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

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 Morinaga case. And the Monster with 21 Faces.

Glico Morinaga Case · 1984-03-18 · Osaka, Kobe, Shiga, and across Japan

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 Hijacking · 1970-03-31 · Tokyo → Seoul → Pyongyang

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 into the back of their SUV so hard that the vehicle punches through the guardrail and disappears over the edge of the bridge.

The children's mother, Kaori Ogami, would spend the next several minutes in the water in the dark, screaming her children's names.

This is the story of what happened on August 25th, 2006. And it's also the story of how one catastrophically selfish choice by one man forced Japan to completely rethink its relationship with drunk driving.

Fukuoka Drunk Driving Sea Deaths · 2006-08-25 · Uminonakamichi Ohashi Bridge, Higashi Ward, Fukuoka City, Japan

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 starts to feel like the real thing. They opened their wallets. They lent her money — hundreds of thousands of yen, in some cases millions.

And then the men who lent her that money started dying. A train accident. A drowning. A hanging. Another drowning. By the time police took a serious look at Miyuki Ueta in late 2009, six men connected to her were dead. Only two of those deaths would ever produce a murder conviction.

This is the Tottori Serial Suspicious Deaths case.

Tottori Serial Suspicious Deaths · 2004–2009 · Tottori Prefecture, Japan

It's 1:30 in the morning on May 21, 1938. A remote mountain hamlet in Okayama Prefecture is completely dark — someone cut the power lines eight hours ago.

A 21-year-old man steps out of his house. He has strapped two electric torches to his forehead. In his hands are a shotgun, a katana, and two daggers. An axe is on his belt.

His grandmother is already dead behind him. He killed her first.

What follows over the next ninety minutes is the worst one-man killing spree in modern Japanese history. By the time he reaches the hillside above the village and turns the gun on himself, thirty of his neighbors are dead.

His name is Mutsuo Toi. And before he picked up those weapons, he was mostly known as the boy with tuberculosis — the one the women in the village had stopped speaking to.

Tsuyama Massacre · 1938-05-21 · Kaio hamlet, Kamo Village, Okayama Prefecture, Japan

In the spring of 2006, in a farming town in northern Japan with a population of just four thousand people, a nine-year-old girl was found drowned in a river. Her mother — a single parent in her early thirties — appeared on national television, weeping. She demanded that police reopen what had been classified as a tragic accident. She made posters by hand and plastered them around town. She told reporters, with apparent devastation, that her daughter had been murdered, and that the killer was still out there.

She was right about all of it. Except for one detail.

The killer wasn't a stranger. It was her. And by the time Japan figured that out, she had killed again. This is the Akita Child Murders.

Akita Child Murders · 2006-04-09 · Fujisato-cho, Akita Prefecture, Japan

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 never been identified, and the reward for him sits unclaimed.

Then to Kabukicho, September 2001, where forty-four people died in a narrow four-story building. Police concluded in 2008 that the fire was most likely deliberately set — but no suspect was ever identified. The only convictions were for negligence, and every sentence was suspended.

Then to Osaka in 2021, where a man set fire to a psychiatric clinic and died of his own injuries two weeks later, taking his reasons with him.

And finally Amagasaki, where the woman at the center of at least eight deaths took her own life in detention, before her trial could begin.

Four cases. No verdict in any of them.

In this compilation:

• Episode 4: Setagaya Family Murder

• Episode 21: Kabukicho Building Fire (Myojo 56 Building Fire)

• Episode 22: Osaka Clinic Arson

• Episode 31: Amagasaki Serial Disappearances

Hachioji City, Tokyo. A Sunday night in late July 1995. The summer is at its worst — hot, humid, the kind of evening where you want the day to be over.

Inside a suburban supermarket called Nampei Owada, three women are working the closing shift. Two of them are high school students earning pocket money on the side. The third, a 47-year-old woman named Noriko Inagaki, has been the night manager for exactly one month.

By 9:15 in the evening, all three of them are dead — bound with tape, shot once in the head, left on the floor of the second-floor office.

And here is the part that nobody in Japan has been able to move past in thirty years: there has been no arrest. The perpetrator has never been identified. The case is still open today, with a six-million-yen reward sitting unclaimed. This is the Hachioji Supermarket Murders.

Hachioji Supermarket Murders · 1995-07-30 · Hachioji City, Tokyo, Japan