A former deputy editor of the Japanese publisher Kodansha has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for the murder of his wife in 2016.
The sentence was given to the publisher’s former employee Park Jung Hyun on July 18, 2024, following a first and second trial that Japan’s Supreme Court ruled weren’t “fully completed,” causing the case to go through the High Court.
READ: Former Kodansha Editor Park Jung Hyun Trials for Murder
The 48-year-old former deputy editor–who joined Kodansha in 1999 and worked on the manga Attack on Titan in its 2009 launch in Bessatsu Shonen magazine–was charged with strangling his wife Kanako at their home in Bukyo Ward, Japan eight years ago.
On the day of the incident on August 9, 2016, the Tokyo Reporter states that Kanako was seen lying face-up at the base of the house’s staircase, and was proclaimed dead an hour later in a nearby hospital.
Park denied the allegations of murdering his wife and initially claimed that she had “fallen down the stairs” during the first questioning. But the suspect later claimed that Kanako had committed suicide by hanging herself with his jacket on the staircase railing. An autopsy also revealed that the cause of death was suffocation with pressure applied to the neck.
On why Park had changed his initial reasoning, the defense said to the court that he didn’t want to “say to his children that [their mother] committed suicide.”
Park Jung Hyun Sentenced to 11 Years in Prison for the Murder of His Wife
According to the report by NHK on July 18, the former deputy editor also claimed that he held down Kanako on a mattress, who was holding a knife. Park said that he went to another room, heard a noise outside the door, and saw that his wife had already committed suicide. The presiding judge, however, dismissed this and sentenced him to 11 years in prison. “It is too sudden and unnatural that the wife lost consciousness and then moved around so much that she made a noise, and then committed suicide,” the judge proclaimed. “The defendant's claims lack credibility.”
After the ruling, Park’s mother claimed that the sentence was “cruel” as his son had allegedly cared for his wife. Former judge Yaushi Hanada told the NHK that the defense's story of suicide was “impossible based on solid facts that were medically based.”
“The prosecution's evidence was strong, so it would have been difficult to overturn the defense’s claim of suicide unless it was extremely realistic,” he said.
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