- Wada's father expressed his deepest apology over his
son's criminal acts. He said he would kill his son when he came out of
jail "or my son should be brave enough to kill himself".
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- TOKYO -- Young men from Japan's
elite universities have had forced sex with hundreds of women after joining
clubs which turned them into pack rapists.
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- The scandal was revealed with the arrest of Shinichiro
Wada, ringleader of a notorious "Super Free" student club at
Tokyo's prestigious Waseda University.
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- He is alleged to have raped as many as 500 women.
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- Wada and four other students were arrested on June 6
on suspicion of gang-raping a 20-year-old female student who attended a
wild-drinking party in the seedy Roppongi night entertainment district
in Tokyo.
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- After the party, the five took about 20 female students
to another pub where they made one drunk with vodka.
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- They offered to help her outside and took her to a stairway-landing
at a nearby building where they raped her in turn.
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- Wada, who joined Waseda's politics-economic department
in 1994, is accused of turning serial rape into a profitable franchise.
He has been the Super Free's honorary representative since 1995 and has
reportedly earned *10 million ($A125,000) a year.
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- The club's main activity is to organise wild parties
almost monthly at Roppongi clubs such as Velfarre, attracting up to 2000
participants each time who buy a ticket for between *3000-*5000.
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- After a mass party, members take about 100 attractive
girls to another club where they ply them with alcohol.
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- Then, the gang members select five or six drunken girls
and take them to the club headquarters where they take turns raping them.
The serial rapists had a manual on how to organise a party, sell tickets,
sweet-talk girls and then calm them after the rapes.
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- In order to claim the sex is consensual, they have forced
the victims to smile for pictures.
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- According to one victim, a group leader in the rape kept
saying: "Hey, aren't you enjoying this? Smile. Say cheese."
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- Junichiro Kobayashi, one of the arrested Waseda students,
reportedly said to a victim's boyfriend: "Look at this picture. It
was consensual."
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- The club's targets were usually women who had come from
provincial towns to Tokyo to study and were often eager to associate with
elite students. According to Friday magazine, about 100 girls became victims
each year.
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- Despite this, only about 10 had reported their ordeals
to police.
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- One former club member said some girls had become pregnant
and there were rumours one victim committed suicide.
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- The Super Free extended its activities to seven other
major cities such as Osaka.
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- It has also emerged that similar student clubs operated
at Keio University, Meiji University and Hosei University.
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- After their student days, many of the young rapists were
welcomed straight into Japan's top corporations. The first club leader
got a job at Recruit Co.
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- He was followed by other graduates who joined Mitsui
Real Estate, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Air France, Nissho-Iwai Corp, Fujitsu
Ltd, Mazuda Motor Corp and Mitsubishi Motor Corp.
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- After the arrests of the Super Free gangs, Waseda University
expelled them and warned its 50,000 students not to mix "freedom and
self-indulgence".
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- Wada's father expressed his deepest apology over his
son's criminal acts. He said he would kill his son when he came out of
jail "or my son should be brave enough to kill himself".
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- © Queensland Newspapers
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- http://www.couriermail.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,7217161,00.html
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