Black Torii — Japanese True Crime

Black Torii

Deeply researched, respectfully told stories of Japan's most infamous crimes. Each episode reconstructs what happened, how, and why — the people, the timeline, and the psychology behind the case.

  1. 1d ago

    Episode 101: Lod Airport Massacre

    Three men stepped off an Air France flight in Tel Aviv on the afternoon of May 30, 1972. They wore business suits. They were Japanese. They had no particular grievance with Israel, had never visited Palestine, and had no personal connection to any of the people in the terminal they were about to walk into. In the next twenty-four minutes, they would kill twenty-six people — most of them Puerto Rican Christian pilgrims who had flown halfway around the world to walk the streets of the Holy Land. It is one of the most disorienting crimes of the twentieth century. And it starts with a question that has never had a fully satisfying answer: how do three young men from Japan end up committing a massacre in Tel Aviv on behalf of a Palestinian organization, killing people who had nothing to do with any of it? This is the story of the Lod Airport Massacre. Lod Airport Massacre · 1972-05-30 · Lod Airport (now Ben Gurion International Airport), Israel

  2. 2d ago

    Episode 100: Katsutaro Baba

    It's autumn, 1905, in a mountain valley in Nagano. Japan has just won the Russo-Japanese War. The nation is celebrating. In small villages like Asahi, the shrine festivals are livelier than usual — people are staying out later, the paths between the rice paddies are busy with lanterns, and the air carries the particular feeling of a country that believes things are going well. Then a sixteen-year-old girl disappears at one of those festivals. Nine days later, her body is found in a rice field at the edge of the village. Her abdomen has been cut open with a knife. Her gallbladder has been removed. The police have no suspect. No one in the village does. And the man who did it will keep doing it for two more years, at festival after festival, killing six people in total — without a single person suspecting the quiet, hardworking neighbor who lived just down the road. This is the story of Katsutaro Baba. Katsutaro Baba · 1905-09-01 · Asahi village (present-day Tatsuno), Nagano Prefecture, Japan

  3. 3d ago

    Black Files: The Occupation Years — four killers who hid in the ruins of postwar Japan

    August 1945. Japan surrendered, and the country it left behind was in ruins. Its cities had been bombed. Food was scarce. The black market was how most people survived. And the police were trying to rebuild under foreign occupation. Tonight's Black Files is about four cases from those years, and about people who used the chaos to kill. We begin with Yoshio Kodaira, a decorated Navy veteran. In 1945 and 1946 he offered hungry women food and work, then led them into the woods. He was convicted of seven murders. Then Tokyo, 1948. A midwife named Miyuki Ishikawa ran a maternity home where newborns were left to die from deliberate neglect. Estimates of the deaths run past a hundred. She served four years. That same January, a man claiming to be a health official walked into a bank in Shiinamachi with a story about a dysentery outbreak. Twelve people died. The man convicted of it, Sadamichi Hirasawa, denied it until he died in prison in 1987, and many still doubt he did it. And finally Genzo Kurita, a black market broker who killed at least seven people between 1948 and 1952, including a mother and two of her children at a cliff called Osen Korogashi. Her seven-year-old daughter survived. The war was over. For these victims, the danger wasn't. In this compilation: • Episode 83: Yoshio Kodaira • Episode 88: Miyuki Ishikawa • Episode 47: Teikoku Bank Affair • Episode 96: Genzo Kurita — The Osen Korogashi Murders

  4. 3d ago

    Episode 99: Hiroaki Hidaka Hiroshima Murders

    It's April 1996, in Hiroshima. A sixteen-year-old girl climbs into a taxi late at night. She's there under the same kind of arrangement that tens of thousands of Japanese teenagers had fallen into during the bleak years after Japan's economic bubble burst — a paid date with an older man, quick cash for brand-name clothes and the feeling that the economy hadn't swallowed her entirely. The driver is thirty-four years old. He's wearing the neat uniform that Hiroshima taxi companies require of their men. White shirt, black tie. She never gets out of that cab alive. And over the following five months, three more women are killed the same way. Same man. Same method. Same necktie. This is the story of Hiroaki Hidaka — and of the hidden economy that made women invisible to the law and visible to the men who wanted to harm them. Hiroaki Hidaka Hiroshima Murders · 1996-04-18 to 1996-09-14 · Hiroshima, Japan

  5. 4d ago

    Episode 98: Sadakichi Shimizu Meiji Murders

    Japan 1882. The Meiji era is fourteen years old. Tokyo is remaking itself — gas lamps replacing paper lanterns, brick buildings rising where wood once stood, former samurai drifting through a city that no longer needs them. And somewhere in the backstreets of Honjo, a traditional masseur with a Western revolver is preparing to commit the first pistol murder in Japanese criminal history. His name was Sadakichi Shimizu. He was in his mid-forties, had spent years working the alleys and tenements of Tokyo's east side, and by the time police caught him, he had committed more than eighty burglaries and is believed to have killed somewhere between five and six people — the exact count was disputed even at trial. What nobody disputed was this: Shimizu used a pistol. In a country where guns were tightly controlled, where serious crimes were almost always committed with blades or bare hands, Shimizu introduced a weapon that changed what crime could look like in Japan. The story became so notorious that when Japan's film industry made its very first drama film — in 1899, six years after his execution — they chose Sadakichi Shimizu as their subject. --- Sadakichi Shimizu Meiji Murders · 1882–1887 · Honjo / Ryogoku / Bakurocho / Hamacho, Tokyo

  6. 5d ago

    Episode 97: Seisaku Nakamura

    Somewhere in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, in the summer of 1941, a seventeen-year-old boy killed five people in the space of six weeks. Two of them died on the same afternoon. A third was his own brother. He was deaf from birth. He had never spoken a word anyone could clearly understand. And he had grown up, by almost every account, at the very edge of the world — a boy who could see the lives around him but could not reach them, who had spent his entire childhood being treated as something between a burden and a ghost. When the police came to his family's home after his brother's murder, the survivors refused to say who had done it. They were afraid of him. That silence kept him free for another year. This is the story of Seisaku Nakamura, known as the Hamamatsu Deaf Killer. And it is also, in a quieter way, the story of what happens when a society decides it has no obligation to a person who cannot hear it. Seisaku Nakamura · 1938–1942 · Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan

  7. 6d ago

    Episode 96: Genzo Kurita — The Osen Korogashi Murders

    October 11, 1951. A remote cliff on the Boso Peninsula, in Chiba Prefecture. The place is called Osen Korogashi — named for an old legend about a girl who fell to her death here, somewhere in the distant past. The cliff drops roughly twenty meters to the rocky coast below. Nobody lives nearby. Nobody is passing through. A twenty-nine-year-old woman is here. She came from the countryside with her children, looking for her husband, who had gone missing. Somewhere along the way, a stranger had offered to help — to guide them, show them the roads, get them where they needed to go. He seemed harmless. Then they reached the edge of the cliff. What happened in the next few minutes turned this place into one of the darkest landmarks in postwar Japanese crime history. And it was not the first time Genzo Kurita had done something like this — nor would it be the last. Genzo Kurita — The Osen Korogashi Murders · 1948–1952 · Shizuoka, Tochigi, and Chiba Prefectures, Japan

  8. Oct 5

    Episode 95: Yoshinori Ueda Dog Lover Murders

    January 24th, 1994. Snow is falling on a rented farm field on the outskirts of Shiojiri City, in Nagano Prefecture — one of those flat, unremarkable parcels that nobody visits in the deep of winter. Remote enough, quiet enough, that you could bury something there and trust it would stay buried. Today, that trust ends. Police arrive with shovels and a missing-person report. They find a steel storage locker, half-sunk in the frozen earth. Inside it, the body of Sachiko Takahashi — forty-seven years old, a housewife from Osaka, someone who'd trusted a man she knew through their shared love of dogs. And before the end of February, officers will dig up four more people from the same patch of ground. Five victims. All dog lovers. All connected to the same self-styled dog trainer from Yao City, Osaka — a man who learned how to kill from watching a veterinarian put a puppy to sleep. This is the story of Yoshinori Ueda. Yoshinori Ueda Dog Lover Murders · 1992-1993 · Yao, Osaka / Shiojiri, Nagano, Japan

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Deeply researched, respectfully told stories of Japan's most infamous crimes. Each episode reconstructs what happened, how, and why — the people, the timeline, and the psychology behind the case.

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