Japanese crimes often fall into 2 categories. The first are the "victimless" crimes. These crimes don't have an identifiable victim right away and include corporate fraud, abuse of power, organized crime, extortion, bid-rigging, unfair business practices and the like.
Then there is the second category. These go along the lines of teen suicides, kids killing classmates for not being their friends, or for bullying, or kids killing their parents after an argument and then perhaps cutting up the body, barbecuing it, and burying the pieces somewhere (as happened once before).
So what makes these people commit these horrid crimes? Seemingly normal (usually young) people crumble under society's pressure to live up to unrealistic expectations. Some kids lives are so consumed by living their parents dream that sometimes they just snap, like Yuki Muto: after three years of trying to get into dentist college like his dad, sister, and brother, he couldn't take his sister's hurtful comments. So he killed her, cut her up, put her in a closet and told his parents it was a pet shark that died. Then he went to cram school.
A 21-year-old cram school student suspected of murdering his sister and mutilating her body in their Tokyo house has told police he had been under strong pressure to pass a college entrance exam, according to police sources...more
