Black Torii — Japanese True Crime

The Meiji Restoration remade Japan almost overnight. Within a single generation the samurai class was gone, the cities filled with gas lamps and brick, and a new national police force was formed. It was still learning how to catch a killer. Tonight's Black Files goes back before the Showa era, to five cases from Japan's first modern decades. We begin in 1880s Tokyo with Sadakichi Shimizu, a masseu...

Three women were dead. A fourth would never fully recover. All of them had been poisoned — quietly, deliberately — by someone they trusted. The victims didn't live in some isolated corner of Japan. They were neighbors and acquaintances in an ordinary city in Kumamoto Prefecture, and the woman who killed them had prepared their food with her own hands. Her name was Sadame Sugimura. She was 49 years...

In the winter of 1963, Japan was about to host its first Olympic Games. The country had rebuilt from wartime rubble into an economic miracle, and its people were riding a wave of national confidence the likes of which they hadn't felt in a generation. At the center of that feeling — the man who had, more than anyone else, helped put it there — was a wrestler named Rikidozan. He was thirty-nine yea...

Picture a man who has spent most of his adult life behind bars. More than twenty prison terms. Forty-odd robberies. Rapes. And now, four murders. The last one — a geisha killed at a tea house near Tokyo on a spring afternoon in 1915. By any measure, one of the most violent repeat offenders in Meiji-era Japan. Now picture this same man, sitting in a police holding cell weeks later, listening to his...

Nine months. Four people dead. All of them elderly. All of them killed for cash. The largest haul from a single killing was eighteen thousand yen — roughly a hundred and seventy US dollars at the time. The smallest was fifteen thousand yen and a piggy bank. The man who did it was twenty-seven years old, unemployed, and had grown up in the same small city in Nagano Prefecture where he would commit...

Three men stepped off an Air France flight in Tel Aviv on the afternoon of May 30, 1972. They wore business suits. They were Japanese. They had no particular grievance with Israel, had never visited Palestine, and had no personal connection to any of the people in the terminal they were about to walk into. In the next twenty-four minutes, they would kill twenty-six people — most of them Puerto Ric...

It's autumn, 1905, in a mountain valley in Nagano. Japan has just won the Russo-Japanese War. The nation is celebrating. In small villages like Asahi, the shrine festivals are livelier than usual — people are staying out later, the paths between the rice paddies are busy with lanterns, and the air carries the particular feeling of a country that believes things are going well. Then a sixteen-year-...

It's April 1996, in Hiroshima. A sixteen-year-old girl climbs into a taxi late at night. She's there under the same kind of arrangement that tens of thousands of Japanese teenagers had fallen into during the bleak years after Japan's economic bubble burst — a paid date with an older man, quick cash for brand-name clothes and the feeling that the economy hadn't swallowed her entirely. The driver is...

August 1945. Japan surrendered, and the country it left behind was in ruins. Its cities had been bombed. Food was scarce. The black market was how most people survived. And the police were trying to rebuild under foreign occupation. Tonight's Black Files is about four cases from those years, and about people who used the chaos to kill. We begin with Yoshio Kodaira, a decorated Navy veteran. In 194...

Japan 1882. The Meiji era is fourteen years old. Tokyo is remaking itself — gas lamps replacing paper lanterns, brick buildings rising where wood once stood, former samurai drifting through a city that no longer needs them. And somewhere in the backstreets of Honjo, a traditional masseur with a Western revolver is preparing to commit the first pistol murder in Japanese criminal history. His name w...

Somewhere in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, in the summer of 1941, a seventeen-year-old boy killed five people in the space of six weeks. Two of them died on the same afternoon. A third was his own brother. He was deaf from birth. He had never spoken a word anyone could clearly understand. And he had grown up, by almost every account, at the very edge of the world — a boy who could see the lives arou...

October 11, 1951. A remote cliff on the Boso Peninsula, in Chiba Prefecture. The place is called Osen Korogashi — named for an old legend about a girl who fell to her death here, somewhere in the distant past. The cliff drops roughly twenty meters to the rocky coast below. Nobody lives nearby. Nobody is passing through. A twenty-nine-year-old woman is here. She came from the countryside with her c...

January 24th, 1994. Snow is falling on a rented farm field on the outskirts of Shiojiri City, in Nagano Prefecture — one of those flat, unremarkable parcels that nobody visits in the deep of winter. Remote enough, quiet enough, that you could bury something there and trust it would stay buried. Today, that trust ends. Police arrive with shovels and a missing-person report. They find a steel storag...

July 5, 1995. A team of detectives from the Fukushima Prefectural Police arrives at a private residence in Sukagawa, a quiet city in central Fukushima Prefecture. A member of a local spiritual circle has been hospitalized — the circumstances unusual enough that someone decided to take a closer look. The woman who answers the door is forty-seven years old. She has lived in this house for years. Her...

Los Angeles, November 1981. A Japanese businessman and his wife are walking through a downtown parking garage when a gunman steps out of the shadows. She takes a bullet to the head. He takes one to the leg. She never wakes up. When the news reaches Japan, the country grieves alongside him. He appears on television — composed, sorrowful, a man destroyed by what happened to his wife in a violent cit...

September 1923. The Japanese capital has just been leveled by the most devastating earthquake in the country's modern history. Over a hundred thousand people are dead, and the city is still burning. The army is everywhere. Martial law is in effect. In this chaos — this particular, curated chaos — three people are taken from the streets and brought to a military police headquarters in the Azabu dis...

In Japan, almost every criminal trial ends in a conviction. And once a verdict is final, getting a court to look at it again is extraordinarily hard. Retrial petitions are rejected, and rejected again, sometimes for decades. Tonight's Black Files is about three men who made it through that door. All three were convicted on the strength of confessions given in police custody, confessions they later...

In a small riverside city in Shizuoka Prefecture, a six-year-old girl disappeared from a kindergarten graduation ceremony in March 1954. Three days later, her body was found in the woods across the river. She had been strangled. The city was shaken. Police needed answers. And fourteen months later, they had one — a twenty-five-year-old man with a mild intellectual disability, arrested hundreds of...

Every morning for forty-six years, Iwao Hakamada woke up not knowing if today was the day he would be killed. In Japan, death row inmates are not told when their execution will happen. They wake up each morning, and sometimes a guard appears at the cell door — and sometimes that appearance means they have a few minutes left to live. Hakamada endured that uncertainty, every single morning, from 196...

In the spring of 1985, someone in Japan started killing strangers. Not with a knife, not with a gun. With a bottle of juice, placed near a vending machine. They didn't know who would pick it up. That was the point. The drink looked completely normal. An Oronamin C — a popular vitamin drink, bright orange bottle, the kind millions of people grabbed every day without a second thought. But someone ha...

Tokyo, 1948. Japan is three years out of the most devastating war in its history. The city is still rebuilding. There are food shortages. There is poverty. And there is a maternity clinic run by a highly educated midwife, where mothers bring their unwanted newborns and pay a fee, hoping the staff will take the child off their hands. The clinic director found this arrangement quite practical. The b...

It started with a student ID card. Weeks before a family of four was killed inside their apartment in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, a 19-year-old named Teruhiko Seki attacked a 15-year-old girl on a street in the same city. He took her bag. And among her belongings was her student ID — her name, her school, and her home address. He kept it. That address would eventually lead him to an apartment wher...

A thirteen-year-old boy goes to after-school club activities on a Wednesday afternoon in January. He doesn't come home. Hours later, around 8 o'clock in the evening, a teacher at Meirin Junior High School in Shinjo City, Yamagata, discovers two feet sticking out of the top of a rolled-up gymnasium mat stored in the equipment room. The boy is wedged inside it, headfirst, buried up to his shins. He...

In June 1981, a Japanese graduate student in Paris invited a Dutch classmate to his apartment to translate poetry. He shot her from behind while she sat at his desk. He spent several days eating parts of her body. He was arrested. Examined. Declared legally insane. And then — through a sequence of institutional failures that would be almost impossible to design on purpose — he was released, return...

We are taught to fear the stranger in the shadows. But the four men in this compilation didn't hide in the shadows. They walked up to people in daylight, and they were trusted. In the hungry ruins of 1945, Yoshio Kodaira offered desperate young women food and work, then led them into the forests of Tochigi and the outskirts of Tokyo. He was convicted of seven murders. In 1963, Akira Nishiguchi int...