November 17, 2005. Two sisters are at home in their apartment in Naniwa ward, Osaka. Asuka Uehara is twenty-seven. Her younger sister Chihiro is nineteen. They share their lives in the way that close siblings do — the same walls, the same routines, the ordinary rhythms of a household. Their neighbor moved into the building six days ago. They probably never even learned his name.

That neighbor had already killed someone. He had beaten his own mother to death with a baseball bat five years earlier, at the age of sixteen. And Japan's juvenile justice system, after reviewing his case, had made a formal determination: it decided he was correctable. It decided he could be reformed. He served his time, and they let him go.

Asuka and Chihiro had no way of knowing any of this. In Japan, juvenile criminal records are sealed by law. This is the story of the Osaka Sisters Murder.

Osaka Sisters Murder · 2005-11-17 · Naniwa-ku, Osaka, Japan

A stolen gun. Four cities. Four people dead in twenty-five days.

And then — this is the part that doesn't fit the script — a death-row cell, and a man who couldn't really read, teaching himself. Writing. Publishing. Becoming, against every conceivable expectation, a bestselling author while he waited for the state to kill him.

Norio Nagayama killed four people in the autumn of 1968. He was nineteen years old. He came from the kind of poverty that Japan's postwar economic miracle simply pretended didn't exist. And his case — the long, tangled legal fight over whether a state can execute a man it never bothered to save — produced the standard that Japanese courts still use today when they decide who gets the death penalty.

His name is attached to that standard now. The Nagayama criteria. It bears the name of the boy from Hokkaido who pulled the trigger — and the nine questions judges have asked ever since.

This is his story.

Norio Nagayama Serial Shooting · 1968-10-11 · Tokyo, Kyoto, Hakodate (Hokkaido), Nagoya — Japan

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 that would spend years afterward trying to understand how that could have happened without anyone stopping it.

This is the story of the Osaka child abandonment deaths of 2010.

Osaka Child Abandonment Deaths · 2010-07 · Nishi Ward, Osaka, Japan

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. Some of those complaint records were later found to have been falsified. Her death gave Japan its first anti-stalking law, passed in November 2000.

Then to Ishinomaki, February 2010, where an eighteen-year-old arrived before dawn at the home of the young woman who had left him — five days after he had already been documented assaulting her. Two other young women died. The sentence he received made legal history.

And finally to Tokyo, May 2016, and a twenty-year-old performer named Mayu Tomita, who reported threatening messages weeks before she was attacked outside a concert venue — and was told she was not in immediate danger. She survived. The law was amended seven months later.

Three cases. The same warning, ignored three times.

In this compilation:

• Episode 35: Okegawa Stalker Murder

• Episode 49: Ishinomaki Murder

• Episode 51: Stabbing of Mayu Tomita

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 tells them that he is dead, at a room in an inn on the other side of the city. And then she says — depending on which account you believe — something along the lines of: I cut them off because I wanted to take the part of him most important to me.

This is the Sada Abe Incident. It happened in the spring of 1936, two years before the Pacific War began. And it became one of the most debated, most reinterpreted, most filmed crimes in Japanese history. Not because of the body count — there was one victim. But because of what it said about love, obsession, and the limits of possession.

Sada Abe Incident · 1936-05-18 · Arakawa Ward, Tokyo, Japan

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 over, Mana and Riko were both dead, ten other people were injured, and the eighty-seven-year-old man behind the wheel was not arrested.

Ikebukuro Runaway Car Accident · 2019-04-19 · Higashi-Ikebukuro, Toshima, Tokyo

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 with a knife chasing a woman in the street, the officers who responded had no reason to think they would need body armor.

Both of them would be dead before the next sunrise. And the man who killed them had never broken the law to get his weapons. He had followed every rule. The licenses were all in order. This is the story of the 2023 Nakano City Shooting.

Nakano City Shooting · 2023-05-25 · Nakano City, Nagano Prefecture, Japan

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.

Then a man stood up. And the ordinary Friday evening became something nobody on that train will ever fully stop carrying with them.

This is the story of the 2021 Odakyu Line stabbing — an attack in which ten people were hurt, no one died, and a single act of violence went on to inspire a wave of copycat crimes that put Japan's commuter train culture on edge for years. And the question at the center of it doesn't have a clean answer: what do you do with a man who has decided, quietly and over a very long time, that he has been cheated by the world?

Odakyu Line Stabbing · 2021-08-06 · Odakyu Electric Railway, Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan

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 arrested at the scene, he told officers simply: "I intended to kill my family."

What the police didn't know yet — what would only emerge in a courtroom five years later — was that he had selected three victims deliberately. He had concluded, it's said, that in Japan you need to kill at least three people to qualify for the death penalty. He wanted to be executed. He killed three family members in order to arrange his own death through the legal system.

He did not get the death penalty. He received life imprisonment instead. And this — the crime, the calculation behind it, and the verdict that denied him what he'd sought — is the story of the Takarazuka Crossbow Familicide.

Takarazuka Crossbow Familicide · 2020-06-04 · Takarazuka, Hyogo, Japan

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 gap between what the state promises and what it actually provides — that story had been building for thirty years. This is the Kumazawa case.

Kumazawa Father-Son Murder · 2019-06-01 · Tokyo, Japan