Black Torii — Japanese True Crime

In 1960, huge crowds filled the streets of Japan to protest the US-Japan Security Treaty. The treaty went through anyway. Out of that defeat came a radical fringe that decided marches had failed, and that only armed action would do. This is the Black Files, and tonight we follow that fringe across seven years and three continents. It starts on March 31, 1970. Nine young members of the Red Army Fac...

Five people boarded a Japan Air Lines flight as passengers. They sat in their seats, like everyone else, as the DC-8 lifted off from Bombay. And then, somewhere over the Indian subcontinent, they stood up — with pistols and grenades — and told the crew to change course. The destination they chose was Dhaka, Bangladesh. A city that was, at that exact moment, beginning to come apart from the inside....

It began with a sister trying to escape a doomsday cult. On the afternoon of February 28, 1995, a 68-year-old Tokyo notary officer named Kiyoshi Kariya stepped out onto the street near his home and never came back. He had been seized in broad daylight by a team of operatives working for Aum Shinrikyo — the same organization that would release sarin gas on the Tokyo subway just twenty days later. T...

She was thirty-one years old, walking home on a summer night, in her own city, in her own neighborhood. She had no enemies. No connection to anyone who wanted to hurt her. No reason in the world to feel afraid. But somewhere else in Nagoya that same evening, three men who had met through a website eight days earlier were driving slowly through the streets, looking for a target. Not a specific pers...

It is past midnight in a small city on the island of Shikoku. A man is dead. His common-law wife is injured, lying in the same room. Their nine-year-old daughter has just seen something horrifying. And she will try to tell people what she saw. No one in authority will believe her. This is the story of Fuji Shigeko — a woman convicted of murder on evidence that was coerced, fabricated, and conceale...

November 23, 1956. A young man who used to study at Tokyo University — the most elite institution in Japan — stands in front of a police officer on the outskirts of Tokyo and pulls the trigger. He is twenty-six years old. He believes he is at war. He goes to prison for twenty years. He comes out. And then, thirty-nine years later, in the spring of 1995 — with the entire city still shaking from one...

She was ten years old. She had found a way to ask for help — a school welfare questionnaire handed out by her teacher, meant to be confidential. So she picked up her pencil and she wrote the truth: my father is hurting me. Can't you do anything? The system received her message. Then it handed it directly to her father. Mia Kurihara died on the morning of January 24, 2019, in the bathroom of her fa...

July 29, 1965. A summer morning in a quiet suburb south of Tokyo, the fields still cool, the city still waking up. An eighteen-year-old named Misao Katagiri was out in the countryside near Zama-machi, Kanagawa, doing something he apparently did often: shooting birds with a rifle. Sparrows, by most accounts. Nothing dramatic. A private obsession on a Thursday morning. A police officer stopped him....

In postwar Japan, some of the deadliest substances in the country weren't kept in laboratories. They sat in sheds and storerooms and on the shelves of agricultural supply stores. They were insecticides and weed killers, made to protect crops, and they could be bought or brought home without much trouble. Tonight's Black Files covers three cases where those chemicals were turned on people. We begin...

In the summer of 2013, a tiny mountain hamlet in Yamaguchi Prefecture woke to smoke and silence. Two homes had burned to the ground overnight. Beneath the charred timber, five elderly people lay dead — beaten to death before the fires were set. Five victims out of a community of twelve. One-third of the village, in a single night. When investigators looked at the home of the one neighbor who had d...

October 12th, 1960. Hibiya Public Hall, in the heart of Tokyo, a short walk from the Imperial Palace. Three political parties are holding a televised debate — cameras rolling, audience seated, the kind of event that looks safe precisely because it's so formal. At 3:05 in the afternoon, a seventeen-year-old in the crowd broke from his seat. He vaulted onto the stage, crossed the floor in two or thr...

In 1966, a sixteen-year-old boy walked out of a juvenile detention facility in northern Japan and started killing. Three women, in three different prefectures, in less than six weeks. He was still a teenager when police caught up with him in January 1967. And the name he used throughout — the name police hunted, the name prosecutors put on trial — belonged to a woman he loved. A woman he had never...

On March 30, 1970, a twenty-two-year-old man stood in a courtroom in Kochi Prefecture and heard a judge sentence him to death. He had killed once — a robbery gone wrong on a mountain road in rural Shikoku — and the state was prepared to end his life for it. It didn't happen. His sentence was reduced on appeal. He served out a long prison term and walked free in 1991. Twenty-two years behind bars....

November 22, 2005. A Tuesday. A seven-year-old girl named Airi Kinoshita finished her morning classes at her elementary school in Hiroshima and began walking home alone. She never arrived. By three o'clock that afternoon, police in the Aki Ward of Hiroshima were standing over a taped-up cardboard box in a vacant lot near her school. Inside was Airi. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. A...

A Tuesday evening in late March 1961. A small mountain village in Mie Prefecture, where the road winds up from the valley and the houses are close together and everyone knows everyone. The women of the Better Life Club have gathered for their annual meeting. Wine is served. Someone pours. Within minutes, women are collapsing on the floor. By morning, five of them are dead. One man is arrested, int...

Three women. Three cities. Five weeks. Iizuka, Kitakyushu, Fukuoka — three separate cities strung across northern Kyushu, each holding a different piece of the same crime. Each connected to a small, unremarkable city called Nōgata that sits almost precisely at the center of them. When investigators eventually drew lines between the crime scenes on a map, the result looked almost deliberate: a roug...

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...