Spurned Man Kills Woman With Bonsai Shears

TreeBay

I have been a bit behind in my upkeep of the homepage. I hope to get back to it very soon.

In the meantime, here is a snippet from the Japan Times

The Japan Times: Jan. 23, 2003

KOCHI (Kyodo) A man was sentenced to 15 years in prison Wednesday for stabbing his girlfriend to death and seriously wounding her daughter at their home in Kochi.
The Kochi District Court, in sentencing Akio Udaka, a 49-year-old architectural worker, said he was angry because the victim, Chieko Koji, 55, had not responded to his marriage proposal.

He stabbed her in the chest and elsewhere June 15 with a pair of bonsai shears, and also attacked her daughter.

Udaka later fled to a nearby forest but was found and arrested four days later.

He admitted to the crime during his trial. Prosecutors had demanded a 16-year sentence.

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zeb

Sad...
I always thought bonsai was a safe hobby and that japanese were somehow calmer in the inside than us, the westerners.

Zeb

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Two men were walking down a road. The one on the left was interested in bonsai. The one on the right had no money either.

BonifaceVIII

Those people are just as stupid and violent as any other person is capable of. The masses are always stupid and always will be, that seems to be my understanding.

GaryS

I would have headed for the forest too!

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GaryS

TreeBay

I kind of wonder, if they were in fact bonsai shears, which of the couple they belonged to? Sometimes the translations are off. This ebay auction, for example, isn't really bonsai shears. You can look and see from the construction that they are a pretty ordinary pair of scissors in the hasami style. The blades are much too long for bonsai

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...item=2302986900

When I did a search on the suspect's name, I found that this news item had been listed on a gun lobby site for comments. I was trying to figure out what the spin on that was, whether it was the editorial opinion there that she would have been safe if she had been "packing heat" or something.

She was killed shortly after returning from the police station, where she was told to move to a relatives site or seek police aid if she felt she was in critical danger, and the article makes it sound as if she was murdered just after she got home from that interview.

Regards,

Matt

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Tony

It makes you wonder about all that peaceful contemplation and Zen stuff equated to bonsai that we've been hearing about all these years, don't it.

Tony

Carl_Bergstrom

Not any more than the occasional theft in my neighborhood makes me question the essential good-spiritedness of the vast majority of my neighbors.

-Old Mister

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