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By Ryann Connell Staff writer & Eric Y* Distributer
Hirokazu Shizuku was one of Osaka's top education officials, responsible for ensuring the prefecture's educators maintained the high moral and professional standards expected of them.
Now, notes Asahi Geino (9/2), the 47-year-old elite educator is on remand awaiting trial for breaking the law banning child pornography.
"He took a 15-year-old schoolgirl to a love hotel in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, where he performed indecent acts on her and then used his digital camera to take nude photos of her," a source close to the police investigation tells Asahi Geino. "A raid on his home unearthed over 10,000 pornographic photos or videos of schoolgirls. That saw him arrested for production of child pornography."
Changes to the child pornography law that came into effect in early July meant that anybody who takes even a single indecent picture of an underage child can be arrested for producing kiddy porn, a crime previously restricted to large-scale producers.
"Shizuku has paid for about 150 prostitutes all across the country up until now. He paid for an 18-year-old about three years ago and had been hooked on younger girls ever since. In the past three years, he used the services of over 90 child prostitutes," a reporter for an Osaka-based newspaper tells Asahi Geino.
Former pupils spoke of a "by-the-book" teacher who rarely strayed from Education Ministry guidelines and was difficult to relate too.
Neighbors concur about Shizuku's distance.
"He was really rude all the time," says an associate near the teacher's home in Mannaka, Osaka Prefecture. "You'd greet him and he'd just ignore you."
Osaka education officials were shocked by Shizuku's arrest.
"He never missed a day of work and was always plugging away at his job. He never got into small talk and just chipped away at whatever he had to do," says a spokesman from the Osaka Board of Education. "He never looked at weird sites or made nuisance phone calls. I have never heard of any work-related problem about him. When I heard about his arrest, my first thought was 'unbelievable.'"
While pen pushers in the hallowed halls of education administration may have been surprised, those who knew Shizuku at a more intimate level hardly find the news of his legal troubles to be earth-shattering.
"Before every game we played, he used to make us go out on the tennis courts and practice. He used to watch us with this really lecherous look in his eyes. It was almost as though he was eyeing us off deliberately," says a former female pupil Shizuku took charge of while serving as a school tennis coach. "Shizuku was really bad in his treatment of girls depending on their cuteness. He didn't think twice about making a fool of a girl in front of everybody if she was ugly or a bit plain. At least one girl stopped coming to school because of the way he treated her. But then, if a girl was really cute, or she had big boobs, he could be unbelievably kind and he'd let them do whatever he wanted in his classes."
Despite his penchant for pubescent prostitutes, Shizuku insists he never let his proclivities interfere with his profession.
"He swears," the Osaka hack tells Asahi Geino, "that he never laid a hand on any of the girls he taught."
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