Police have arrested two primary school teachers in Japan for taking and sharing indecent images of young girls in a chat group with fellow teachers.
The two men, a 42-year-old teaching at a public school in Nagoya and a 37-year-old based in a public school in Yokohama, admitted taking some photographs and videos of girls below the age of 13, local police told the BBC.
The images – including so-called upskirt photographs – were then shared in the group of 10 primary and junior high school teachers, which was managed by one of the arrested.
Japan has only recently banned upskirting and the secret filming of sexual acts as part of wider sex crime reforms.
The teachers’ group chat came to light after one of the teachers involved was arrested for having “deposited bodily fluids” on a 15-year-old girl’s backpack, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun reported.
A forensic review of his mobile phone then led to the discovery of the chat group, which was hosted on an unnamed social media platform.
The material shared on it included upskirt photographs, as well as clips of girls changing, and what appeared to be “deepfakes” created from the girls’ headshots.
Some of these photographs appeared to have been taken in schools, police said, but it was unclear whether these were the schools members of the groups taught at.
In May 2023, it brought in sweeping legal reforms as part of a wider overhaul of its century-old laws on sex crimes, after multiple rape acquittals in 2019 caused outcry.
Specifically, the laws ban the filming of children “in a sexual manner without justifiable reason”.
Offenders would face imprisonment of up to three years or a fine of up to 3 million Japanese yen (£15,160; $20,800).
The 2023 reforms to Japan’s sex crime laws also expanded the definition of rape and raised the age of consent from 13 to 16.