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The Day I Couldn’t Move in Front of the TV

“Please. I’m begging you. Please forgive me.”

— A five-year-old girl wrote those words in her last letter to her mother, and then she died.

The day the news read those lines aloud, my hands stopped in the middle of housework, and I couldn’t move from in front of the TV. When my own small child looked up at me, clinging anxiously to my leg, I realized I had been crying.

From that day on, a question settled heavily inside me and would not leave.

— Why does a parent kill their own child? Why can’t a spouse stop their partner from doing it?

The Notebook That Crossed a Line

I had probably grown too accustomed to incidents like this. When the news read out words like “murder,” “death,” “suicide,” or sometimes “starvation,” my heart would grow a little heavier, and my hand would naturally reach for the remote. That was simply part of my daily life. Such things felt so far from my own existence that even imagining them rarely went well.

As an analogy from a completely different domain, childbirth comes to mind. Even when you hear that “giving birth feels like passing a watermelon through your nose,” before you’ve experienced it, the words just slide past you. They stop somewhere short of “it must hurt a lot.” Then you go through it yourself, and there is pain and terror that no words can contain — far beyond anything you imagined.

What it actually feels like inside someone who is suffering can only be reached by experiencing it yourself or by witnessing it directly. Words like “killed” or “died,” on their own, slide past us as someone else’s story.

— But this case was different from any abuse case I had heard about before.

Because the girl’s notebook had survived.

The words written there were so concrete, so young, so urgent, that for the first time, a fragment of what it actually felt like to be on the inside of that suffering slipped into me — and refused to leave.

Consume the news, then forget by tomorrow — that letter crossed that line.

A Face That Came to Mind in the Dental Chair

It was only a few weeks after the girl had died. I was at the dentist for treatment, leaning back in the reclining chair, waiting for the anesthetic to take hold. The brightness of the overhead light, the smell of the chemicals, the mechanical sound from the back of the room — I was just bracing for the pain that was about to come. Nothing more.

And suddenly, her face came to me. The face I had seen so many times on the news. The girl who was already gone.

And I thought:

— Here I am as an adult, sweating through a dental procedure. And she, every day, inside that home, was waiting in fear for the moment that fist would come down on her, again and again.

When the treatment ended, I went back to my car, closed the door, and sat there for a long time before I could start the engine.

After that, she would come back to me out of nowhere — at the supermarket checkout, at red lights, on the way to and from the daycare, getting up at night for a glass of water. It wasn’t that I wanted to forget. But she would not let me.

Not knowing what to do with that feeling — the search for an answer to that question may have been what set everything in motion.

With My Own Hands

A little after that, around the time my second child was born, something happened during the evening bath. I was holding the baby in both arms, washing him. By chance, a bucket of cold water was sitting right next to us that day.

For a single second, I reached for the shampoo bottle. That was when the small body in my arms slipped — and sank straight into the bucket of cold water.

— Time stopping. I think this is what people mean by it.

His eyes went wide, and I heard him gasp. I lifted him out almost reflexively, warmed his body under the hot shower, repeating “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” over and over. He cried with a voice I had never heard from him — almost a scream.

That night, after the children fell asleep, I lay in bed and couldn’t move.

It was only a few seconds. I hadn’t hit him. I hadn’t yelled. But it was completely my carelessness, and I had dropped him into cold water. My head knew it was an accident. Even so, the thought that the sensation of cold water might have been carved into his small body — I couldn’t escape it for a long time.

— There are homes in this world where the same thing — pouring cold water, or boiling water, on a child — is called “discipline” and repeated, day after day.

In one home, the same act becomes an accident that keeps a parent awake all night. In another, it becomes the routine of the next morning. What is that distance made of? That question stayed with me for a very long time.

Was It “Just Bad Luck”?

The only time in my life I have known “pain that no words can contain” was during childbirth. I know it isn’t fair to compare. But the pain and terror that came over me during labor existed only inside my body. It was the first time I learned that this kind of overwhelming pain truly exists in the world.

— And there are homes where that overwhelming kind of pain is poured, every day, onto children who should be loved beyond all measure.

After the case, I heard people offer comfort with words like, “She was an angel sent here to change the world.” Those words moved nothing inside me. If anything, the despair on the other side — that there is no god — only deepened.

“There are days that fall outside what life is supposed to be — and one fell on her by chance.” The gap between the home she was born into and the homes most of us were born into. Between her short life and the long ordinary years the rest of us are given.

I could no longer close that gap with phrases like “she was just unlucky” or “may she be born to happy parents in her next life.”

A child does not ask for help on their own. If they are locked inside a home, no one’s eyes will reach them. — Where, and how, do you even begin to look? My own powerlessness left me without an answer for a long time.

I Couldn’t Just Stand Still

Up until then, “child abuse” had probably been a word I looked at from the outside, blurred behind a thick mosaic.

See the news, feel a pang in the chest, murmur “how terrible,” and by the next day, return to ordinary life. Without noticing, I was using that small ritual to be done with it. Looking back, that posture was right at the center of putting things off and leaving them to others.

That girl’s notebook would not allow me to keep standing in that posture.

I happened to grow up surrounded by the love of my parents and the people around me. I happened to make it safely into adulthood. And now, as an adult on the side of protecting children, I am still in a place where I can move. — If that is the case, I want to do whatever small thing I can. I don’t know how much it will change. But surely, doing something will move things — even slightly — more than doing nothing.

The first thing I did was send a single email to the politician representing my district. “Just days ago, I never imagined I would do something like this,” I thought, watching myself write it with a strange, detached curiosity.

For issues like child abuse, public opinion has to move before politics moves. Triggered by that girl’s case, public figures launched petitions, the National Diet acted, and laws were changed. Even so, the more I looked into it, the more it became clear that writing essays and sending emails alone could not reach the places that needed to be reached.

— “Is this harder than breaking a window to get her out?”

If a time machine existed, I think I would have bought a baseball bat, taken a taxi to that apartment, waited until the parents had gone out, and broken the window. That much, perhaps, I could have done. But that time is not coming back.

The old me would have thought: “Take a day off work to attend a ward council session? Write a petition? What’s the point?” I would have thought exactly that, without question.

But because Yua-chan left behind, in writing, that “tomorrow, I will absolutely do it, I will,” I am able to act. I could not break a window. But anything easier than that, I decided I would do without hesitation. “Tomorrow, more than today, I want to be someone who has done something” — I keep that one line inside me.

To end child abuse, public opinion has to keep its attention until the state moves all the way through. As long as politicians are driven by votes, sustained public attention is the most powerful lever we have.

The “Why” Finally Came Into Focus

I knew from the start that the answer to my question — “why does a parent abuse their own child?” — would not come easily.

Perpetrators’ life histories, expert commentary, scholarly analyses, courtroom records — I read every one I could find. Plausible answers were everywhere: poverty, stress, marital conflict, intergenerational cycles, isolation, addiction, postpartum depression. Each is true on one face. But not one of them, on its own, could account for all the cases lined up in my head at once.

“In the end, human beings are simply unknowable” — I kept landing on that conclusion and closing the book. Many times.

But the turning point came as two things, layered together.

The first was finding a specialist training program. It was a systematic curriculum focused on clinical practice with abuse cases — a clinical framework built to read what is happening from the side of the people involved. Keeping my regular work, I attended every weekend for two years.

The second was that, soon after, I left my company.

Raised in an ordinary home, joined a company straight out of school, married, had children, returned to work — for someone who had been “an ordinary office worker,” moving into the field of child welfare was a path I had never once considered before.

It would be more accurate to say that I had no choice — not that I made a decision. I could no longer endure spending years in a safe room, just reading, “until I understand someday.”

From the moment I stepped into the field of child welfare — through dialogues with the people involved, conversations with their families and supporters, and direct observation of their lives — I came into contact with “reality” at a density I had never had access to before.

— And then one day, the “framework for sorting” I had brought with me from the training, and the “countless real cases” I had been encountering in the field, locked into place inside my head.

What had been one tangled mass began to split apart, sharply, into something completely different.

“Child abuse” is not one phenomenon. Depending on the parent’s makeup, the cause, what is happening, what breaks down inside the child, and what those around them need to do — all of these differ at the root. Several distinct phenomena had been crammed under the same single word.

For example: a parent of normal intelligence with a history of being abused; a parent with mild intellectual disability or borderline intelligence; a parent with schizophrenia; a parent of normal intelligence whose psychological development was halted partway through for some reason. Even just these four are not the same. The motivations, the way the relationship with the child becomes distorted, and the help that is required all differ.

The moment I had this distinction in hand, the cases I had previously closed with “I don’t understand” began to come undone, one after another.

And I thought: there must be many people in the world who need this way of seeing. People standing still inside their own homes, asking “what is happening here?” without an answer. This must not stay locked inside the world of specialists as a “taboo.”

This site, Kokoro Note, was made for that reason.

What Kokoro Note Tries to Write

There are three things Kokoro Note is trying to do.

One. Translating the clinical framework into the language of the field.

In the world of clinical practice with abuse, there is a system of organization that has been built over decades. But it sits inside textbooks for support professionals, and almost never reaches the hands of the people involved or the families standing right beside them. I retranslate that framework into the plainest possible language. I do not flood readers with jargon. Instead, I write the way you would mark coordinates one point at a time: “What is happening in front of you right now sits here, on this map.”

Two. Recording how the people involved actually feel, drawing from cases I encounter in the support field.

Cases in textbooks are too neat. The roughness of the field is gone. But among the families I meet in the support field, individual fluctuations that no book or paper can fully capture happen daily. On this site, I place those into articles as grounded, lived-in detail.

However, I never write them in a form where individuals can be identified. The essence — what was happening in that home, how those feelings actually moved — is preserved. But settings, character attributes, and turns of phrase are deliberately shifted, and elements drawn from multiple cases are woven together. “Whose story is this?” can no longer be traced. “What is happening here?” is what reaches you. That is how source material is handled on this site.

Three. From the perspective of policy, economics, and social design — thinking about “where to push next for real effect.”

The social cost of child abuse in Japan is estimated at roughly 1.6 trillion yen per year. This is not a story of “how sad.” It is an economic story, a story of how a society is designed. Finland’s neuvola system, the operation of special adoption, the structure of child consultation centers, international differences in foster care placement rates — I do not let these end at “yes, a heavy issue.” I write about which lever to pull, and how much it would move, in the grammar of numbers and policy.

Who I Write For

Kokoro Note is written with the following readers in mind:

• Those who want to understand child abuse, the breakdown of psychological connection, and matters surrounding intellectual disability not as news sensation or emotional reaction, but as structure
• Support professionals and helping practitioners looking for words that fill the gap between specialist texts and the field
• Those who have long sensed that “something is off” inside their family, their parents’ home, or their partner’s family — but never had the language to name it, and have come this far without it
• Those who, every time they see “that case” in the news, feel they want to do something but don’t know what — and watch the days go by

For all of them, what I want to hand over is the same: a foothold for “looking once at the structure, before the emotion.” With that, you can begin to see the path back to deciding, on your own terms, what to think next, what to choose, and who to ask.

My Position and the Path I Have Walked

I am not a physician, nor a certified public psychologist. Nor am I a survivor of abuse who lived through it firsthand.

My position stands between two roles — supporter and editor.

Articles on this site are written against this background, with cross-reference to the framework of clinical practice in abuse, the DSM-5, judicial precedent, and public statistics. That said, I am only an interpreter and editor — I am not someone who diagnoses. I do not provide individual psychological counseling, medical judgments, or anything equivalent to diagnosis. My role in writing is simply to carry words, scattered across many places, into the hands of the people who need them. That is all.

If you have read this far and are looking for the first article to pick up, I would recommend this one.

A Note Before You Read the Articles

Before opening individual articles on this site, please take a moment to read this short note. It explains, briefly, how we approach these difficult topics—particularly our use of intelligence-related terms—and what we ask of readers as they go through the material.