FAMOUS MURDERS IN JAPAN
Akihabara murderer caught on tape
buying his weapons
Between 1972 and 1977 Kiyota Katsuta, strangled five women in their 20s and 30s after sneaking into their homes to rob them. Before 1984 he shot three others to death while committing robberies using a handgun he seized from a police officer. He was sentenced to death and executed in 2000.
Isse Sagawa, a Japanese serial killer knows as the Bois de Boulogne in France, killed and ate his girlfriend in France in 1981. He kept the body parts in a freezer and said he killed her because he had grown tired of her and wanted to eat her.
In December 2007, a cross dresser was arrested for the murder of a woman in 1994 after DNA taken from women’s underwear he wore was matched with the DNA on articles found at the scene of the murder.
Miyazaki Serial Murders
In April 1997,Tsutomu Miyazaki was sentenced to death for "brutally murdering" four girls, between the ages 4 and 7, in 1988 and 1989 in Tokyo and nearby Saitama "to satisfy his sexual appetite." Miyazaki had deformed hands and a tragic family life and possessed a collection of 6,000 animated, horror and pornographic videos, some with young girls.
In August 1988, 26-year-old Miyazaki lured a four-year-old girl into his car, drove her to a wooded area, strangled her, and sexually assaulted her corpse. Five months later he burned the body, ate some of the ashes and deposited the rest of her remains in a box in front of her parents house. In October and November 1988, he abducted and strangled a 4-year-old girl and 7-year-old girl. In June 1989, he abducted a 5-year-old girl, strangled her and mutilated her, ate her wrists and drank her blood. He wrote letters to victim's families signed with a pseudonym, claiming responsibility for the crimes.
Miyazaki carried out the murders in a room filled with horror and pornographic video tapes. Among the tapes were videos of his victims. He used the female pseudonym, Yuko Imada to write letters claiming responsibility for the crime to newspapers and the victim’s family. Attached to the letters to newspapers were photos of the victim’s bodies.
Miyazaki's lawyers tried to use the insanity plea to avoid a death sentence. Miyazaki provided graphic details of the murders and blamed his actions on "rat people" and "a man who enjoys forcing me to do things I don't want to do." In the end the judges decided that although he was weird he was sane enough to realize that what he was doing was wrong and he was sentenced to death. In 2001, a court upheld the death penalty.
Miyazaki was executed in June 2008, 20 years after he committed his first murder and two years and four months after his death sentence was finalized. Unrepentant to the end, he never apologized to the families of his victims or attempted to explain why he did what he did.
Miura Case
In February 2008, Kazuyoshi Miura—a Japanese citizen and former president of an imported goods trading company—was arrested on the Pacific island of Saipan for the murder of his 28-year-old wife in Los Angeles in 1981, a crime he had been acquitted of in a Japanese court. The arrest warrant was issued by the Los Angeles police.
Miura and his wife were shot in a parking lot in Los Angeles in 1981 allegedly after Miura gave a hand signal to a hired hitman. His wife, who had been shot in the head, died a year later. Miura had taken out a $1.5 million life insurance policy on her. He was given a life sentence by a Tokyo District court but the verdict was overtured in 1998 by a Tokyo high court because the wife’s killer has unknown. The Supreme Court dismissed the prosecutors appeal in March 2003. Miura was the chief suspect in another murder, involving a 33-year-old woman in 1979.
Prosecutors in Los Angeles said that double jeopardy rulings did not apply to the Miura case because the defendant was charged in two different countries, and the charges in each country were different. Miura hired expensive and high profile lawyers, including Mark Geragos, the lawyer who represented Michael Jackson in his child abuse case in the mid 2000s.
In October 2008, Miura was sent to Los Angeles after a Los Angeles county court ruled that Miura’s arrest warrant was valid. Less than 17 hours after he arrived in the United States he was found dead in his cell. The Los Angeles coroner concluded he committed suicide by hanging. Police said he hung himself with a piece of his shirt. There was no suicide note.
Everyone was shocked. People that met with Miura in his cell said he was calm, requested some books to read. and gave no hints of wanting to commit suicide. The defense conducted its own autopsy and they said their doctor found evidence of beating on Miura’s back and marks on his throat that could have been caused by choking and said “all of this is consistent with murder.” The Los Angeles Police Department said there was no evidence that Miura was murdered.
In December 2008, the L.A. coroner concluded that Maura’s death was a suicide, saying that he strangled himself with a shirt tied to a bunk bed.
Video of Miuru boarding and getting off the plane from Saipan to Los Angeles show him wearing a black baseball cap with the words “PEACE POT MICRODOT” written around it in white letters. “Pot” is thought to refer to marijuana and “microdot” is a kind of LSD. The Phrase “Peace Pot Microdot” is used by some drug users to say goodbye.
Lucy Blackman Murder
Lucy Blackman, a 22-year-old British citizen, who worked at a hostess bar, disappeared in July 2000. In February 2001, her remains were found in cave in Miura in Kanagawa Prefecture. Her body had been dismembered into 10 pieces and her head was found inside concrete. She is believed to have died from a sleep-inducing drug and was dismembered after she died with an electric saw. When the body was dug up the remains were so decomposed that it was impossible to determine the cause of death.
Joji Obara, a president of a middle-size company, was charged with Blackman’s murder. He was seen with Blackman at a hostess bar in Tokyo. The cave where Blackman's body was found is 200 yards from a condominium owned by Obara. Obara denied the charges against him. Nothing with Obara’s DNA was found on Blackman’s body. No blood, where the dismemberment is thought to have taken place, was found.
Obara raped and drugged 10 women—six foreign, including Blackmen and four Japanese—and killed two of them between March 1996 and April 2000. The victims included four Japanese women and five foreign including Blackman. One of these victims, a British woman named Carita Ridgeway, was found dead in July 2000 with a chloroform-induced liver disorder (a kind of of severe hepatitis) after she was drugged and raped by Obara. In most of the cases Obara lured the women to his condominium, gave them an alcoholic drink with a sleep-inducing drug such chloroform or Rohypnol., before raping them as they slept.
Trial for the Lucy Blackman Murder
In a trial that lasted for six years and five months. Obara pleaded non guilty to rape and other the charges brought against him in the Black murder and the nine other cases and refused to appear at the hearings.
In April 2007, Obara was acquitted of all charges involving the death of Blackman, while Blackman’s father’s looked on, but was given life in prison for raping and drugging nine women. On the Blackman case the judge said, “It cannot be determined from evidence Obara committed the crime alone, and there is no direct evidence.”
In December 2008, Obara was convicted by a higher court. of abducting, dismembering and burying Blackman but acquitted of actually killing her due to lack of evidence.
The evidence against Obara in the rape and drugging cases included videotapes made Obara that showed him raping the women as they slept; cholorofm and other sleep-inducing drugs found in condominium. One video tape confiscated by police showed Ridgeway, who was 21 at the time of her death.
The evidence against Obara in Blackman case included: 1) chain marks found on Blackman's bones matched marks made by a chain saw Obara had purchased two days before Blackman disappeared; 2) sightings of Obara with cement on his clothes and hands and on the Blackman she disappeared; 3) sent letters sent by Obara pretending t be a living Lucy Blackman; and Obara’s scanning of websites that described how to dispose of dead bodies with sulfuric acid. But in the end the judge ruled there was no smoking gun and all the other evidence was circumstantial.
Blood Money and the Lucy Blackman Murder
The Blackman murder and trial got a fair amount of coverage in Britain. The press was critical of the ¥100 million “condolence fee” given by Obara to Blackman’s family, which some called blood money. Obara also gave several million yen each to his eight living victims. All eight of the women who survived accepted as did the family of Carita Ridgway after initially saying they would not take it.
The only person that did not accept it was Jane Steare, Blackman’s mother, who was outraged that her ex-husband and Lucie father, Tim Blackman, accepted roughly $1 million in 2006. She told one newspaper, “As far as I’m concerned Tom accepted 100 million pieces of silver. Judas was content with just 30.”
Lindsay Ann Hawker Murder
Lindsay Ann Hawker, a popular, attractive 22-year-old British English teacher, was murdered in March 2007 by a 28-year-old man, Tatsuya Ichihashi, who paid to have a private English lesson with her. Hawker’s naked body was found on a balcony buried in sand in a bathtub near Tokyo in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture. She had been strangled.
The killer had a previous conviction for wallet snatching . He had stalked Hawker and was able to elude nine police officers when he escaped in his stacking feet. A security camera caught images of Ichihashi in the elevator of Hawker’s apartment. As of 2008 he had not been caught even though his picture is displayed at nearly every post office and local neighborhood police station in Japan. Many think he committed suicide is some remote place where his body would never be found.
In June 2009, the reward for information leading to the arrest of the killer in Hawker murder—Tatsuya Ichihashi—was raised from $100,000 to $1 million.
Curry, Money Tree and Golf Ball Murders
In July 1998, Masumi Hayashi, a woman living in Wakayama, killed four people, including a small boy, and injured 63 by serving them curry spiked with arsenic at a neighborhood gathering. The motivation was unknown. Between 1985 and 1998 she and her husband collected more than $8.2 million in insurance claims, some of them on life insurance policies on people that died. Hayashi said nothing in her trial. She was sentenced to death and her death sentence was upheld by a higher court in 2005. In May 2009, her death sentence was finalized.
In the 1990s a man murdered two prostitutes by placing golf balls in their mouths and strangling them. He was caught after he tried to kill several other women in the same way after demanding tohave sex with them.
In the late 1990s, Futoshi Matsunaga a man from Kitakyushi and his common-law wife killed seven people, including the woman’s own father and mother and four other relatives. One of the victims was a 34-year-old man who lived at their house and was tortured before he died. Matsunaga admitted abusing the victims but denied killing them because they were his “money tree.” The common-law wife, Junko Ogata, admitted that she carried out the murders.
The victims were abused and confined and welfare payments and other sources of money in their name were seized by Matsunaga and Ogata. The victims were finally killed when it deemed there was no way to make money from them anymore. The murders came to light in March 2002 when a teenage girl confined at Matsunaga and Ogata’s apartment escaped and told police. No remains of the victims were ever found. Matsunaga and Ogata are suspected of dismembering the bodies and dumping the remains in the sea.
Random Killings in Japan
Random killings, mostly stabbings, are one of he most disturbing crimes committed din Japan. According to the National Police Agency there were 67 multiple stabbing rampages between 1998 and 2007, with eight cases in 2007, twice as many as in the previous year.
In January 2008, a 16-year-old male student a private high school slashed a passerby in the Ginza district of Tokyo and was arrested for attempted murder. The youth told police, “I wanted to massacre people, I didn’t care who they were.” In May 2008, a 40-year-old man assaulted two boys and a woman in Osaka and Kyoto and was later arrested in Saitama Prefecture.
In September 1999, a35-year-old man killed five people and injured another 10 after driving his car into a train station in Shimonoseki. The man told police, “No matter what I did, it never turned out well, which made me bitter toward society.” The same month a 23-year-old man stabbed eight people, taking two lives, on a street in Ikebukuro in Tokyo.
In June 1981, a 29-year-old man stabbed to death four people, including young children, in Fukugawa, Koto Ward, Tokyo in an incident known as the “Fukagawa street stabbings.’
Running Amok With Knives in Japan
In March 2008, a 24-year-old man, Masahiro Kanagawa, killed one person and injured seven others after running amok, shouting and wielding knives in both hands, in and around a supermarket near Arakwaoki Station on the JR Joban Line in Tsuchiura, Ibaraki Prefecture. After he was arrested the man told police, “I wanted to kill seven or eight people . I didn’t care who they were.”
Large amounts of blood were visible at the scene, a testament of the ferocity of the attacks. One witness said he saw Kanagawa attack a man in his 60s, running towards him and shouting loudly. A station master said that after hearing screams he saw people lying on the ground covered in blood. He said he saw one woman helping a man with neck wounds. The man was barely conscious and did not respond when spoken to. Kanagawa was wanted by police in connection with the murder if a 71-year-old man four days before. He had made taunting calls to police, saying “You better catch me soon.”
Kanagawa late told police “I’m unrepentant. I don’t feel regretful.” He had just quit a job. He seldom left his home and is said to have spent much of his time playing ninja video games. He lived with his parents and a younger sister and brother. They family rarely ate together, The father said that it had been some time since he or other family members spoke to his son. Before the stabbing he cut his hair and donned glasses to outwit police who looking for him for the murder of the 71-year-old man.
Health Club Murder in Japan
In December 2007, two people were shot dead and six others, including two young girls, were wounded when an unemployed man, 37-year-old Masayohsi Magome, opened fire with a shotgun at a fitness club in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture. The suspect fled the scene in a minivan and was found dead in church compound with self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Over 2,500 rounds of ammunition were found in his van.
The two people who were killed were a 26-year-old female swim instructor at the club that Magome reportedly had a crush on and a school buddy that Magome invited to visit the club with him. Magome left no suicide note or clues to why he did what he did. He came from a churchgoing Catholic family and often boasted he had a high-paying job even though he didn’t work. Magome legally owned his gun. Some of his neighbors complained about his strange behavior and asked the government to have his gun license revoked.
Rampage in Akihabara
In June 2008, a 25-year-old temporary auto factory worker, Tomohiro Kato, went on a carefully planned rampage, killing seven people—six men and one woman ages 19 to 74—and injuring 10, in the busy Akiharbara shopping district of Tokyo. Dressed in a pale suit, he drove 95 kilometers from his home and plowed a rented two-ton truck into a crowd and then leaped out and began stabbing bystanders. Afterwards Kato confessed to police he wanted to kill as many people as possible.
Of the 17 that were killed or injured, five were struck by the truck and 12 were stabbed. Kato purposely drove the truck through a pedestrian crossing as people were crossing, trying to kill as many people as possible that way. The truck was traveling 40 to 50 kilometers per hour in a zigzag pattern tp avoid other vehicles. Kato drove around the area for 20 minutes before beginning the attack apparently trying to get the timing right for plowing into the intersection. Three of the five people he hit died.
Kato stopped the truck about 70 meters from the intersection and got out and ran back to the intersection with the a double edge combat knife in his hand, stabbing 12 people in the crowded intersection within one minute. As he ran from the truck he stabbed three people. In the intersection about 100 people were milling around. There he stabbed five people, three of them in the back. One of the victims was a policeman who was assisting victims hit by the truck.
Pedestrians initially thought only traffic accident had taken place. When they realized that a man with a knife was running amok they began to scatter. At this point in the attack Kato stabbed three of the fleeing people in the back.
The entire Akihabara rampage unfolded in less than two minutes. It resulted in the highest death toll for an attack of this kind in postwar history. The Washington Post described the scene as looking like a war zone with “puddles of blood and random shoes on the pavement.” Some of the victims did not even know they had been stabbed. The double edged knife Kato used made it easy for him to thrust deeply and withdraw the blade and repeatedly stab in this way with a minimum effort. One victim whose liver was penetrated by the knife died four hours after the attack in a hospital.
About five minutes after the attack began police officers from a local koban surrounded Kato in a back alley about 50 meters from the intersection. The policeman who first confronted Kato did so with a police baton. Kato managed to slash the policeman’s protective vest three time before the policeman pulled out his gun. At that point Kato dropped his knife. His face was covered with blood.
Akihabara Killer
Kato had posted a message on a cell phone bulletin board on the morning before he carried out his rampage that read: “I’m going to kill people in Akihabara.” He said he was “going to plow a car into [a crowd], and then—after the car becomes unusable—use a knife.” His last message, 20 minutes before he drove the truck into the intersection, was: “It’s time.”
Kato was lonely man who called himself “a cell phone addict.” He posted up to 200 messages a day on cell phone online bulletin boards about his work, issues with his parents, and desire for a girlfriend. He was also absorbed in manga, anime and video games, once telling a coworker, “People betray me, but anime and video games I create don’t.” He was also heavily in debt because of a car accident that resulted from a suicide attempt on an expressway.
Kato had three knives with him at the time of the killing: a double-edge, 13-centimeter dagger used in the stabbings, a butterfly knife and a throwing knife hidden in his sock. Afterwards Kato told police that job despair and worries about losing his job “made him kill.” Three days before the attack he left his workplace abruptly after being unable to find his work clothes in a dressing room, which a coworker said Kato might have interpreted as a message that he had been fired. On a bulletin board Kato wrote: “I made up my mind to carry out the stabbings two or three days ago...Of all the places I knew, the busiest place I could think of was the Akiharbara street during the times when it is closed to traffic.”
Kato is from a family of four from Aomori. His parents are divorced. He was regarded as one of the best students in his middle school and got into a prestigious high school in Aomori. When he started getting poor marks in high school he began to lose interest in school. Instead of going to university he decided to get an auto mechanic licence at a junior college in Gifu. He graduated from the college but never gt the license. He held a number of different jobs. At the time of the killings he lived in Susono, Shizuoka Prefecture, not far from Tokyo.
Kato said he hated life. Around 2004 he began sending e-mails tp a friend saying things like “I have no money” and “I want to die.” In a message on a cell phone bulletin board a few months he wrote, “I’ve been living the life of a loser.” In October 2008, Kato was deemed “mentally competent to stand trial.
Aftermath of the Akihabara Murder
The government responded by banning two-edged knives 5.5 centimeters or longer. Those caught with one face a maximum prison sentence of three years r a maximum fine of $5,000. Only 600 banned knives were turned into police as party of campaign to get people to turn in their knives,
After the Akihabara rampage, the number of online posts threatening murder dramatically increased, reaching 2,800 in eight months after the incident, eight times higher than before.
After the Akihabara attack there were several copy cat stabbing attacks, including the stabbing death of a female worker and the wounding of another woman by a 33-year-old man in a bookstore in a building connected to a train station on Hachioji, Tokyo. In another incident six people were injured by a woman with a knife at JR Hiratsuka Station in Kanagawa Prefecture. In Osaka, a woman dressed in black randomly stabbed a bystander in a subway station.
Bureaucrat Killer
In November 2008 a man named Takeshi Koizumi killed a 66-year-old vice minister in the health and welfare ministry and his 61-year-old wife in a knife attack at their home on Saitama outside Tokyo and seriously injured the 72-year-old wife of another health ministry bureaucrat in another attack in Tokyo. The apparent motive for the attack was to avenge the loss of a pet dog, which had been put to sleep at a public health center 34 years earlier. One police official said, , “I never imagined someone would have such an unusual motive .”
Koizumi turned himself in to police, saying “I killed the vice minister.” . Afterward police found a knife with a 20-centimeter-long blade in the bloodstained backseat of a minicar he had rented. Evidence such as knife marks in the victims arms indicated that the people that were attacked put up a struggle.
In the first attack the two victims were found side by side inside the entrance to their house. Blood that spilled outside the door alerted neighbors that something was wrong. In the second attack the killer posed as a delivery man and stabbed the 72-year-old victim after he handed her a box and searched for the 76-year-old bureaucrat but could not find him.
Koizumi later said, “I wanted to let the bureaucrats know that if they treated life no respect, they’d reap what they sowed, It was retribution.” He was reportedly unaware that municipal governments rather than the central government—to which the bureaucrats worked —had jurisdiction over public health centers involved with pet and animal control.
Cell Phone Chat Line Killers
In August 2007, three men—Tsukasa Kanda, Yoshitomo Hori and Kenji Kawagishi—who met using a cell phone chat line—abducted and killed a 31-year-old woman Rie Isogai in Nagoya. The three men, two of them unemployed at the time of the murder, met an underground mobile phone bulletin board known as “black-market job center” and discussed their plan to abduct a female passerby, get her to turn over her ATM card and pin number and then kill her.
The three men stole ¥62,000 from the victim using her cash card and ignored her pleas for mercy and bludgeoned her with a hammer and strangled her too death with adhesive tape and a rope and dumped her body in a forest in Gifu Prefecture. Kanda and Hori were give the death penalty. It was one of the few times that the perpetrators were given the death penalty for killing one person. Kawagishi was given a life sentence in part because he turned himself in shortly after the crime was committed.
Dismembered Bodies in Japan
In January 2007, a 21-year-old student in Tokyo murdered and dismember his younger sister with a knife and saw. The student, who had just failed exams to enter dental school, said he was angry when his sister, an aspiring actress, accused him of not having any dreams. The mother found the body parts and the dismembered head in a closet when she returned from visiting her family for the holidays and the murderer was off at a juku camp.
The victim was first bludgeoned with a wooden sword and then held underwater. In the shower in the bathroom the killer cut his sister into 10 pieces and placed them in three plastic bags and hid them under newspapers in his closet. The killer cleaned up the shower so well that there was not evidence if any blood. His plan was to dump the body parts when he returned from his juku trip. He told his parents not to go in the room where the body parts were kept because there was a dead shark in there.
In December 2006, a male torso was found in a garbage can on a narrow street in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo. The body had been hacked in half at naval level and beheaded. The left arm was missing from the elbow down. The right had was cut of the wrist. The man who found it told the Asahi Shimbun, “The area around the neck was severed straight across. At first I thought it was a mannequin.” Later a head was found in a park and the lower half of the body was found at private residence that matched the torso.
Kaori Mihashi, the 32-year-old wife of the victim, an employee of Morgan Stanley, admitted killing her husband. The woman killed her husband by clubbing him with a wine bottle while he was sleeping after having returning home drunk, dismembered him with a say and dumped parts of his body in different parts of Tokyo. Even though psychiatric experts forb both the prosecution and defense determined that she was unable to tell right from wrong when she committed the crime Mihashi was found guilty of murder and sentenced to prison for 15 years,
In 2006, a 21-year-old university student admitted that he buried two other students alive in Okayama in a dispute over a girlfriend.
More Dismembered Bodies in Japan
In May 2008, a severed head was found on the shore of Lake Biwa near Kyoto by a fisherman. The head matched up with a right leg that was found nine kilometers away a few days earlier.
In January 2007, the upper half of a body was found near the Yagigawa River in Ibaraki Prefecture. Thirteen days later the lower half was found distance away in Saitama Prefecture in a mountain forest near Ishioka. In June the wife of the victim admitted murdering her husband and chopping his body into two pieces. Police identified the victim—who appeared to have been suffocated—using dental records and records of medicines found in his body. The wife filed for divorce two months after her husband was murdered.
In January 2009, a 19-year-old boy was arrested fro murdering his 43-year-old mother, 15-year-old brother and 13-year-old sister. The killer had tried to slice off the heads of his victims but was unsuccessful. He did manage to slice open the abdomen of his mother and place a foreign object inside it.
In May 2007, a 17-year-old high school student in Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, killed his mother, cut off her right arm and head and went to a karaoke with her head in a school bag in the front basket if his bicycle, Later he visited an Internet café and watched a music video and then turned himself at a police station, saying “I cut of the arm with a saw, just like the head.”
The boy regular underwent treatment for a developmental disorder that made it difficult for him to establish interpersonal relationship. The boy told police, “I was hoping that a war or terrorist attack would occur,...I killed her myself at home...while she was asleep. I wanted to kill somebody, whoever it was. ...I killed my mother as she happened to be the one there. I wanted to kill someone, so it didn’t matter if they were family.” Manga with graphic violence were confiscated from the boy’s house.
In April 2008, a Filipino woman returned to her apartment in Minato Ward looking for her female room mate. In the house was a man in his 40s holding a body part. When asked the man said he didn’t know where her room mate was. When he left she called police. A paper bag containing part of a woman’s lower torso and an arm bone was found on a paper bag in the apartment along with a blood-soaked mattress. The roommate is believed to be to have been cut up with a sharp knife on the mattress.
Knife and Motorcycle Attacks in Japan
In August 2004, a 47-year-old man stabbed to death seven relatives with a knife and seriously injured another in Karogawa, a town west of Kobe. Among the dead was an 80-year-old woman. The man set fire to the house where the murders took place and was arrested after he crashed his car. According to police the man was unemployed and said he carried out the crime because he had a deep-seated grudge.
In September 2008, a 42-year-old man went on rampage during a shrine festival in Kanazawa and slashed people indiscriminately with a sickle, killing a 30-year-man and injuring six others. The killer worked a s vendor selling children’s toys and reportedly snapped after being teased by children.
In September 2008, a 48-year-old man was fatally beaten in Kakamigahara, Gifu Prefecture by two men on motorcycles who the man had scolded for nearly running him over when they ran a red light. According to witnesses the man and the bikers got into an argument and one the bikers got off his motorcycle and struck the man in the head, the man died o a brain hemorrhage,
Image Sources: exorsyst blog
Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Daily Yomiuri, Times of London, Japan National Tourist Organization (JNTO), National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
© 2009 Jeffrey Hays