Yoriaki Izumi, center, head of the Ibaraki City Fire-Defense Headquarters, apologizes Nov. 12 for the violence that senior firefighters meted out to two junior colleagues in Ibaraki, Osaka Prefecture. (Hideki Muroya)

IBARAKI, Osaka Prefecture--Two young firefighters in their 20s had dreams of battling blazes and saving lives.

Instead, they found their own lives in danger at the hands of abusive supervisors inside the fire headquarters here.

One of the firefighters was hung upside down from a fire engine and the other was choked with a medical device.

The Ibaraki City Fire-Defense Headquarters announced Nov. 12 it dismissed three male employees in disgrace for repeated acts of violence against two junior colleagues.

A 47-year-old fire lieutenant, a 34-year-old fire sergeant and a 33-year-old assistant fire sergeant were handed dishonorable discharges.

The headquarters plans to survey about 260 employees by the end of November, at the earliest, to ascertain if other violent conduct and incidents occurred.

As a gesture of responsibility of the incidents, Yoriaki Izumi, the head of the headquarters, has taken a pay cut for three months. Three other officials have received disciplinary action.

According to the headquarters, the older of the three perpetrators demanded a young firefighter to show him a picture saved in his smartphone in April at the fire station’s garage.

When the firefighter refused and moved to get away, the fire lieutenant grabbed him and bound his body with ropes. He then hung the young firefighter upside down from a fire engine’s handrails and left him like that for about five minutes.

“We were just playing a game of tag,” the fire lieutenant explained during an internal investigation about his conduct.

On another occasion, the man took it upon himself to eliminate body hair around the young firefighter’s abdomen by forcing the man to shed upper garments and expose naked skin to flames from insecticide sprayed into a lit lighter.

The fire sergeant and assistant fire sergeant targeted another young firefighter. They used a length of tubing from a blood pressure device and wrapped it around his neck, ignoring his desperate plea: “Please stop. I’m scared.”

They removed it only when the firefighter’s trachea became compressed and his facial color changed due to a lack of oxygen reaching the brain. The firefighter's face and eyeballs sported dot-like bleeding afterward.

The fire lieutenant ordered the fire sergeant and assistant fire sergeant to keep silent about the incident for fear of it from becoming public.

“We wanted to check whether we can measure blood pressure from the neck,” the fire sergeant said in his defense, according to the headquarters.

The fire lieutenant also targeted the other firefighter. During physical strength reinforcement training in April, he punched the firefighter’s chest several times. The firefighter was knocked to the ground, whereupon the fire lieutenant put the boot to his back and lower body more than 30 times.

Other firefighters participated in the training, one of whom told the investigation that the fire lieutenant displayed “an inordinate level of outrage.”

“I was too frightened to stop him,” the firefighter said.

The fire lieutenant tried to justify his behavior by saying: “I was just being playful. It was meant to open the channels of communication.”

Officials of the headquarters said it was impossible to gauge the extent of firefighters' injuries because they did not go to a doctor for an examination after the incidents.

One of the firefighters who was assaulted mentioned the incident to a colleague in September, which led to an internal investigation by the headquarters.