Photo/Illutration The mother of Toma Kurakake holds up a portrait of the boy at a news conference in Fukuoka on Sept. 26 after the first day of the trial. (Koki Furuhata)

FUKUOKA--The former head of a nursery school and a teacher have admitted to charges of professional negligence resulting in the heatstroke death of a 5-year-old boy.

The student, Toma Kurakake, was left on the school bus and was trapped there for hours in the summer heat in July last year.

Yoko Urakami, 45, the former nursery school principal, and teacher Noriko Toba, 59, apologized on their first day of the trial at the Fukuoka District Court on Sept. 26.

“We feel sorry,” Urakami said.

According to the indictment, the school bus was carrying seven children when it arrived at the Futaba nursery school in Nakama, Fukuoka Prefecture, on the morning of July 29, 2021. But only six got off. The defendants locked the bus without noticing that the boy was still inside.

Toma was stuck in the bus under the blazing sun for about nine hours before he died of heatstroke.

Prosecutors said in their opening statement that the defendants were aware of the danger of leaving preschoolers on the bus. Temperatures in the city rose above 30 degrees for several days and it was sunny on the day of the incident.

But the school staff still failed to check to ensure that all the students had exited the bus.

The temperature near the area where Toma sat reached 55 degrees in a re-creation test. The boy’s body temperature was 39.1 degrees when he was transported to a hospital.

The defendants were also questioned that day.

Futaba nursery school had added a second school bus in the spring of 2020 at the request of parents. But due to staff shortages, the principal drove the bus on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, without staff accompaniment.

“I was distracted by a 1-year-old baby crying loudly in the bus (that day),” Urakami said.

She said she was afraid of complaints from neighbors, so she felt rushed and did not check inside the bus after the students disembarked and tried to hurry them along to the school.

Toba, who was helping the other students disembark that day, said, “I thought that Urakami checked the inside of the bus.”

Urakami said, “I always counted the number of children getting off the bus, but I didn’t check it against the number of children getting on the bus.”

After the trial, Toma’s grandfather and other family members spoke to the media at a news conference about their loss.

“It’s been a year since my grandson passed away. Our dinner table is still quiet,” he said.

Toma would have been a first-grader in elementary school this year. His grandfather said tears roll down his face when he sees children with their school bags.

He said during the trial, he found that the nursery was careless in how it acted.

And he recalled a similar recent case in Shizuoka Prefecture this month, where a 3-year-old girl died after being left on a school bus for hours.

“I was surprised to see a similar thing occur about a year or so later,” the grandfather said. “Isn’t it the driver’s role to check the inside of the bus?”

(This article was written by Naoki Nakayama and Koki Furuhata.)

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