Boy missing after parents left him in a forest has been found, Japanese police say

By Jake Adelstein and Louis Krauss

June 2, 2016 8:12 PM PT

Reporting from Tokyo — A small boy whose disappearance in northern Japan engrossed the nation for six days and launched a discussion about what constitutes child abuse has been found unhurt, authorities said.

His parents had let him out of their car on the side of a mountain road Saturday night and drove away to punish him for having thrown rocks at cars earlier that day, according to national media accounts. They reportedly returned five minutes later to find that he was gone.

The state broadcaster NHK reported Friday morning that a search party found the boy, 7-year-old Yamato Tanooka, uninjured in the town of Shikabecho, about four miles from where he had been left on the island of Hokkaido. Police confirmed that he was found.

The boy told the police that soon after being abandoned he found shelter in a hut that was part of a national defense force training facility, according to the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun.

“I walked there myself on the night of [May] 28th, down the mountain, and I drank water to get by,” he was quoted as saying. “There wasn’t anything to eat.”

Although the story appears to have a happy ending, it has also launched a nationwide discussion about the difference between discipline and child abuse.

The search for the boy gripped the country, with firefighters, police and — as of Wednesday — the national defense force mobilized in a massive search.

“We dispatched about 70 personnel and 15 vehicles,” Ministry of Defense press representative Haneo Yohei said.

When the father, Takayuki Tanooka, reported the incident, he told officials the boy went missing while the family foraged for vegetables on a nearby trail.

But he later explained to NHK: “In order to discipline him, I wanted to scare him a little and made him get out of the car. Then I was ashamed to admit at first what had happened.”

The forested area, near the town of Nanae, is heavily populated by bears, according to town officials, and temperatures drop to the mid-40s at night.

Even as the search continued, police were considering bringing charges against the parents for abandoning their son.

Now that the boy has been found, police are planning to speak more with him before deciding. In Japan, a person who abandons a child or other person in need can be punished by imprisonment with hard labor for a year or less.

It is not the first time a misbehaving child has been abandoned in Japan as a form of discipline.

In 2001, an office worker and his wife bound their son’s hands and feet with twine, gagged him, put him in a car and left him in the mountains in the city of Kudamatsu. A motorcycle rider found him the next day.

The boy was not hurt, but the police arrested the parents and charged them with “abandonment of guarantor responsibility.”

In a newspaper interview, the father said he was not sorry and defended his actions. “Because the kid does bad things, I did the same thing before,” he was quoted as saying. “As his parent, it’s a matter of course” in disciplining a child, he said.

At the time, the police didn’t release the name of the parents.

In another incident the same year in the city of Komatsu, a woman abandoned her two daughters, ages 10 and 5, in the mountains to punish them for eating their father’s supper.

Back then, there seemed to be more sympathy for these parenting practices.

The reaction of the Japanese public to the latest incident, however, has been mostly negative, suggesting a shift in awareness of the nature of child abuse.

“Perhaps from the viewpoint of the parents [of Yamato], they were disciplining the child, but to leave him there, and drive away in the car, that’s clearly abuse,” Ogi Naoki, a well-known education and parenting expert, wrote on his blog.

He went on to say that child abuse is common in Japan, with many parents believing in corporal punishment. “It’s a problem that the entire nation of Japan must address,” he wrote.

A popular news site, J-Cast, launched an online poll Tuesday asking readers: “Is leaving behind a disobedient child in the mountains for a short time, “discipline” or “abuse”?

Of the 6,079 who had answered as of Friday morning, 18.6% said discipline, 67.8% said child abuse and 13.6% were undecided.

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Adelstein and Krauss are special correspondents.

UPDATES:

8:12 p.m.: This story was updated throughout with reporting from Times special correspondents.

7 p.m.: This story was updated with more information about where the boy was found and context of the case’s cultural impact.

This story was originally posted at 6:04 p.m.