Christian missionary spreads the word ... and legs of 14-year-old girl

Christian missionary spreads the word ... and legs of 14-year-old girl

Shukan Shincho (12/6)

Forget the wrath of God. A Nagoya Christian messenger is facing far more earthly punishments after he assumed the missionary position with a 14-year-old girl, Shukan Shincho (12/6) preaches.

Hachiro Mayuzumi, a 29-year-old missionary with the Japan Church of Christ, was arrested last month for breaking the Child Welfare Law by allegedly performing indecent acts with the teenage girl.

Mayuzumi initially told the reverend he works for that he had gone to a brothel and been arrested because the prostitute he visited was underage.

But it seems like there is a different story involved.

The man of the cloth first came in contact with the girl living in Yokohama in July this year. He had responded to an ad the junior high schoolgirl had placed on a mobile phone matchmaking site.

After they swapped mail and profiles, the girl agreed to meet the Christian proselyte. On Sept. 10, he caught the bullet train from his home in Nagoya all the way to Yokohama to meet the schoolgirl.

Once in Yokohama, they quickly checked into a love hotel, then had sex along the way to spending the night together, police said. When the religious man was about to leave, the girl told him she had nowhere to go, so he did the Christian thing and took her back to Nagoya on the bullet train with him. When he got her back to his one-room apartment, he once again repeated the missionary position, though not the one he'd been trained for.

"He had sex with her three times, once at the love hotel and the other times at his home," an officer from the Kanagawa Prefectural Police force that arrested Mayuzumi tells Shukan Shincho.

In the meantime, the young girl's frantic mother was desperately trying to call her daughter's mobile to find out where she was. When she finally got through, she managed to talk the girl into going back home. With Mayuzumi playing the good shepherd, the girl went back to Yokohama and the Christian stayed at her home for the next three days.

"Mayuzumi did not pay the girl at all. But he admits to the charges being made against him," a reporter covering the case tells the weekly.

Protestant clergy members like Mayuzumi are permitted to marry, but they're not supposed to play around out of wedlock. And especially not with 14-year-old girls.

"Mayuzumi was brought up in Niigata. His parents are both really strict Christians. His father does an incredible amount of work to help the homeless," a friend of the family says.

Mayuzumi studied theology at Seiwa College in Kobe, then at posh Doshisha University in Kyoto. After graduation, he joined the church and, in April 2005, was posted to his current post in Nagoya, where he lived in a tiny apartment and cycled to church.

"He's about 170 centimeters tall and really fat. He loves fried foods liked curried noodles and fried chicken on rice. Even when he orders regular noodles, he always gets the biggest possible serving," the proprietor of a restaurant the missionary frequented says. "He'd sit there scoffing away while reading kids' manga."

Mayuzumi's pious preacher papa is sticking by his sordid son.

"I haven't confirmed exactly what went on, so it's not my place to comment. All I can do at the moment is believe what the son I have raised is saying," the father tells Shukan Shincho.

A worshipper at the Nagoya church Mayuzumi worked for says the missionary may have been plagued by a broken heart.

"He was dating a woman when he was studying at Doshisha University," the follower says. "They continued a long-distance love affair for a while even though they were so far apart."

But it appears Mayuzumi and the woman split. And it looks liked he turned to the unpredictable world of online dating to get over the failed affair.

"Mayuzumi apparently said he doesn't get on that well with other adults," the newspaper hack covering the story tells Shukan Shincho. "He seems to get on better with kids in junior high or high school." (By Ryann Connell)

（Mainichi Japan） December 12, 2007

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