Japanese woman’s death sparks calls for tougher anti-stalking law

The body of the 20-year-old woman was found at her ex-boyfriend’s house after she had informed the police multiple times about his stalking

The discovery in Japan of the body of a 20-year-old woman at her ex-boyfriend’s house has sparked criticisms of the country’s anti-stalking law and the poor handling of the case by the police.

Police found the skeletal remains of Asahi Okazaki in a bag hidden under the floorboards of the house in the city of Kawasaki, Kanagawa prefecture, on April 30.

It was their fourth search of the premises, and their first full one with a warrant. By then, Okazaki had been missing for over four months, according to local newspapers.

A postmortem later revealed that more than a month had passed since her death and her body had been partially burnt.

Officers met Okazaki’s 27-year-old ex-boyfriend, Hideyuki Shirai, at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on May 3 after he returned from a trip abroad, the Asahi newspaper reported. He was later arrested for illegal disposal of a corpse.

Public anger was stirred over a newspaper report quoting the victim’s family, with many questioning whether the police should have intervened sooner in the case to help prevent Okazaki’s death.

According to Unseen Japan news website, Okazaki’s father and over 90 others protested outside a police station in Kawasaki on May 3, shouting, “You killed her!” at officers. Okazaki “had reported to police over and over again after the stalking had escalated since November 2024”, her family told The Mainichi newspaper.

Before she went missing on December 20 last year, Okazaki had made multiple police reports about Shirai, starting with a fight they had in June. In September, she filed another report complaining that he had attacked her. She withdrew the allegation a month later but reported on another violent act by Shirai on November 5.

In response to the complaints, police verbally warned Shirai about his behaviour three times, according to The Mainichi.

But his stalking persisted and Okazaki called police nine times from December 9 until she went missing, saying that she had spotted Shirai lurking in her neighbourhood in Kawasaki. The police told her to go to the local station to give them more details but they did not follow up when she did not appear.

“I might get killed,” Okazaki texted her mother the day before she disappeared, her 50-year-old father told The Mainichi, adding: “The police did nothing for us.”

Even after she went missing at her grandmother’s house in Kawasaki, where she had fled to hide from Shirai, the police said they did not suspect foul play, according to The Japan Times newspaper. “They didn’t take any photos or fingerprints. They just left the scene without doing anything,” her father said.

A Kanagawa police official told The Japan Times that the police questioned Shirai on a voluntary basis seven times after Okazaki went missing. The police also visited his house but were not allowed to search under the floor where Okazaki’s body was later found as Shirai’s relatives told the officers at the scene that they were in the middle of a meal.

“We recognise the seriousness of the incident and will work to identify any issues for which improvements should have been made,” the official said on May 4.

In response to the backlash, the police in Kanagawa set up a special team on May 9 to look into what went wrong in their investigations, according to The Mainichi.

Japan’s Anti-Stalking Act was enacted in 2000 after a 21-year-old student in Okegawa, Saitama prefecture, was murdered by a hitman hired by her ex-boyfriend and his brothers after she reported him for stalking, according to local media. The law has been revised several times since then to expand the definition of stalking and increase penalties for offenders.

The public, however, is demanding stronger police enforcement of the Act following Okazaki’s death, according to media reports.