that?” And then she deleted that message thinking that it would then disappear.
So then they get sort of switch topics and they get into the weird SNM practice again.
Runa told me to sit upright in the middle of the living room of our house.
Put my hands behind my back and close my eyes.
Osamu told the court as a witness.
I was told to sit as if I was handcuffed and blindfolded.
I felt something moving from behind and I felt
something touching my cheeks and neck with a scarf.
So he’s saying there’s some kind of binding material,
a scarf or something that she’s touching him with.
Yeah, she’s testing to see what his kind of reactions are going
to be before he actually goes ahead and does this actual crime.
It turns out that a few more details came out a couple days ago. There are
claims that she rented several horror movies 10 days before the actual crime.
She rented the 2016 movie Terrifier. She rented the 2017 movie Leatherface.
Both contain neck cutting scenes which Runa recorded on her phone.
So she’s watching these horror movies. She’s getting to these parts where
she actually like the murderer kills someone by cutting their throne.
And she records that on her phone. We assume so she can study it later. Runa and the victim had
sex multiple times. The last time there was no protection used and she said you broke your promise.
The only other details are about sort of her youth
and when she’s a child and when she was brought up.
And it’s really just a question of how did she get to this place in her life where she was able to command her
parents so freely where she was able to think that murder was going to be an accessible solution to this problem.
Runa stopped going to school after middle school. She never went to high school. She never did any schooling
beyond that. It sounds like she didn’t work. She just stayed at home and ordered her parents to do things.
She already had control by that time over her parents. Her parents raised their daughter
without getting angry. They bought her everything she wanted the prosecution said.
They couldn’t scold her. The house was overflowing with loonous things. Kidoko lived in
a small place and Osama had no place in the house so he spent his time at internet cafes.
So because the house was full of her stuff, there was no actual space for their parents. The father actually seemed to
spend most of his time outside of the house at internet cafes, probably just surfing the internet reading and sleeping.
Kidoko would ask her daughter what she wanted and communicated with Osama online. So basically she would say, “What do you want today? Maybe food?
Maybe a thing.” And then she would make that request to the father on a messaging app and then the father would come home and just drop it off.
The mother called Runa young lady and spoke to her in polite language. So in Japanese there is
familial language and polite language. There’s different levels. There’s also very rude language.
That’s sort of the important thing you have to learn when you start learning Japanese. When you
speak to your parents, you should be more polite, just a little bit, but you’re still familiar.
In this case the mother is speaking to the daughter like the mother is a servant
and then the daughter is sort of the master of the house by calling her young lady.
Runa told her father to sell her mother to a jukujo fusoku business, which
is a brothel that specializes in older women instead of younger women.
And Osama was her personal driver. So like when she went searching for the victim,
the father drove her around from place to place so she could go hunting for this guy.
She made the father join all nighters at game centers and other
places, Runa was selfish and treated her parents like slaves.
So this is an ongoing case. There is no resolution yet, but when we get to an
update, I will update on the actual results, but it’s pretty clear she’s guilty.
It’s actually more interesting as to whether or not the parents what they’re going to be prosecuted
with, what they’re actually going to be charged with, what they’re actually going to find culpable of.
Because it sounds like in a weird way, once Runa took control over the household, they were almost victims of her, but of course at
any point being adults, they could have called the police, they could have looked for help, they could have tried to do something else.
But the father’s a psychiatrist is to me one of the more interesting parts because he
fed into this as much as anyone else, but at the same time, he should have known better.
So this is really just a statement for anyone out there who thinks about having kids be strict,
do not let your children take control of everything and do not be nice to your children.
I can’t stop with who will don’t be nice to your children. But absolutely, this is a case for being strict with your children and not
giving them sort of that gentle, soft love and never saying no to them like is actually a very modern trend of what is gentle parenting?
I’m not a fan of that. This is a very good example case of gentle parenting and not saying no to your kids is not a good idea
because you could end up in a situation where you are driving your child around looking for a victim and participating in the crime.
Which is going to get you arrested as well.
I think this murder in Japan series, because this is the third one, if it keeps
going, should be Ninja Ninja Japan specials, which is almost self evident.
But I’ve hit basically writer’s block. I’ve been doing so many other projects
that I haven’t had any ideas for things to talk about for a seeming be.
And I don’t want it to just die. So I think that’s actually why I did it this way. I
kind of just took what would be a special Ninja Japan and made it into a seeming be.
I was trying it out though, and I do like it. There’s a lot less commentary a lot more just like
reading and passing on facts. I think this might be one that’s better to do with someone else.
Like I go through this stuff and then talk to someone about it.
It’s Japanese folktales. I came to Japan. Of course I want to learn how to speak Japanese. I want
to learn how to read. I want to learn how to be a better person. I want to be able to interact.
When I was learning how to read it first, I wanted some heated gamma books. I got really interested in
them. I really enjoyed them. This is how I started learning some Japanese vocabulary that I didn’t know.
I thought folktales would give me a little insight into the culture. I wish I
hadn’t done that because the insight into the culture was absolutely terrifying.
Japanese folktales are just off the chain. They are just insane. The kid’s folktales traditionally are.
If you get the old original versions are always horrendous stuff. It’s always people getting torn in half.
I would say in the European tradition, the Western tradition that they are generally trying to teach you something. So, Hansel and Gretel is like, “Oh,
be your parents. Don’t go into the forest. Be careful of strangers.” A little red riding hood is like be cautious of strangers, that kind of stuff.
There is, despite the horror of the story itself, a lesson you’re
trying to impart upon children. Japanese fairy tales or folktales.
They go hard and I spent years trying to figure out what the actual moral of a lot of
these was. It turns out the moral of most of these seems to be revenge as in get some.
The first story I read was the crab in the monkey. I’m going to tell you the bridged
version of this. I started doing research on these, trying to learn more about these.
It turns out, you know, this is an oral tradition, so there’s multiple versions of the story. The interesting
one on this is what gets used in the final revenge plot, kind of changes depending on where you are.
I bet it’s actually just local stuff gets used so it’s more
familiar to the people who are actually hearing the story.
I’m going to tell you the story and then we can do a little
bit of analysis. I got three stories to tell you today.
If you find a rice ball, don’t eat that rice ball, that’s not good for you.
The monkey comes along and sees the crab with the rice ball.
Don’t eat the rice ball. Give me the rice ball and I’ll
give you this persimency, persimines are a fruit in Asia.
The crab’s like, that’s a bad deal. I got this one in the hand right now.
I can eat it and I’ll be satisfied. I don’t know if crab’s eat rice. Sure.
I’ll go with that crab’s eat rice. I think everything needs rice. If you have
a rice ball, I don’t use any animal that would actually refuse to eat it.
Okay. I got a knot tangent. This might be the hardest part for me. Discipline-wise.
The monkey convinces the crab says, I’m going to give you the seed.
You can grow the seed into a persimine tree.
The persimine tree, therefore, will provide you with persimines for a very long time.
It’s a much better deal. It does take patience and the crab’s like, you know what?
The crab’s just, you know, inherently patient animals. I will do the exchange. So gives him the rice ball, gives the monkey the rice ball,
takes the persimine seed, goes off and plants at the monkey’s like, aha, I got a rice ball, eats it right away, you know, disappears.
X amount of years later, I assume, they dose kind of just jump, cut, smash, cut to the
next part. The crab plants and grows the tree. It produces a lot of fruit, but it’s crab.
The crabs don’t have famously long arms and they’re not particularly good at climbing.
Don’t tangent. I can’t. I’ve seen videos online of giant crabs climbing up walls.
Okay. That’s not what’s happening here. This crab cannot climb. God, I’m going
to ruin this. It’s not like I was going to make it good in the first place.
This crab cannot climb the tree to get the persimines and the monkey is in the tree and he’s like, aha, he takes a persimine, he starts eating it and the crabs like, hey, dude, those
are my persimines. You can’t have them without my permission. You need to like, at least give me the persimines. You shouldn’t be eating my persimines. There’s a lot of argument there.
The monkey, being a little bit of prick, takes an unripe and persimines so
very hard and throws it down and kills the crab. This is straight up murder.
Now, there’s a couple of verses in this story. One is very graphic rate like cracks its carapace and then
the thing suffers for a long time and dies and then others is just throws it down and just kills the crab.
Now, this crab had babies. Again, they grew this tree for years.
I don’t know how old these babies are but I don’t know how long crabs live.
Crabs one of those animals that just lives forever until it dies, which I guess is
every animal. What I mean is there are like animals that have sort of a finite lifespan.
There are people who think that like lobsters are immortal, like something has to kill them
but basically they never get sick or anything. I don’t know if crabs are the same as that.
I know a couple people listen to this, it’s like double speed.
This might be very confusing for you. I’m sorry.
The earliest version of this is when the persimine hits the crab to kill it.
It actually gives birth in that moment and then dies.
So it was carrying babies inside or something
but all the versions the crab has babies.
Then the baby crabs are like let’s get some help and
they don’t really explain what the help is for yet.
It’s almost like a question of is there inherent knowledge that
the babies are going to go get revenge or is this like a reveal?
It’s actually something I should ask some Japanese people.
After learning every one of these stories, when I read these stories initially,
I went to some Japanese co-workers and I asked them questions about it.
They were always very befuddled because they couldn’t answer
any of my questions because they were like too nitpicky I guess.
So they go and they want to get to the Japanese folktale version of the A team.
We’re like we’re going to go get the best of the best.
So they get a chestnut, a B, and an Usu.
Now an Usu is usually a tree stump that’s been hollowed out and what they do
is they put rice in there and they get a big hammer and they pound the rice.
So you probably if you’ve watched any video on Japan, seen the guys, the guy hits it
with a giant hammer and then the other guy mixes it and then he hits it with a hammer.
And there’s a rhythm to it. So they want to go fast without
actually hitting the guy’s hands with a giant hammer.
So there is a rhythm kind of thing you can see if you want.
That’s not important. You got to know what it is.
It’s really, it looks like a giant heavy pestle. Heavy is the important word.
And a cow poop. So as a person listening to this story, I did have issue with the anthropomorphization
because before we were dealing with monkey and crap, both animals, they could talk to each other.
I’m accepting that. Okay, now it seems like the author, the creator of this folk tale, is just like,
well, what do I want in this story? I’ll anthropomorphize those, but not necessarily everything else.
Got to take a little deep break. See how many spins he does.
Three. Four. Come on, buddy. Five. Six.
Holy is a lot. Oh, he on the seventh one. He’s down. Okay. Good.
So I take a little Dave break there. Everyone enjoys a little Dave.
So my problem was, yeah, anthropomorphizing cow poop.
So the B makes sense. It’s in the animal kingdom, just like the crab in the monkey.
I’ll accept that. The chestnut, that’s pretty tough.
How do we have a single sentient chestnut? The Usoo is something carved from a tree. It seems like if you’re
going to anthropomorphize trees, when it’s an Usoo, the tree had to be cut down. It would be dead by now.
But we’re just going magic, but the poop was a bit of a stretch.
I was like, why do you have to do a poop?
And I’m like, oh, it’s Japan. Japan loves putting poop in stories.
Japan is, I believe, the culture that popularized the ice cream swirl poop.
And so now if you draw that, people think it’s poop and not necessarily ice cream.
So this group gets together. You have the crabs,
the chestnut, the B, the Usoo, and the poop.
And they’ve teamed up and they’re going to get that monkey.
They go to the monkey’s house. The chestnut gets in the fire.
The B hangs out around the water pail. The cow poop hides in the
dirt floor outside the building and the Usoo gets on the roof.
Now I explanation to how anything’s happened. The Usoo, since it’s
sentient somehow, could get on the roof, we’re just accepting it.
You can see what they’ve set up is a root Goldberg machine of death.
They’re creating a elaborate way to torture and kill the monkey.
Which, again, this is dark. Like when you actually
think about what’s happening, this is very, very dark.
So the monkey comes home and he goes to the fire
to warm himself after a hard day of monkeying.
And then the chestnut pops and the pop, you know, that little bit
of fire jumps out and hits him in the arm and it burns his arm.
So he runs outside and he puts his arm in the water bucket,
which is not sentient, which actually I just thought of just now.
He puts his arm in the water bucket and then the B stings him. And then he runs and
he slips in the dirt on the cow poop, which essentially would kill the cow poop.
I don’t know. I don’t know. They could have just had the crabs
bring the cow poop over. It didn’t have to be sentient, but it was.
It’s a character in the story. He slips on the cow poop and he
falls down and then the Usoo falls down on him and kills him.
So this is like home alone. This is like full on
construction of A to B to C to D to death. Now home alone.
I don’t believe they killed anybody, but that’s
because it was a kids movie. This is a kid’s story.
The imagine the large trunk of a tree falling and crushing
if not the whole monkey, at least enough of him to kill him.
I don’t really like how complicated the plan is.
I don’t think you should do overly complicated plans.
If you’re going to do murder and stuff, you’re going to do that.
It has to be simple and direct so you know it’s going to be effective.
This relies on lock if you hadn’t fallen in the right place.
If the burn hadn’t been strong enough, the plan fell apart right there.
So the plan was overly complicated.
I think this is supposed to be the entertaining aspect of
the story for the kids, the complicated nature of the plan.
But then if you’re going to do that, make it way longer. Maybe that’s some of the other stories that I didn’t
read is that it is way longer and that is actually the entertainment is how stupidly complicated the plan is.
But every element of the plan furthers torture the monkey
before his death. That’s something to keep in mind.
So I, when I read this story the first time, went to my
Japanese coworkers and I said what is the moral of this story?
And most of them could not really explain it because it’s not forgiveness.
It is clearly and exclusively, you killed my parents, I’m going to kill you and I’m not just
going to kill you, I’m going to make it painful and maybe even last as long as possible.
Now, someone else in Japanese society kind of came to a similar realization as me.
There was a guy named Ryunosuke Akutakawa.
He rewrote the end of the story so that the crab
children were all arrested and given the death penalty.
So this guy thought ah, there is a moral lacking in this
story where the baby crabs get revenge for their parents.
They need to be punished by the law because they’ve committed a murder.
So I’m going to give them all the death penalty so no one survives.
I mean, they actually make it sound in that way that the
poop and the Usu and the bee are irrelevant in the chestnut.
Maybe the chestnut, because it’s in the fire, like it would be dead, right?
The bee, one of bee’s things, you hit dies.
The Usu is the only thing that technically could have survived
this whole process because the poop, you slip in the poop.
Yeah, anthropomorphizing those was a bad idea because you have to
hurt them or kill them to get them to participate in this plan.
And somehow they agreed to it.
No Japanese person I met could ever explain to me the actual moral of that.
It was like don’t do bad things. Like the monkey did a bad thing.
And that’s why revenge wasn’t acted upon him
so the monkey shouldn’t have done bad things.
So don’t be bad.
But I was like, is not a complicated murder also a bad thing?
And that’s where they ran into problems because it is hard to
deny that the murder torture saw a movie at the end of this story.
This story is an acceptable way to behave.
I do like that the guy who rewrote the end
actually also gave everyone the death penalty.
Like that’s not actually better. There’s no reconciliation.
There’s no anyone becoming a better person out of this story.
It’s just death and murder.
Which brings us to our second story, which is the rabbit and the Tanuki.
The Tanuki is a raccoon style animal in Japan.
You probably know that. I don’t want to make any
assumptions about what people do and don’t know.
But Tanuki’s are famous in Japan as shapeshifters.
There’s the War of the Tanuki, which is like humans are encroaching on.
It’s like a jibbly movie or something.
Humans are encroaching on their land.
There’s one scene where they use their testicle sacks
as they stretch them out and use them as parachutes.
Other cultures are wonderful and exciting to learn about.
I did enjoy that. It was very funny. It was very funny to me because it was so weird.
This is apparently just part of the Tanuki mythology.
Anyways, let’s get into it.
There was a Tanuki stealing food from a farmer.
Pretty normal thing for an animal to do.
The farmer caught him and tied him to a tree, the Tanuki.
He says, “I’m going to come back later and I’m going to kill you.
” The Tanuki starts to cry, so we all feel bad.
The farmer’s wife comes back and she feels bad.
And the Tanuki apologizes and says, “I won’t do it again.
I’m not going to steal anymore foods.
” So the old lady in her kindness unties the Tanuki.
So what does the Tanuki do?
If you haven’t already gotten sort of the theme of what’s been going on so far,
the Tanuki then murders the old lady and shapeshifts into her.
So when people come back, they’re going to see
the old lady, but it’s actually the Tanuki.
The Tanuki takes the old lady and brings her
into the house so no one can see the body.
He then cuts her up and prepares her in a meal for the farmer when he comes back.
I’m just going to let that one sit for a bit.
Everyone makes a big deal about the South Park episode
where he feeds the kid his own parents or something.
This way, way back.
Hundreds of years ago, the Japanese were like, “Yep, this is what’s going to happen.
We’re going to have a man do unknown cannibalism
as part of our folk tale to teach kids morals.
” Again, it’s just a revenge story, bud.
So the farmer comes back and he sits down and eats
dinner and they don’t say whether he enjoys it or not,
but I’m going to go ahead and assume he thinks this
is a great dinner because that just makes it worse.
Then the Tanuki sort of does the big reveal and says, “Haha,
you’ve just eaten your own wife and then books it out of there.
” Man, yeah, I don’t know where to go from there.
There was forced cannibalism as part of this
story if you really stop down thinking it.
The farmer is understandably upset.
His friend, the rabbit comes by and goes, “Hey buddy, what happened?
” He goes, “Well, I just ate my wife.
” The rabbit vows revenge on the farmer’s behalf.
There’s a few versions of this story, but I’ll share the common element.
So I’m only going to use the common elements
of this story when I am telling it to you now.
Like the previous story, the different versions, really all
they do is add more elements of torture to lengthen the story.
So I’m going to give you the base version and understand that every other version you could
hear has more aspects or elements of torture in it before the actual death at the end.
The rabbit befriends the Tanuki.
Then, while they’re one day while they’re out in the
forest, the rabbit drops a beehive on the Tanuki’s head.
And then the Tanuki, of course, gets stings all over his head.
So the rabbit treats the stings with pepper to make it hurt more.
The Tanuki is carrying kindling, so this must be on another day.
He’s carrying kindling on the way back, and they’re walking by.
This story is actually called kachi kachi yama, which is kachi kachi mountain.
And he’s carrying kindling, and he’s walking along, and the rabbit’s behind
me and lights the kindling on fire, setting the Tanuki on fire from behind.
And as soon as he’s like, “Hey, do you hear that sound?
” Sounds like kachi kachi kachi kachi is the sound of fire.
And then the rabbit looks and goes, “Yes, that is
because we are walking close to kachi kachi yama.
Kachi kachi yama is kachi kachi kachi mountain, I guess.
” And that’s why you — famously, you can hear the kachi
kachi sound of fire when you are close to this mountain.
Of course, it burns his back. It burns the Tanuki’s back, but it doesn’t kill him.
But that’s when the Tanuki realizes the rabbit isn’t really his friend.
So then, he challenges the rabbit to a contest.
I don’t really get this part.
He says, “Let’s race across the lake, so we’re going to build our own boats.
We’re going to race across the lake.
” The rabbit carves a boat out of a tree trunk, so would.
The Tanuki makes his boat out of mud.
I think you can see a flaw in the Tanuki’s plan.
As they start going across the lake, the Tanuki’s boat starts to dissolve.
He starts to drown, and the rabbit hits him on the head with an ore.
This is the weird part of this revenge, because the revenge part of this —
if you had just left the Tanuki to his own devices, he would have killed himself.
Like, he wouldn’t — you wouldn’t actually have to commit murder.
Like, some of the other attempts could have been considered murder attempts.
This one, he challenged you to a race.
He built an inferior boat.
That inferior boat started to sink.
He went down with it.
He couldn’t swim very well.
You could just let him drown, and then claim a certain amount of innocence.
But, the rabbit takes it always that step further.
Like, this is it, the protagonist, or the hero.
These stories always takes it that step further
to make sure that they actually kill the thing.
So the killing blow is the — or hitting the Tanuki in the head.
Then the rabbit goes back to the farmer and tells the
tale of his revenge, and I guess everyone satisfied.
And this is not an eye for an eye.
So, like, you killed my wife, I’m going to kill you.
That would be an eye for an eye, I think.
This is always — there’s another element of
I’m going to torture you before I murder you.
So, it’s an eye for an eye, plus more.
It’s almost like your enemies must suffer.
And then I asked some Japanese people about this story,
and their version of the moral was don’t do bad things.
And then when you come back to them and say,
“Well, is not torturing someone also a bad thing.
” They’re like, “But that’s as a result of your actions.
” So, if you hadn’t committed those actions, you
wouldn’t have been tortured in the second place.
So, that’s one of the weird issues of these stories.
We have one more story.
Now, this one is not about torture and murder.
Those two shared a theme.
And I read them very close to each other, and
when I asked my Japanese friends about them,
I never got a satisfactory moral to this story.
Essentially, they would just say, “Don’t do bad things.
” But I’m like, “But the result of you doing a bad
thing was a very complicated, awful, evil revenge.
” The last story I’m going to do, though, is called the Boy and the Turtle.
And it’s just — it’s like someone did some — found some LSD way, way back in the day.
So, there’s a little boy on the beach.
And he’s walking around and he sees some other boys.
And they’re bullying a turtle.
I don’t know what that means.
I think I guess that just means they’re playing with a turtle in an unkind way.
Maybe hitting it or turning it out on the back.
Doing bad things to a turtle.
And I think at that point, everyone is on the turtle’s sides.
Like, “Don’t do bad things to turtles.
” Turtles are cool.
This is why the straw industry suffered so
much when the straw went up that turtle’s nose,
because when you heard a turtle, the world unites against you.
So, you know, I don’t use straws.
I legit don’t use straws anymore.
I will only use paper straws.
And it’s because of that turtle.
Because turtles don’t hurt anybody.
Don’t hurt turtles.
Okay.
So, he chases the boys off.
He says, “Don’t bully the turtle.
” I don’t know if he’s a scary person, but
anyway, he gets the kids to leave them alone.
And then she goes, “Thank you.
Come with me under the sea to a magical world.
” That’s a great invitation.
It’s almost like Disney should make a song that sounds very similar to that.
So, they go.
So, the boy in the turtle go together under the sea
and they go down to this like undersea castle world.
Somehow the boy can breathe, not asking any questions.
It’s magic.
This is magic.
The undersea kingdom is magic.
So, I’m perfectly skeptical of what’s going on here.
The boy attends a three-day party and he eats
food and he does like what Japanese people do.
They talk to fish.
He eats.
The thing is, if his Japanese kid was probably eating fish
and talking to fish, that’s got to be very uncomfortable.
It’s not exactly the cannibalism from the previous
story, but there is like an uncomfortable element
if you’re eating like a similar species while having a conversation with someone.
But he’s having a good time.
He’s having a party or maybe they’re just eating a lot of seaweed.
It’s been three days.
It’s time to go.
You can only party for so long.
So, the queen says come here.
I want to thank you for helping our turtle friend.
Here’s a box.
Don’t open the fucking box.
Already that’s a bit weird.
It’s weird as a present.
Like, don’t open the box.
Here’s a box.
Don’t open the box.
That’s it.
Now, get out.
There’s no explanation as to why you should open the box.
That is to me the biggest problem with the story so far.
So the weird present is given to the boy without any explanation.
It’s just the only thing that said is here’s a box.
Don’t open the box.
I’m assuming it’s a very nice box.
This is a gift from the queen.
He goes back to the beach and he’s like, I think it’s different.
This is feel different.
The beach looks different.
Maybe some of the buildings in the background kind of changed.
That’s weird.
And he figures out that time in the undersea
kingdom and time in the world he comes from.
Past differently.
It’s almost like interstellar black hole kind
of like time, fractioning gravity situation.
I’m not going to explain it.
We’ll just, again, it’s magic.
But he understands that now three days under the water in
the underwater party kingdom equals 300 years in the world.
Which means everyone he knows, his family, his friends,
everyone he’s ever, you know, everyone’s ever existed.
They’re all dead now.
Like 200 years ago at least.
They’re dead.
And so he has no home.
He has no life.
He has no sort of world to support him.
Because again, this is not an adult who made this choice.
This is a child.
And that’s another element that I think gets forgotten very quickly.
This is a child whose entire support system in the world is now gone 200 years ago.
He sits down on the beach and starts to cry.
And then he decides to do the only logical thing.
Maybe there’s something in the box that can help me
in this dire situation that I have been put into.
So he opens the box.
And when he opens the box, he immediately ages 300 years and dies.
What is going on?
So the box was somehow holding the difference
in time between the real world and the boy.
So once the box was open, that whatever magic was released.
And so his aging, it must have been incredibly painful for a few seconds.
Like he aged 300 years, and they don’t give a
time frame, but I’m going to say very quickly.
But that aging process must have been incredibly
painful and then just in a sudden death.
The only thing I can come up with is you have
a short-term reward, but at a massive cost.
But the moral of the story actually seems to be don’t help people.
Because if he hadn’t helped the turtle and left the boy to just bully the turtle more,
he wouldn’t have gone under seas, he wouldn’t
have spent those three days ergo 300 years.
Which means his family wouldn’t have died and
he would have been able to live a normal life.
He would have, he lost his life for helping this turtle.
And I cannot for the life of me figure out any aspect of this,
of having any sort of moral that makes any sort of sense.
And then the other question that I have more than anything
else is why didn’t the queen give him any sort of explanation?
If she had said, “Hey, look, time passes differently here.
” So if you go back home and you open this box, you’re going to
age in the difference the 300 years and you’re going to die.
So don’t open the box.
Then he would know what was going to happen.
She could have explained that to him.
But then he would have had the question of, “Well, why did you keep me here for
so long knowing that everything in my world was going to change and disappear?
And all my family was going to die, and I’m not going to have a life.”
And then it would have made more sense for him to just stay in the underwater kingdom.
Like there’s no, all the questions lead to you helped a turtle and lost everything.
The queen maliciously?
Because I don’t think there was any ignorance.
She knew, she knew to say, “Don’t open that box.
” So she knew what was going to happen if you opened that box.
She didn’t give him any way to go back to the
real world and actually have some sort of life.
She just dumped him and left him on his own.
So is that punishment for coming to the undersea kingdom?
Was that punishment for helping the turtle?
Was this whole thing some kind of weird strategy?
But that seems like mental torture for the kid as he sits there and realizes.
300 years ago, everything I know is no longer existed.
I don’t have anything in this world anymore.
I have no life.
My world has ended.
I went and asked some Japanese people what this means.
Like what is this story about?
And they said, “Well, it teaches you nothing.
It’s just a fanciful story.
” And it’s like it’s a fanciful story with one
of the most horrendous endings to his story.
For someone who has tried to be a good person, the whole time.
Doing good things might have short-term
benefits but lead to the loss in the long-term.
I spent months and months and months trying to figure out some kind of lesson or story
or moral or point to this boy in the turtle story.
And I’ve never been able to do it.
If you have an idea, please post it in the comments.
Please send me a message.
ChunkmyVHS.gmail.com or something.
Because I got nothing.
I’ve asked Japanese people, “They got nothing.
” They’re just like, “Oh, it’s just like a fun, weird story.
” I’m like, “No, it’s not.
It’s horrible.
” And it makes me question everything I understand about Japanese culture.
