TOKYO (TR) – Tokyo Metropolitan Police have arrested a school teacher from Teradacho, Hachioji City for allegedly committing lewd acts on an elementary school boy, reports the Mainichi Shimbun (Dec. 10).
Koichiro Tanaka, a 75-year-old juku cram school teacher, is accused of committing lewd acts on the 12-year-old boy on the banks of the Akigawa River in Akiruno City around early October.
Tanaka allegedly invited the boy, who was playing in the river, to a barbecue, urged him to remove his clothes and wrapped him in a loincloth. “I just made him wear a loincloth with a white cloth to cover his genitals,” the suspect said.
Upon his arrest on suspicion of indecent assault without consent, the suspect denied the allegations. “I may have touched him with my hands when I was dressing him in a loincloth, but it wasn’t my intention,” he said.
According to police, the boy’s mother became suspicious when she heard her son talking on the phone to “an older man he met on the riverbank.” She then contacted police.
The boy said, “I had fun playing in the water, but I felt uncomfortable when [the suspect] suddenly touched me.”
Tanaka is a former elementary school teacher who was found guilty of kidnapping a minor and violating the Child Welfare Act in 2017. In that case, he lured a boy into an apartment in connection with an incident in which a group of child pornography enthusiasts filmed and shared obscene videos of boys.
