It is a Wednesday morning in September. The sun is already high over Tokyo. The wide boulevard running from Ikebukuro Station toward Sunshine City — one of the busiest commercial stretches in the entire country — is packed the way it always is. Shoppers moving between stores. Students on a late start. Office workers on a break, grabbing something before heading back inside. In front of Tokyu Hands, one of Japan's most popular lifestyle department stores, the pavement is alive with the ordinary business of an ordinary day.

At 11:35 in the morning, a 23-year-old man standing in that crowd suddenly screams. He screams in Okayama dialect — his home dialect, the one from a prefecture a full day's travel away — something that translates roughly to: "I'm pissed off. I'll kill every last one of you."

Then he pulls out a kitchen knife and a hammer, and he starts.

Six minutes. Eight people attacked. Two dead, six injured. And when it was over — when a group of bystanders finally tackled the man and held him down until police arrived — a question began to form over Japan that would not go away for years. How does a young man who showed up to work every single morning, who his employer described as hardworking and without complaint, end up doing something like this to people he has never met?

This is the story of the 1999 Ikebukuro Rampage.

Ikebukuro Rampage (池袋通り魔殺人事件) · 1999-09-08 · East Ikebukuro, Toshima Ward, Tokyo, Japan

There's a house in Higashi-ku, a quiet residential ward of Fukuoka city. It's a normal family home in a normal neighborhood — the kind of place that doesn't call attention to itself. But parked outside, according to what was later described in court, is a Mercedes-Benz. And for three young men watching the street that summer, that car is a sign. Not just of wealth, but of what they believe is waiting inside.

On the night of June 19th, 2003, they go in.

Inside is a family of four. A businessman named Shinjiro Matsumoto, forty-one years old. His wife Chika, forty. Their two children — eleven and eight. None of them are expecting anyone. None of them will survive the night.

And here is the detail that makes this case so hard to sit with: the amount of money the three men reportedly found, according to court proceedings, was roughly ¥37,000. That's the equivalent of a few hundred dollars. For that — for an assumption triggered by a car, and an amount that wouldn't cover a month's rent in Fukuoka — a family was wiped out. This is the Fukuoka family murder case.

Fukuoka Family Murder · 2003-06-20 · Higashi-ku, Fukuoka, Japan

She arrived for every date with a home-cooked meal. Elaborate food, prepared with time and care — the kind of cooking that says I put thought into this, I put you first. And for the men who met her through Japan's marriage-hunting websites, that meal was often the most intimate attention they'd received in years.

In 2009, police in Saitama Prefecture found a 41-year-old man dead in a rental car. Carbon monoxide. Charcoal briquettes still burning inside. It looked, at first glance, like a suicide.

It wasn't.

Detectives started pulling the thread. And what unravelled was a pattern: lonely men, marriage websites, a cheerful woman who cooked extraordinary meals — and a string of suspicious deaths stretching back at least two years. Her name was Kanae Kijima. And by the time it was over, Japan would call her something else: the Black Widow. The Konkatsu Killer.

Kanae Kijima Black Widow Poisonings · 2009 · Tokyo, Saitama, Chiba, Japan

It was a Friday morning in Osaka's Kitashinchi district — one of the most vibrant entertainment and business areas in western Japan. The time was just after ten.

On the fourth floor of a modest eight-story office building, about thirty people were gathered inside a psychiatric clinic. They weren't there against their will. They had come, as they did most weeks, because they were struggling — struggling with the pressures of work, with anxiety, with depression. This was a clinic specifically for workers' mental health, and many of them had been coming for months, even years, trying to get better.

In the next few minutes, twenty-five of them would be dead.

Not from a mass stabbing. Not from a shooting. From a fire that burned just twenty-five square meters — smaller than many living rooms — and was mostly extinguished within half an hour. This is the story of the Osaka clinic arson: the deadliest criminal act in Japan since the Kyoto Animation massacre two years earlier.

Osaka Clinic Arson · 2021-12-17 · Kitashinchi, Kita-ku, Osaka, Japan

Some crimes stand alone. These three do not. They are chapters of a single story — the story of Aum Shinrikyo, the doomsday cult that spent six years escalating from murder in the night to chemical warfare at rush hour.

It begins in November 1989, in a Yokohama apartment. A thirty-three-year-old lawyer named Tsutsumi Sakamoto had been helping families recover their loved ones from the cult. Six Aum members entered his home in the early morning hours and killed him, his wife, and their fourteen-month-old son. The family simply vanished — and stayed missing for nearly six years.

Because no one connected Aum to that crime, the cult kept building. In June 1994, in a quiet neighborhood in Matsumoto, a converted truck released sarin gas into the summer night air. Seven people died that night. More than five hundred were sickened. And police spent months blaming an innocent neighbor while the real killers planned their next attack.

That attack came on March 20, 1995, when five cult members boarded three Tokyo subway lines at the height of the morning commute. Thirteen people died. More than five thousand were poisoned.

Three cases. One cult. This is the shadow of Aum — told in the order it actually happened.

In this compilation:

• Episode 17: Sakamoto Family Murder

• Episode 16: Aum Matsumoto Sarin Incident

• Episode 2: Tokyo Subway Sarin Attack

It's just after one in the morning on a Saturday, and Kabukicho is still very much alive. This is the corner of Tokyo that never sleeps — neon signs blazing, hostess bars packed, mahjong parlors full of late-night players grinding through hands of cards. The streets outside hum with noise and footsteps. Nobody inside a narrow four-story building on one of the side alleys is thinking about fire exits.

They never got the chance.

Forty-four people died in that building before sunrise. And more than twenty years later, nobody has been arrested for starting the fire. This is the story of the Kabukicho Building Fire — one of the deadliest and least talked-about disasters in modern Japanese history.

Kabukicho Building Fire (Myojo 56 Building Fire) · 2001-09-01 · Kabukicho, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan

April 14, 1999. A young mother is home alone with her baby daughter in Hikari City, a small coastal town in Yamaguchi Prefecture, at the western tip of Japan's main island. Her husband left for work that morning the same way he always did. She has no reason to think today is anything other than an ordinary Thursday.

There is a knock at the door. The man outside says he's there to check the plumbing.

She lets him in.

In the next few minutes, Yayoi Motomura — twenty-three years old, with an eleven-month-old daughter named Yūka — will be murdered in her own home. Her baby will be murdered too. And the case that follows will drag on for thirteen years, forcing Japan to ask a question it had never fully answered before: can a teenager — a person not yet considered a legal adult — be put to death for something this terrible?

This is the story of the Hikari Mother-Child Murder.

Hikari Mother-Child Murder · 1999-04-14 · Hikari City, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan

She was seventeen years old, cycling home from a part-time job on a November evening in suburban Saitama. A few minutes from her front door. An ordinary Tuesday night in 1988.

She never made it home.

What happened next unfolded inside a house in Tokyo — over 44 days, beneath the notice of a city of millions. Adults lived in the same building. They heard what was happening. They said nothing.

When Junko Furuta's body was finally found, it was encased in concrete inside a steel drum, abandoned in a vacant lot near the bay. The case is considered the worst act of juvenile violence in Japan's post-war history. The four teenagers primarily responsible served between five and twenty years each. At least three of them went on to commit more crimes after their release.

This is what happened.

Concrete-Encased Schoolgirl Murder (女子高生コンクリート詰め殺人事件) · 1988-11-25 · Ayase, Adachi Ward, Tokyo, Japan

In the summer of 1988, small girls started vanishing from the streets of western Tokyo and Saitama.

One family received a box in the mail a few months later. Inside: hundreds of bone fragments, baby teeth, and photographs of a child's clothing. A typed note that said: "Mari. Cremated. Bones. Investigate. Prove."

When police finally arrested a suspect the following summer, they walked into a room wallpapered floor-to-ceiling with nearly six thousand videotapes. And somewhere in that collection, hidden among the anime and horror films, was footage of the killer's own crimes.

This is the story of Tsutomu Miyazaki — the case Japan calls the Little Girl Murders.

Miyazaki Otaku Murders · 1988-08-22 · Tokyo and Saitama Prefecture, Japan

November 1989. A lawyer in Yokohama goes to sleep with his wife and their fourteen-month-old son. He is thirty-three years old, working to help families who have lost relatives to a religious cult. By morning, all three of them are gone — and no one will know what happened for six years.

Their bodies will not be found in one place. They will be found in three separate mountain ranges, in three separate prefectures, sealed inside metal drums. And their teeth will have been smashed to prevent identification.

This is the story of the Sakamoto family murder — the crime that Japan's deadliest cult committed first, the one that revealed how far they were willing to go, and the one that no one connected to them until after they had already killed more than a dozen strangers on the Tokyo subway. This is Episode 17.

Sakamoto Family Murder · 1989-11-04 · Isogo Ward, Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan