Mayumi Saito an Osaka, Japanese mother confesses to drowning four newborn babies in concrete buckets over a five year period cause she was too poor.
Mayumi Saito a 53 year old Japanese woman was on Tuesday arrested after confessing to putting four newborn in concrete-filled buckets two decades ago and having been filled with guilt over not caring for her babies.
Human remains were identified in four buckets found in her condominium, an Osaka police official said, requesting anonymity due to department policy.
Retrieved buckets each measured about 30 centimeters in height.
Imaging analysis confirmed that all of the buckets contain human bones, apparently those of infants. The buckets were each housed in a cardboard box reported asahi.com.
A day after her turning herself at a local police station, the guilt ridden woman was booked with abandoning bodies reported the Japan Times.
Saito was quoted by police as saying she put the bodies into concrete from 1992 through 1997 because she had been too poor to raise them, but had been filled with guilt over the years.
‘I gave birth to all of them at the place I used to live,’ Saito was quoted by investigators as saying. ‘I don’t think (my boyfriend) was aware of what I did. I brought the buckets to my current residence with my other belongings when I moved.’
Mayumi Saito drowns four newborns in concrete buckets: An indictment on Japanese social services for the less well off?
Saito had a part-time job, but details of her work, family and comments were not available. It is believed the woman lived with a young man in his late teens who is apparently her son. The woman is believed to have also lived on welfare.
The causes of the babies’ deaths were unclear. It is fairly standard in Japan for criminal charges to be added later as an investigation progresses.
Although Japan is the world’s third-largest economy and has a reputation as being economically advanced, poverty remains a problem, especially among women.
Social support such as affordable daycare is lacking for women to work while child-rearing, as well as to get counseling and other help to cope with parenting duties and mental stress noted the nytimes.
Japanese media reports quoted the woman as saying she had no one to talk to or turn to.
Reiterated the Japanese mother, ‘There was no one I could talk to about my conscience and I thought about killing myself,’
Adding, ‘But I couldn’t commit suicide and leave my son who I live with behind.’
More than 15% of Japanese children are living below the poverty line, according to Japanese health ministry statistics. Poverty rates in Osaka – the commercial centre of the Japanese island of Honshu – are particularly high.
A 2014 report via nippon describes one in six Japanese people living in relative poverty. In the survey, 59.9% of households responded that they found life financially tough. The record poverty rate was believed to be due to such factors as the drop in income for families with children over a protracted period of deflation and the increase in single-mother households, in which mothers often have low-paying, irregular employment.
It remains unclear as to the degree of charges Mayumi Saito will now face with the statute of limitations for abandoning a body is three years, given the fact that Saito was arrested for carrying the body of one of the babies from a different location to her condominium, which she moved into in the summer of 2015, the police said.
