He was seventeen years old. Good grades. Respected by the younger kids at school. A member of the soft tennis club. Nothing about the way he looked or talked or moved would have made you uneasy.

On May 1st, 2000 — a national holiday, the start of Golden Week — he walked to a house roughly a hundred meters from his school, stepped through an unlocked front door, and killed a sixty-five-year-old woman he had never met.

When police asked him why, he said something that stopped Japan in its tracks: "I wanted to try killing someone."

No rage. No grievance. No money. Just curiosity about what it would feel like.

This is the Toyokawa Housewife Murder.

Toyokawa Housewife Murder · 2000-05-01 · Toyokawa City, Aichi Prefecture, Japan

There's a city in western Japan, a port town called Sasebo. About two hundred and fifty thousand people live there. It's a quiet place — a naval base, some fishing boats, mountains behind it and the sea in front.

In 2004, a twelve-year-old girl in Sasebo lured a classmate into a restroom and slit her throat with a box cutter. Japan was shaken to its core.

It was the worst crime of its kind anyone could remember. And it happened in Sasebo.

Ten years later — almost to the day — another girl in Sasebo killed another classmate. The same city. Two generations of schoolgirls. And this time, what happened inside that apartment was, in some ways, even harder to explain.

This is the story of the murder of Aiwa Matsuo.

Sasebo Schoolgirl Murder 2014 · 2014-07-26 · Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan

There's a kind of evil that doesn't announce itself with violence. It arrives quietly — as charm, as trust, as the slow realization that you've already done something you cannot undo. Between 1996 and 1998, in a cramped apartment in Kitakyushu, Japan, a man named Futoshi Matsunaga killed seven people without ever personally pulling a trigger or picking up a knife. He made their own family members do it for him. And when it was over, he had the killers living under the same roof, bound to silence by their own actions.

Japanese prosecutors, in their closing statement, told the court that this case was "without comparison in the criminal history of Japan."

They were not exaggerating.

Kitakyushu Serial Murders · 1996–1998 · Kitakyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan

When police in Japan's Hyogo Prefecture pulled a steel drum from the waters of Okayama harbor in October 2011, they knew something was wrong before they even cracked it open. The drum was too heavy. And when they did open it, they found what they feared — a body, sealed in concrete.

The victim was a man named Jiro Hashimoto. He was fifty-three years old. And he was only the beginning.

What investigators uncovered over the months that followed was something that had been hiding in plain sight for nearly twenty-five years — a woman in her early sixties who had drawn at least five separate families into her orbit, isolated and broken them, and then turned their own members against one another in a system of abuse and murder so entrenched that some of the people inside it couldn't remember a life before it.

The Japanese media called her the Black Queen Bee. They called her circle the Piranha Family. This is the story of the Amagasaki Serial Disappearances.

Amagasaki Serial Disappearances · 1987–2011 · Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan

She was nineteen years old. She was studying at one of Japan's most respected national universities. By every outward measure — grades, campus life, social ease — she appeared to be thriving.

And in the bathroom of her Nagoya apartment, a seventy-seven-year-old woman's body was decomposing. It had been there for weeks. She hadn't called anyone. She hadn't tried to dispose of the remains. She hadn't even bothered to seal the door frame against the smell. She just kept living in that apartment, going to class, while what she had done sat in the room next to hers.

But here's the part that makes this case more than just a shocking crime. If you go back to her Twitter account — to the posts she'd been making for years before any of this — she told anyone who would listen exactly what she was going to do. This is the story of a girl who poisoned classmates at sixteen, murdered an elderly woman at nineteen, and left a public trail of warnings that nobody followed up on in time.

Nagoya University Poisoning · 2014-12-07 · Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan (murder); Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture (thallium poisonings)

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 bodily injury resulting in death, and served between roughly five and twenty years. One Japanese magazine called the outcome a defeat of the juvenile law.

In 1997, a fourteen-year-old in Kobe left a child's remains at his own school gate with a note signed in an invented name. In 1999, an eighteen-year-old in Hikari City killed a young mother and her infant daughter — and would eventually become the youngest person sentenced to death in Japan in sixty-six years. In 2000, a seventeen-year-old hijacked a highway bus for fifteen and a half hours, after announcing it on a public message board. And in 2004, in a Sasebo classroom, an eleven-year-old killed her twelve-year-old classmate — too young to be prosecuted at all.

Japan amended the law in 2000. These are the cases that forced it.

In this compilation:

• Episode 19: Concrete-Encased Schoolgirl Murder

• Episode 3: Kobe Child Murders (Sakakibara Case)

• Episode 20: Hikari Mother-Child Murder

• Episode 27: Neomugicha Bus Hijacking

• Episode 15: Sasebo Slashing (Killing of Satomi Mitarai)

A five-year-old girl woke up at four in the morning every single day, not to go to school, not because of a nightmare — but because her stepfather ordered it. She had to exercise. Then she had to practice writing. And if she made a mistake — even a tiny one, a single crooked character in her notebook — there were consequences she was too small and too exhausted to survive.

The message she left in that notebook is one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever read. And the worst part — the part that haunts everyone who looks at this case — is that the people whose job it was to protect her were right there, twice, and sent her back anyway.

This is the story of Yua Funato, and the systems that failed her.

Meguro Child Abuse Death (Death of Yua Funato) · 2018-03-02 · Meguro Ward, Tokyo, Japan

It was 7:44 in the morning on a Tuesday in late May. A cluster of elementary school students was gathered at a bus stop in a quiet residential neighborhood in Kawasaki — backpacks on, dressed in navy school uniforms, waiting for the bus that would take them to Caritas Elementary School, a private Catholic school nearby. Parents stood with them. The morning air was still.

A man was walking toward them. He was fifty-one years old, a local resident who had barely left his house in years. He lived just a short distance away with his elderly uncle and aunt. He had not held a job in a very long time. In each hand, he was carrying a long-bladed knife.

In the final few seconds before everything changed, he didn't shout, and he didn't run. He walked up quietly — like someone heading somewhere ordinary. And then he raised the knives. In under a minute, twenty people were attacked. Two of them didn't survive.

This is the story of the 2019 Kawasaki stabbing.

Kawasaki Stabbing (2019) · 2019-05-28 · Tama ward, Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan

It's Golden Week in Japan — the biggest national holiday stretch of the year. Millions of people are traveling. The highways are full. And on a Nishitetsu express bus rolling out of Saga at lunchtime on May 3rd, 2000, there are twenty-one passengers who have no reason to think this will be anything other than a routine forty-minute ride to Fukuoka.

They would not arrive in Fukuoka for fifteen and a half hours.

And here is the thing that set this case apart from every Japanese hijacking that came before it: one hour before a seventeen-year-old boy pulled out a kitchen knife and seized control of that bus, he told the internet exactly what he was about to do. He posted it on a public message board, under the alias "Neomugicha" — Neo-Barley Tea. The people who read it laughed at him. They told him he was lying.

He wasn't. This is the Neomugicha Bus Hijacking.

Neomugicha Bus Hijacking (西鉄バスジャック事件) · 2000-05-03 · Kyushu Expressway to Sanyo Expressway, Japan (Fukuoka–Hiroshima)

Wednesday afternoon. The end of the working day. A busy regional rail station in the western city of Shimonoseki, right on the tip of Japan's main island where it meets the sea. Commuters pushing through the east exit. Families with shopping bags. A perfectly ordinary late September afternoon.

At 4:25 PM, a rented car comes through the glass entrance doors at full speed.

There is no warning. The car doesn't brake. It drives sixty meters through the station concourse, through the crowd, before finally stopping. The driver gets out. He has a kitchen knife. And he isn't finished.

By the time it's over, five people are dead and ten more are injured. The man who did it is arrested right there inside the building, a few minutes after it started. He doesn't run. He never planned to. What he tells police next — the reason he came here at all — is the part that stays with you.

This is the Shimonoseki Station Rampage.

Shimonoseki Station Rampage · 1999-09-29 · JR Shimonoseki Station, Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan