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Tokyo doctor, 75, and wife, 30, in shotgun murder-suicide

Yoshimine Matsumoto
Yoshimine Matsumoto (TV Asahi)

Denenchofu, a quaint residential area of Tokyo’s Ota Ward, is home to some of the richest people in the metropolis.

The burb is also where the bodies of Yoshimine Matsumoto, a 75-year-old doctor, and his much younger wife were found last Friday — the result of a grim incident, the cause of which appears unclear, reports Nikkan Gendai (Oct. 21).

Tokyo Metropolitan Police arriving at the home owned by Matsumoto, the director of the Tohokai Hospital in Kanagawa Prefecture, found him clutching a shotgun atop a bed in a second-floor bedroom. He was confirmed dead due to a blast to the head. His wife, Ayano, 30, was discovered on a futon with wounds to her chest and abdomen.

Police are treating the case as a murder-suicide.

On Friday afternoon at around 1:00 p.m., Matsumoto’s daughter, a 36-year-old employee at the hospital, contacted a security service when her father did not arrive for work. Representatives of the company then discovered the deceased pair.

A local news reporter tells Gendai that the palatial residence, where famous artist Seiji Togo once lived, was purchased 20 years ago by Matsumoto for a nurse he married.

“Usually he lived in a residence near the hospital,” says the source. “But he broke up with the nurse 10 years ago, and he subsequently got engaged with a woman in her late 20s (Ayano) a few years ago.”

The source goes on to say that Matsumoto typically lavished expensive gifts upon ladies he desired, perhaps brand goods or maybe even a Mercedes Benz.

However, he was a serious doctor, a veteran of more than 30,000 surgeries.

“He was a ‘one man’ operation at the hospital and a very strict boss,” says the reporter. “He once requested that a nurse return a bonus after it was learned that she ate candy intended for a patient.”

In 1998, according to the source, six nurses filed a complaint saying that Matsumoto had violated labor laws.

In recent years, the hospital had run into difficulties. As of 2012, the facility was in the red.

“In January, his mother died,” says the writer, “and his physical condition had been deteriorating for the last few months.”

Yet none of the above provides a motive for such a tragic affair.

Source: “45 saisa fufu ga…Denenchofu serebu isha ‘murishinju’ no doki,” Nikkan Gendai (Oct. 21)