Black Torii — Japanese True Crime

July 8th, 2022. Morning in Nara, Japan. A former prime minister stands on a sidewalk outside a suburban train station, giving a campaign speech to maybe a hundred people in the summer heat. It's a small event. The kind of thing politicians do all the time. Bodyguards are present. Camera crews are present. Everything looks ordinary. Then a man walks up behind him and fires a homemade gun. The first...

On a quiet Thursday morning in July 2019, in a narrow three-story building on a residential street in Kyoto, about seventy people were at work making animated stories that people around the world loved. In the space of a few minutes, thirty-six of them would be dead. The man who killed them didn't carry a weapon in the conventional sense. He carried two blue plastic containers filled with forty li...

July 25, 1998. A Saturday evening in the quiet Sonobe neighborhood of Wakayama City. Families are setting up folding tables in a parking lot. Children are running around in the humid summer heat. Elderly neighbors pull up chairs. Paper lanterns sway overhead. This is the annual summer festival run by the local residents' association — the kind of community gathering that happens in thousands of Ja...

At two in the morning on a Tuesday in July 2016, most of the residents of Tsukui Yamayuri-en were asleep. They were adults with severe intellectual and physical disabilities — some unable to speak, some unable to move without help — living in a residential care facility tucked into the hills outside Sagamihara, about forty kilometers southwest of Tokyo. It was a large institution, home to roughly...

In the autumn of 2017, a twenty-seven-year-old man in a quiet Japanese city was killing people — one at a time, over ten weeks — and almost nobody noticed. The bodies were in his apartment the whole time. Nine of them. Strangled, dismembered, stored in cooler boxes a few feet from where he slept. What made it possible was a single tool: Twitter. He found his victims the same way anyone finds anyth...

It was ten in the morning on a Thursday in June. Children in neat school uniforms were sitting at their desks, just like every other day. Parents had already dropped them off. Teachers were working through the morning lessons. The school was the kind of institution families aspired to send their children to — attached to Osaka Kyoiku University, one of the most prestigious elementary schools in th...

On the morning of May 27, 1997, teachers and students arriving at Tomogaoka Junior High School in Kobe found something waiting for them at the school gate. Something that would stop an entire nation cold. There, placed with apparent deliberateness, was the severed head of an eleven-year-old boy. Stuffed in his mouth was a handwritten note, signed with a name no one recognized: "Seito Sakakibara."...

It's New Year's Eve, 2000. Somewhere in the quiet western suburbs of Tokyo, a family of four is going to be murdered tonight. The killer who does it will leave behind more physical evidence than almost any unidentified suspect in Japanese criminal history — DNA, fingerprints, clothing, his own belongings, even a biological sample from the bathroom. He will eat their ice cream. He will drink their...

It's 8 o'clock in the morning in Tokyo. The trains are packed the way Tokyo trains always are during rush hour — shoulder to shoulder, silent, nobody making eye contact. Office workers, students, government clerks, station attendants just doing their jobs. And then, on five separate trains rolling toward the center of the city, people start collapsing. Their vision goes dark. They can't breathe. S...

Noon, on a bright Sunday in the middle of Tokyo. The most famous electronics district in the world has just closed its main street to traffic, the way it does every weekend, so that thousands of people can walk down the middle of the road in the sun. It's supposed to be the safest kind of crowd there is. In about three minutes, seven of those people will be dead. And here's the part that stays wit...