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 woman does everything the system tells her to do, and the system fails her anyway.

Stabbing of Mayu Tomita · 2016-05-21 · Koganei, Tokyo, Japan

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 poisoned — a conviction followed, but the doubts around it never went away. A year later, the president of Japan's national railways vanishes from a department store and is found dead on the tracks; whether it was suicide or murder has never been officially resolved. In 1963, a sixteen-year-old girl is murdered in Sayama, and the man convicted — Kazuo Ishikawa — spends thirty-one years in prison insisting on his innocence, a claim he maintained until his death. And in 1970, nine young radicals armed with katana swords seize a domestic flight in Japan's first-ever hijacking, bound for Pyongyang.

Five cases. One era. And shadows that reach all the way to today.

In this compilation:

• Episode 39: Tsuyama Massacre

• Episode 47: Teikoku Bank Affair

• Episode 48: Shimoyama Incident

• Episode 44: Sayama Incident

• Episode 42: Yodo-go Hijacking

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 Assault.

AKB48 Handshake Assault · 2014-05-25 · Takizawa, Iwate Prefecture, Japan

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 part that makes this case more than just a violent crime story. The man who did this was eighteen years old. And what happened when he finally stood trial — what a panel of ordinary Japanese citizens decided to do with him — set a legal precedent that still shapes how Japan handles its most extreme cases of juvenile violence today. This is the Ishinomaki Murder case.

Ishinomaki Murder · 2010-02-10 · Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan

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 at the tracks where his body lay. Not anywhere nearby. A man doesn't get struck by a high-speed locomotive and leave almost no blood behind — unless he was already dead when he got there.

Was it suicide? Was it murder staged to look like a train accident? Was it something that powerful forces in postwar Japan needed buried quickly? The Shimoyama Incident is one of this country's most fiercely debated unsolved cases — and it has never been resolved. Not officially. Not ever.

Shimoyama Incident · 1949-07-06 · Tokyo, Japan

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 verdict and the probable truth may be very different things, and where the shadow of one of Japan's darkest wartime secrets reaches all the way into the conviction.

Teikoku Bank Affair · 1948-01-26 · Shiinamachi, Toshima Ward, Tokyo, Japan

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 get out. And the man in the Joker suit, when police reached him, would sit calm at the scene. He had planned this for months. He didn't want to escape. He wanted to be sentenced to death. This is the story of the Tokyo Keio Line attack.

Tokyo Keio Line Attack · 2021-10-31 · Keio Line, Chōfu, Tokyo, Japan

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 from Tokyo toward Osaka, carrying more than 800 people. A young man in Car 12 reaches into his bag and pulls out a machete.

He is not confused. He is not panicking. He has been planning this for a while. And the goal — when you finally understand what it was — is the part that changes the way you look at everything else.

Shinkansen Stabbing 2018 · 2018-06-09 · Tokaido Shinkansen, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan

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 left cyanide-laced candy on supermarket shelves. Around the year 2000, with the statutes of limitations expired, the investigation was formally closed. Not solved. Closed.

Then Hachioji, July 1995. Three women working a Sunday closing shift at a suburban supermarket — two of them still in high school. The safe they were guarding was never opened. Thirty years on, the case remains open, and a six-million-yen reward sits unclaimed.

And finally Setagaya, the last night of 2000, where a killer murdered a family of four and left behind more physical evidence than almost any unidentified suspect in Japanese history — and still has no name.

Three cases. No answers.

In this compilation:

• Episode 43: Glico Morinaga Case

• Episode 37: Hachioji Supermarket Murders

• Episode 4: Setagaya Family Murder

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-one years in prison. He was sentenced to death. He maintained his innocence every single day until he died at eighty-six years old — in 2025, just a few months ago. And the physical evidence that put him there? A published scientific study has now dismantled the most important piece of it.

This is the Sayama Incident — one of Japan's most bitterly contested wrongful convictions, and a story about what happens when a justice system decides who the guilty party is before it has looked at the facts.

Sayama Incident · 1963-05-01 · Sayama City, Saitama Prefecture, Japan