These days inhumane maltreatment of children is prevalent in Japan as the days go by.

A man pushed his four-year-old son into a drawer of the TV set table to death and his wife caused burns to several parts of her three-year-old daughter’s body by pouring hot liquid on it. And in midwinter a woman committed an outrage on her 8-month-old daughter, fracturing bones on scores of parts of its body, and went so far as to leave the child in the toilet for 20 hours, with the result that it was frostbitten.

According to data available, the cases of ill-treatment of children that occurred in Japan last year number over 219 000, breaking the highest record in history.

Across the country there are child guidance clinics and the cases of consultation about abuse of children there have continued to increase for 32 years since 1990.

Whenever cases of child abuse are disclosed in Japan, its society seethes with serious criticism and concern.

In April this year the Japanese government inaugurated a children’s family agency as a measure to cope with mistreatment of children.

Meanwhile, the minister in charge of child policy on July 3 announced that they would offer temporary lodgings for children and youths who are homeless or left their houses owing to penury or maltreatment of them by their parents.

A girl in such a place said that she had left her house because of her bad home environment and that the place houses many children with the similar wound.

Such steps taken by the Japanese government as a measure to cope with child abuse are no more than the last resort to appease the public enraged by ill-treatment of children.

In Japanese society where extreme egoism is rampant children are becoming objects of contempt and maltreatment without getting protection and care by the public.

Egoism rampant in society is reducing more and more people to mental monsters who only pursue their own comfort while disregarding their own parents, their friends and even their own children.

It has become commonplace in Japan to regard one’s own child as a burden, maltreat it and go so far as to kill it. Most of young people of the new generation in the country reportedly refuse to have a child.

Many children in the country are still helplessly withering away, suffering all sorts of ill-treatment, far from being under the warm care of their parents.

Cases of child abuse occurring in succession are a showcase of the corrupt Japanese society where people know only money and themselves.

Mistreatment of children is ineradicable in Japan as long as hatred for man and extreme egoism are rampant there.

The corrupt Japanese society, where children, the future of the country, are withering away owing to maltreatment and negligence by their families and the public, is really a community with no future.