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

Matsumoto, Japan. A quiet residential neighborhood. It is 10:40 at night on June 27, 1994, and most of the people on this street are asleep. A van rolls slowly past a low-rise apartment building and parks. Nothing about this looks unusual. Nothing about the night gives any warning of what is about to happen.

The van is pumping invisible death into the air.

By morning, seven people in the Kaichi Heights neighborhood are dead. More than five hundred are sick, some in comas. And the police are about to spend nine months blaming the wrong man — a grieving neighbor who nearly died himself, while the people actually responsible drove away and started planning their next attack. This is the story nobody tells when they talk about sarin in Japan. The dress rehearsal. The attack that happened a year before the one everybody knows. This is Matsumoto, 1994.

Aum Matsumoto Sarin Incident · 1994-06-27 · Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan

June 1st, 2004. Lunchtime at a primary school in Sasebo, a port city in Nagasaki Prefecture. An eleven-year-old girl asks her classmate to come with her to an empty room down the hall.

The classmate is twelve. She trusts her. She says yes.

Minutes later, a teacher finds the eleven-year-old standing in the corridor — alone — soaked in blood. "I did a very bad thing," the girl says, quietly. She doesn't run. She doesn't cry. She doesn't make excuses. She just stands there and confesses.

What happened in that empty classroom would shock Japan to its core — not because it was the work of a hardened criminal, but because the person who did it was a child. An ordinary-seeming child who had been coming apart, quietly and invisibly, for months. And the thing that set it off was a few lines of text in an online chat room.

And then the internet got involved. And the story got stranger still.

Sasebo Slashing (Killing of Satomi Mitarai) · 2004-06-01 · Okubo Elementary School, Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan

A seven-year-old girl was walking home from school along a route she had taken dozens of times. It was a Wednesday afternoon in November, broad daylight, a quiet residential area in Nara City. She never made it home.

Her mother's cell phone lit up with a message sent from her daughter's own number. Attached was a photograph of the girl. The text read: "I've got your daughter."

The man who sent it had been convicted of sexually assaulting children before — not once, but repeatedly, across more than a decade. He had served prison time. He had been released. He had moved into a nearby apartment and built a quiet, invisible life delivering newspapers every morning. And the story of how he got there — and what happened next — exposed something deeply broken in the way Japan monitored people who prey on children. This is the case of Kaede Ariyama, and the man who took her.

Nara Girl Murder (奈良小1女児殺害事件) · 2004-11-17 · Nara City / Sango-cho, Nara Prefecture, Japan

A nine-year-old girl walks home from a school baseball game in a quiet city in northern Japan. She doesn't make it.

The police search. They search for weeks, then months. Theories multiply. One that's taken seriously is that North Korean agents may have taken her — this is the early nineties, abductions by foreign agents were known to happen along that coast. The search turns up nothing. The years pass. Japan moves on.

Nine years and two months later, on a cold January night in the year 2000, she walks up to two police officers and tells them her name. She is nineteen years old. She can barely stand. Her muscles have wasted away from years without movement. And despite being nineteen, she speaks and behaves like a child — because developmentally, that's exactly where time stopped for her.

The room where she spent nearly a decade was two hundred meters from a police station. This is the Niigata Girl Confinement Incident.

Niigata Girl Confinement · 1990-11-13 · Sanjō and Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture, Japan

She had been in Japan for less than three months. Twenty-two years old, a biology graduate from a small village in Warwickshire, England, teaching English to adults in Tokyo, saving up for a world tour with her boyfriend. By any measure, Lindsay Hawker had done everything right.

She was reported missing on a Monday morning when she didn't show up for work. By that same evening, police knew exactly where she had been — and they had already let the man responsible walk out the door.

Tatsuya Ichihashi was on the run for two and a half years. He performed surgery on his own face to avoid recognition. He became a bestselling author before his trial even started. And when it was all over, a Japanese court decided he did not deserve to die for what he had done.

This is the story of Lindsay Hawker, and the slow-motion failure that kept her killer free far longer than he should have been.

Lindsay Hawker Murder · 2007-03-26 · Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan

She was twenty-one years old, tall and blonde, and she had come to Tokyo looking for a fresh start. In less than two months she had a new job, a new city, and a whole new life taking shape. Then, on the first of July 2000, she walked out the door to meet a customer who had promised to buy her a mobile phone — and she was never seen alive again.

It took seven months to find her body. When investigators finally did, what they found in that seaside cave was so horrifying that the case became front-page news on two continents.

What it eventually revealed was something worse than one man's crime. This is the story of Lucie Blackman, and the methodical predator who had been hunting women in Tokyo for almost a decade before anyone stopped him.

Lucie Blackman Case · 2000-07-01 · Roppongi and Zushi, Tokyo, Japan

July 8th, 2022. Morning in Nara, Japan. A former prime minister stands on a sidewalk outside a suburban train station, giving a campaign speech to maybe a hundred people in the summer heat. It's a small event. The kind of thing politicians do all the time. Bodyguards are present. Camera crews are present. Everything looks ordinary.

Then a man walks up behind him and fires a homemade gun.

The first shot sounds like a firecracker. People look around, confused. The second shot brings Shinzo Abe to the ground.

Here is the thing that made this case unlike almost any other: Japan has some of the strictest gun laws in the world. Gun homicides here average in the single digits per year across a country of 125 million people. And yet, the most powerful politician Japan had produced in a generation was killed by a man who built his weapon himself — with parts from a hardware store. This is the story of the assassination of Shinzo Abe.

Assassination of Shinzo Abe · 2022-07-08 · Yamato-Saidaiji Station, Nara City, Nara Prefecture, Japan

July 25, 1998. A Saturday evening in the quiet Sonobe neighborhood of Wakayama City. Families are setting up folding tables in a parking lot. Children are running around in the humid summer heat. Elderly neighbors pull up chairs. Paper lanterns sway overhead. This is the annual summer festival run by the local residents' association — the kind of community gathering that happens in thousands of Japanese neighborhoods every year. There is cold barley tea, conversation, and a big pot of curry simmering in someone's garage.

By morning, four of those neighbors are dead. Sixty-three others are being treated in hospitals across the city for acute arsenic poisoning. Someone had mixed enough poison into that communal pot to kill over a hundred people.

And here is what makes this story unlike almost anything else we have covered: twenty-six years later, we still cannot say with absolute certainty who did it. This is the Wakayama Curry Poisoning.

Wakayama Curry Poisoning · 1998-07-25 · Sonobe district, Wakayama City, Wakayama Prefecture, Japan

On a quiet Thursday morning in July 2019, in a narrow three-story building on a residential street in Kyoto, about seventy people were at work making animated stories that people around the world loved.

In the space of a few minutes, thirty-six of them would be dead.

The man who killed them didn't carry a weapon in the conventional sense. He carried two blue plastic containers filled with forty liters of gasoline. And the grievance that drove him was this: he believed the studio had stolen his novel — specifically, he would later claim, a scene in which characters buy discounted meat at a supermarket.

That's the detail you have to sit with as you hear this story. Because everything that follows — the fire, the deaths, the years of trial proceedings — flows from a delusion so untethered from reality that it's almost impossible to hold at the same time as the weight of what it caused. This is the story of the Kyoto Animation arson.

Kyoto Animation Arson · 2019-07-18 · Fushimi Ward, Kyoto, Japan