Kanagawa prefectural police on Wednesday arrested a 31-year-old former nursery teacher on suspicion of secretly filming two boys at the nursery where he worked, the force announced. The man, who lives in Minami Ward, Sagamihara, was held on suspicion of photographing a sexual pose and of violating the law banning child prostitution and child pornography by producing it.
Police said he admitted to the allegations. "There is no mistake that I did it," he was quoted as telling investigators. He also said he began to feel sexual arousal toward young boys and elementary school-aged boys after he started working as a nursery teacher, and that filming them without being caught was itself arousing, according to the prefectural police.
Two incidents at the nursery
The man is suspected of using a smartphone to film the lower body of a boy in the nursery's oldest class, then aged 5 or 6, while the child was changing clothes at about 10:45 a.m. on June 25, 2024, at the nursery in Minami Ward, Sagamihara. He was the boy's assigned carer.
He is also suspected of filming the lower body of a boy then in the second grade of elementary school in a nursery toilet at about 3:35 p.m. on Oct. 9. The boy had come with his mother to pick up his younger brother and was using the toilet alone, according to the prefectural police juvenile investigation division.
Tip from US authorities
The case came to light after a US investigative agency passed information to the prefectural police through the National Police Agency on May 20 this year. Images of multiple boys were stored in the cloud on the man's social media account, the division said.
Police seized the man's smartphone and found 64 still images and 13 videos of boys believed to have been taken while he was on duty at the nursery between August 2020 and October 2024. Some had been shot with an app that silences the camera shutter, according to the division.
The prefectural police are investigating about 20 boys whose faces appear in the images.