On a rare occasion when Yuri Funato steeled up the courage to give her daughter a bath without incurring the wrath of her husband, she was shocked to discover how emaciated the 5-year-old girl had become after weeks of a near-starvation diet.

It was March 1, 2018, a date Yuri remembers well as her daughter Yua died the following day.

Yuri quickly wrapped Yua in a towel.

“I did so because I felt I had just seen something I should never have seen,” Yuri, 27, told the first hearing in her trial on a charge of parental neglect resulting in death at the Tokyo District Court on Sept. 3. Yuri admitted to the allegation.

Yua died about two months after the family moved to an apartment in Tokyo's Meguro Ward from Zentsuji, a city in Kagawa Prefecture.

The girl's health had sharply deteriorated by late February as her stepfather and Funato’s husband, Yudai, had decreed she should be given only a minimal amount of food.

The 34-year-old will also stand trial on the same charge as Yuri in a different courtroom.

“I could not report the abuse to police because I was fearful of how my husband would retaliate,” a tearful Yuri told the court.

Her lawyers argued that their client had been psychologically dominated by her husband to the extent she felt utterly powerless to stop the abuse.

At the time of her death, Yua, who was 1.08 meter tall, weighed 12.2 kilograms, about 6 kg less than average for that age, according to prosecutors.

She had lost more than 4 kg over the two months that her parents began serving her miniscule portions of food from January, often just a couple of servings of soup a day. Her body bore numerous bruises, prosecutors said.

Yua's death, after months of violence by her father and Yuri turning a blind eye to the situation, made national headlines, resulting in an outpouring of rage and public grief.

In spite of the violence, near-starvation and gross neglect, a notebook Yua kept showed that she kept craving her parents' approval, writing "please, please, please forgive me" and promising to be better behaved.

Yua was considered to be a child at risk. She was taken into protective custody twice by a child welfare center while she lived in Kagawa Prefecture.

Police handed prosecutors papers on Yudai on two occasions on suspicion of causing injuries to the girl in 2017. But he was never indicted.

Poor communication between welfare centers in Kagawa Prefecture and Tokyo prevented welfare workers from intervening swiftly to rescue the child.

After the huge public outcry over Yua’s death, the central government, as well as the local governments that were supposed to have overseen her well-being, conducted a fact-finding study.

It resulted in a central government decision to add 2,000 or so child welfare officers over four years to respond to a growing number of suspected child abuse cases.

Yuri and Yudai married in April 2016 when they lived in Kagawa Prefecture, according to prosecutors. She gave a birth to a boy sired by Yudai in November that year.

His violence against his stepdaughter began around that time.

After moving to Tokyo in search of work, Yudai in January 2018 accused Yua of being “overweight” and began giving her tiny portions of food.

He also ordered her to wake up at 4 a.m., do exercises and practice her writing skills. When she failed to achieve the target, he forced her to stand on a veranda or sprayed her with cold water in the bathroom.

Yuri heard her husband punching Yua inside the toilet cubicle around Feb. 2. But she did not dare to intervene, fearing it would only escalate the violence against her daughter.

The following day, Yua sported dark bruises around her eyes. Yudai just sneered.

On Feb. 9, child welfare center workers visited the family’s home to check up on Yua after being alerted by colleagues in Kagawa Prefecture that she was a child at risk. But Yuri refused to let them meet the girl.

She explained in court that she hoped to endure the situation until her daughter began attending elementary school in April, when people would be bound to notice Yua’s predicament.

Yuri also told the court that she and Yua did not attend a session for parents and children who start elementary school education because of her daughter's bruises.

She said she felt nothing but despair when her husband muttered on Feb. 25 that Yua did not feel like eating and it will be good for her.

Yuri became alarmed when her husband said, “Yua just vomited,” on Feb. 27, three days before her death.

She asked him whether she should take the child to a hospital.

“I can when her bruises disappear,” Yuri quoted him as saying.

During the court session, prosecutors portrayed Yua’s 39 days in Tokyo as a life of isolation. The girl was rarely allowed to venture from the apartment, spending most of her time in a six-mat tatami room.

But the couple and their 1-year-old son regularly went out, including a visit to Asakusa, a popular tourist destination in the capital.

Yua would have turned 6 years old on March 20 and was supposed to begin attending an elementary school as first-grader a couple of weeks later.

(This article was written by Shunsuke Abe and Eri Niiya.)