Deeply researched, respectfully told stories of Japan's most infamous crimes. Each episode reconstructs what happened, how, and why — the people, the timeline, and the psychology behind the case.
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Some crimes begin with a word. The word is no. In the three cases in this compilation, a man decided that a woman's refusal — to stay, to answer, to belong to him — was not something he had to accept. What followed in each case was not a sudden explosion. It was a slow, documented escalation. And in each case, someone saw it coming. We begin in Saitama in October 1999, where a twenty-one-year-old university student named Shiori Ino was killed at the entrance to JR Okegawa Station, after months in which she and her family had brought the police flyers, letters, and threats, and been turned away
Most of the cases we cover on this show happened within living memory. Tonight, we go further back — into the Shōwa era, the six decades of upheaval that carried Japan through war, occupation, and reconstruction. These five cases are history now. But not one of them is finished. We begin in 1938, in a dark mountain hamlet in Okayama, where a 21-year-old man killed thirty of his neighbors in roughly ninety minutes — the worst one-man killing spree in modern Japanese history. Then, occupied Tokyo, 1948: a polite stranger posing as a health official walks into a bank, and twelve employees are poi
Most of the cases we cover end with a name. An arrest, a courtroom, a sentence — some kind of line drawn under it. These three don't. Tonight, three Japanese cases in which the person responsible was never identified. Not acquitted. Not released on a technicality. Never found at all. We begin in 1984, with a group that spent seventeen months holding Japan's food industry hostage. They kidnapped the president of Ezaki Glico from his own bathroom — he escaped three days later — then sent more than a hundred taunting letters signed with the name of a villain from a children's detective novel, and
Most of the cases in this series end in a courtroom. Someone is named, someone is charged, and a country says out loud what happened and who did it. The four cases in this compilation never got that moment. In each one, the person responsible was never put on trial — and the families were left holding a question that no verdict was ever going to close. We start in a quiet Tokyo suburb, where a killer murdered the four members of the Miyazawa family in December 2000 and left behind more physical evidence than almost any unidentified suspect in Japanese history. Twenty-five years on, he has neve
Japan's Juvenile Law was written in 1948. It was built on a simple premise: a child who commits a crime is still a child, and the state's job is to rehabilitate rather than to punish. For decades, that premise held. Then came a run of cases that tested it until it broke. These five cases span sixteen years, and every one of them was committed by someone the law considered a minor. In November 1988, seventeen-year-old Junko Furuta was abducted in Saitama and held for forty-four days in a house in Adachi Ward, Tokyo. Her killers were teenagers. They pleaded guilty not to murder but to inflicting
Some crimes stand alone. These three do not. They are chapters of a single story — the story of Aum Shinrikyo, the doomsday cult that spent six years escalating from murder in the night to chemical warfare at rush hour. It begins in November 1989, in a Yokohama apartment. A thirty-three-year-old lawyer named Tsutsumi Sakamoto had been helping families recover their loved ones from the cult. Six Aum members entered his home in the early morning hours and killed him, his wife, and their fourteen-month-old son. The family simply vanished — and stayed missing for nearly six years. Because no one c
It was the end of July 2010, and a colleague of a woman named Sanae Shimomura was worried. She hadn't shown up to work in days, and when her co-workers finally went to her apartment building in Nishi Ward, Osaka, they didn't need to open the door to know something was wrong. The smell told them. What police found inside that fifteen-square-meter room — a one-room apartment barely larger than a parking space — was something that would not leave the investigators who entered it, or the journalists who reported on it, or the city that heard about it. Two small children. Alone. Dead. And a city th
It is the afternoon of May 20, 1936. Two plainclothes police officers walk into a small inn in Tokyo's Shinagawa district. They've been following a lead — a woman who checked in under a false name, acting strangely. They find her in her room, calm, almost serene. She has been drinking. She is wearing a kimono. They question her about her real identity. And then, when she can see they won't leave without something, she opens her kimono and shows them what she has been carrying for the past two days. It is the severed genitals of a man. She tells the officers the man's name: Kichizo Ishida. She
At 12:25 in the afternoon on April 19, 2019, the intersection near Higashi-Ikebukuro Station in Tokyo was busy with lunchtime pedestrians. The signal was green for walkers. A mother named Mana Matsunaga, thirty-one years old, was crossing on a bicycle with her three-year-old daughter Riko seated behind her. They were heading home after a morning out together. What they could not see — and what nobody in that intersection could have anticipated — was a Toyota Prius barreling toward them at nearly one hundred kilometres per hour. It did not slow. It did not stop at the red light. When it was ove
Japan is one of the safest countries on earth. Not just by reputation — by numbers. Gun violence is so rare that entire years pass with fewer than ten shootings across a nation of 125 million people. Ownership is heavily restricted. Obtaining a firearm is a months-long process of background checks, mental health evaluations, and government inspections of your home. Most people never see a gun in their lifetime outside a police officer's holster. So when, on the afternoon of May 25, 2023, emergency calls began flooding into the Nakano City police station in Nagano Prefecture reporting a man wit
It was a Friday evening in August 2021. Tokyo was still hosting the Summer Olympics — empty stadiums, careful celebrations, the entire city putting on its most composed face for a watching world. And at around 8:30 in the evening, millions of people were doing what they always do in a city of this size: sitting on trains, heading home, staring at their phones. On a rapid express train on the Odakyu Electric Railway, heading toward Shinjuku, the carriages were full but quiet. Workers with their bags on their laps. Young people with earbuds in. The hum and sway of a train doing what trains do. T
On a quiet morning in early June 2020, a twenty-three-year-old university student woke up before dawn in his family home in Takarazuka — a city in Hyogo Prefecture best known as the home of Japan's famous all-female theatrical company — and began killing his family with a crossbow. Three people would die that morning. His grandmother. His younger brother. His mother. A fourth, his aunt, survived only because she happened to be wearing a bicycle helmet when she arrived at the house, and managed to run out into the street screaming for a neighbor to call the police. When Hideaki Nozu was arreste
On the morning of June 1st, 2019, a 76-year-old man picked up the phone and called the police. He told them, calmly, that he had just stabbed his son. And then he waited for them to arrive. The man was Hideaki Kumazawa — a retired senior official of the Japanese government, a former vice-minister of the Ministry of Agriculture, a one-time ambassador to the Czech Republic. His son, Eiichiro, was 44 years old. He lay on the floor of their Tokyo home with 36 stab wounds. The killing made headlines across Japan for a week. But the story it told — about isolation, about failing families, about the
She had done everything right. She returned the gifts. She blocked him on social media. She went to the police — weeks in advance — told them a man was threatening her, described the specific messages, and asked for help. On May 21st, 2016, she was stabbed sixty-one times outside a concert venue in Tokyo. She survived. Barely. And the injuries she carries — a decade later — are permanent. Near-blindness in one eye. Facial paralysis. PTSD that has never fully lifted. A lawsuit that took nine years to settle. This is the story of Mayu Tomita. And it is a story about what happens when a young wom
There are roughly 200,000 tickets sold at a single AKB48 national handshake event. Fans spend thousands of yen for a few seconds of eye contact and a handshake with their favorite idol. The line moves fast. The girls stand in a tent, a table between them and the next person, and then the next. It is designed to feel intimate. On May 25, 2014, a man walked into that intimacy with a saw hidden in his bag. He was not a fan. He had no favorite member. He didn't know their names. He chose this venue for one reason only — and it had nothing to do with music. This is the story of the AKB48 Handshake
It was 6:40 in the morning on February 10th, 2010, in Ishinomaki — a coastal city in Miyagi Prefecture, quiet and ordinary in the frozen winter dark. Most people in the house were still asleep. That's when the door opened. And a young man stepped inside carrying a butcher knife. By the time this was over, two young women — twenty years old, eighteen years old — were dead. A male friend was stabbed through the chest. And the person he had actually come for, the young woman he believed belonged to him, was bleeding from a leg wound as he dragged her into his car and drove away. And here's the pa
July 5th, 1949. Sadanori Shimoyama, the most powerful railroad man in Japan, stepped out of his company limousine in central Tokyo. He was going to buy his wife a birthday present at the Mitsukoshi department store — one of the most famous shops in the country. He walked through the door. He never came out. Twelve hours later, just after midnight, his body was found on the tracks of the Joban Line in northern Tokyo — severed, mangled, destroyed by a passing train. But here is the detail that turns a tragedy into a mystery: when investigators examined the scene, there was almost no blood. Not a
January 26, 1948. A well-dressed man steps into a bank branch in Toshima Ward, Tokyo, shortly after the bank has closed to the public. He says he's a government health official. He says a dysentery outbreak is moving through the neighborhood, and everyone in the room — every single employee — needs to take preventive medicine immediately. Sixteen people comply. Twelve of them are dead within the hour. The man takes the cash from the vault, folds it into his coat, and walks out the door. What follows is one of the most contested criminal cases in Japanese history — a case where the official ver
Halloween night, 2021. A packed commuter train rolls west toward Shinjuku, and among the passengers — some of them already in costume — sits a young man in a purple suit and a green shirt. He's holding what looks like a prop. At least, that's what a few people assumed. Then he sprayed something into an elderly man's eyes. Then he drew a real knife — thirty centimeters long — and drove it into the man's chest. In the next few minutes, seventeen people would be hurt. One of the train's carriages would be on fire. Passengers would pull emergency handles and squeeze through gaps in the doors to ge
The Shinkansen is not just a train. It is a symbol. When it launched in October 1964 — the same week as the Tokyo Olympics — it represented Japan's postwar comeback: the country that had been reduced to rubble nineteen years earlier had built the fastest train on earth. And in the sixty years since, Japan's bullet trains have carried billions of passengers without a single fatality caused by a collision or derailment. Zero. The Shinkansen is held up as proof of what Japanese engineering and discipline can achieve. So here is what happened on a Saturday night in June 2018. The Nozomi 265, bound
On May 1st, 1963, a sixteen-year-old girl walked home from school in a quiet city north of Tokyo, and never arrived. A ransom note arrived at her family's door that night. The police set up a trap to catch the kidnapper. He came. He got away. And three days later, the girl's body was found buried in a field. Under enormous public pressure, police needed someone to blame. They turned their attention to a neighborhood where people from Japan's most marginalized community lived. Within weeks, they had their man. The only problem is: he almost certainly didn't do it. Kazuo Ishikawa spent thirty-on
In the spring of 1984, someone in Japan decided to go to war with the country's biggest candy companies. Not with bombs, not with a clear and reasonable demand, but with something far more unsettling: a string of theatrical letters, each signed with the name of a fictional villain from a children's novel. They kidnapped a CEO. They set buildings on fire. They placed cyanide-laced candy on supermarket shelves where families shopped with their children. And they spent seventeen months making an entire nation afraid to eat a chocolate bar. They were never caught. This is the story of the Glico Mo
It was a Tuesday morning in Tokyo, and by every surface measurement, Flight 351 was a nothing flight — a short domestic hop from Haneda Airport to Fukuoka, two and a half hours at most. One hundred and twenty-two passengers, a crew of seven, a plane called the Yodo. About twelve minutes after takeoff, nine young men stood up from their seats throughout the cabin. They were carrying katana swords. One of them was sixteen years old — still in high school. Another was holding what was described as a homemade bomb. They told the pilot to fly to North Korea. And then things got stranger. Yodo-go Hi
It's a summer evening in Fukuoka. A family of five is on a bridge. The parents are in the front seats. In the back are three children — a four-year-old boy, a three-year-old boy, and a baby girl, just one year old. They're crossing the Uminonakamichi Ohashi Bridge, which stretches over the entrance to Hakata Bay. It's the kind of ordinary moment — a family in a car at night — that you don't think about at all. The kind of moment that happens a thousand times a day and ends the same way it started. Then a car comes out of the dark behind them. It's traveling at twice the speed limit. It slams i
In one of Japan's quietest, most rural prefectures, a woman worked the night shift at a snack bar. Nothing unusual about that. Tottori Prefecture has been losing population for decades, and its small cities are dotted with exactly these places — narrow counters, low lighting, women paid to listen, to pour drinks, to make tired men feel like someone cares. It's a particular kind of economy, and it runs on loneliness. The woman's name was Miyuki Ueta. She was good at the job. Men came back. Some of them fell for her in the way people do when someone performs warmth convincingly enough that it st
