Family Seeks Answers in 1996 Murder of University Student

Jiji Press

12:13 JST, September 10, 2025

TOKYO (Jiji Press) — Twenty-nine years after the murder of a female student at Tokyo’s Sophia University, the bereaved family and police continue seeking information that could lead to the arrest of the murderer and resolution of the high-profile incident.

Relatives of the victim, Junko Kobayashi, then 21, and others took to the streets of the capital to ask members of the public for information on Tuesday, which marked the 29th anniversary of the murder, as a suspect has yet to be identified. “We want to keep going, so that the case is solved,” a bereaved family member said.

In the morning, Kenji Kobayashi, the 79-year-old father of Junko, laid flowers and offered a prayer at a jizo statue erected at the site of the murder to console the soul of the victim. Some 20 other people, including the chief of Kameari Police Station of the Metropolitan Police Department, accompanied Kenji.

“What we fear most is that the case will be forgotten,” Kenji said. “Every day, we are living our lives dreaming of the case being resolved.”

At Keisei Electric Railway Co.’s Shibamata Station in Tokyo’s Katsushika Ward, Kenji and police officers handed passersby flyers and memo pads in which facts about the murder case are written.

In the incident that happened on the afternoon of Sept. 9, 1996, the family’s house in the Shibamata district in the ward was severely burned, and the woman’s body, with stab wounds apparently inflicted by an edged tool such as a fruit knife on the face and neck, was found on the second floor. The hands and legs were bound.

The incident took place two days before Junko, then a fourth-year student at Sophia University, was about to leave for the United States to study.

According to investigative sources, type-A blood of an adult male was collected from the site of the incident, while a suspicious man wearing a yellow-brown coat and black pants was spotted near the residence immediately before the incident.

The MPD has mobilized a total of 120,700 officers to investigate the incident. The police had received a total of 1,783 tips as of the end of August this year, but no suspect has yet been identified.

The police created life-size panels in the image of the suspicious man and showed them to the public. The MPD will also seek information by putting up 8,100 posters at train stations and convenience stores, and inserting 32,000 flyers in newspapers.

“It’s true that the passage of time is making our investigations more difficult, but we are continuing our probes with the determination to capture the culprit no matter what,” said Masayuki Okabe, chief of the MPD’s First Criminal Investigation Division.

“Please provide us with information even if it is small, fragmentary or uncertain,” he said.