Grisly Murder Of Little Boy Stuns, Angers Japanese

The severed head of an 11-year-old was found Tuesday morning outside a school in Kobe with a note stuffed in the boy’s mouth saying: “Stop me if you can.”

In a country with relatively little violent crime and where children routinely ride subways alone, this gruesome killing left the nation uneasy about the next move of the killer. Police said the same person may also be responsible for the bludgeoning death of a 10-year-old girl in the same neighborhood in March.

Jun Hase, 11, had been missing since Saturday afternoon when he left home to visit his grandfather, who lives a half-mile away in a middle-class neighborhood of Kobe, in western Japan. Tuesday morning, a janitor found his head at the gate of a junior high school. Later the rest of his body was found nearby in bushes on a wooded hill.

The murder of JonBenet Ramsey has been almost bigger news here than in the United States, with morning television shows, newspapers and magazines fixated on the unsolved case of the little beauty queen from Colorado. The Ramsey case reinforced the Japanese stereotype of America as a violent and often-depraved place.

But Tuesday, the Japanese media focused on the country’s own child murder. Police officials told reporters that the words “Devil Rose” were also penned on the note in the boy’s mouth, but they did not reveal, what, if anything, they believed that meant.

More than 400 police officers combed the neighborhood Tuesday, questioning virtually everybody. Police cars with flashing red lights and sirens flooded the normally quiet middle-class neighborhood in the Suma Ward. Thousands of children were warned to stay inside at night and not to walk alone during the day. Parents began organizing to accompany children to school. The anxiety was felt throughout Japan, where people are accustomed to thinking of their society as one of the safest on Earth.

There were 1,200 cases of murder and attempted murder in the entire country last year, compared to 23,000 murders in the United States. Japan’s population is about half that of the United States.

Much of the violent crime involves Japanese mobsters. But random violence is growing and a recent string of sensational cases, starting with the 1995 poison-gas attack on the Tokyo subway that left a dozen people dead and 6,000 ill, has stolen the national sense of security.

Tuesday some people turned their anger toward police, questioning their aptitude in solving murders. Many local police officers, who pedal through neighborhoods on bicycles and spend much of the day giving people directions, are unaccustomed to dealing with the kind of violent crime that is common in urban areas in the United States.