Black Torii — Japanese True Crime

Black Torii
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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.

  1. 1d ago

    Black Files: Political Killings — A Century of Violence Against the Public Sphere

    Japan likes to think of itself as a country where politics is settled by argument, not by blood. These three cases say otherwise. Tonight's Black Files spans nearly a hundred years, from a military police cell in 1923 to a train station sidewalk in 2022. Each time, someone decided that a person's place in public life made them a target. We begin in September 1923, days after the Great Kanto Earthquake, with martial law in force. Military police took the anarchist Sakae Osugi, the feminist writer Ito Noe, and Osugi's six-year-old nephew into custody. None of them came out alive. The officer convicted of the killings, Lieutenant Masahiko Amakasu, was released after about three years. Then October 1960. Socialist Party chairman Inejiro Asanuma is speaking at a televised debate in Hibiya Public Hall when a seventeen-year-old ultranationalist rushes the stage with a short sword. A photographer caught the moment, and that image won a Pulitzer Prize. Finally, July 2022 in Nara. Former prime minister Shinzo Abe is giving a campaign speech when a man fires a gun he built himself. His grievance wasn't really with Abe's politics. It was with a church he blamed for ruining his family. Three killings, three very different motives, and one question running through all of them: what happens to a country when someone decides that a bullet or a blade will settle what an argument couldn't? In this compilation: • Episode 92: Amakasu Incident • Episode 111: Assassination of Inejiro Asanuma • Episode 10: Assassination of Shinzo Abe

  2. 1d ago

    Episode 127: Kawasaki Hostel Fire

    Just after midnight, in the old industrial quarter of Kawasaki City, a fire broke out in a wooden building that most people in Japan would never visit and had never heard of. The building was a kan'i shukuhakusho — a "simple lodging house" — the cheapest and most marginal form of shelter in the country. Inside, nearly ninety people were sleeping, most of them elderly men on welfare, placed there by the city because they had nowhere else to go. The fire jumped to the building next door, through a shared wall. Within an hour, eleven people were dead. Japan's fire investigators spent nine months examining the ruins. In February 2016, the Kawasaki City Fire Bureau published its conclusion: the fire had been deliberately set. No one has ever been arrested. No suspect has ever been publicly named. And more than a decade later, the question of who killed eleven sleeping welfare recipients in Kawasaki on the night of May 17th, 2015 — and why — has never been answered. This is the story of the Kawasaki hostel fire. Kawasaki Hostel Fire · 2015-05-17 · Hinode-cho, Kawasaki-ku, Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan

  3. 2d ago

    Episode 126: Murder of Rina Shimabukuro

    A Thursday evening in late April. Warm Okinawan air, the kind that settles in after a long day at work. The kind of night when the streets of a mid-sized island city feel safe, familiar — the kind where you think nothing of going for the walk you've taken a hundred times before. Rina Shimabukuro was twenty years old. She left her apartment in Uruma City that night — April 28th, 2016 — the way she always did. For a walk after work. She never came home. What happened to her triggered a murder conviction, a protest of more than 65,000 people, and a diplomatic crisis that reached the desk of two governments. The man who killed her was an American — a former Marine, a base contractor, a man who had lived in Okinawa for years, walked its streets, adopted its language, and married one of its people. This is the murder of Rina Shimabukuro. Murder of Rina Shimabukuro · 2016-04-28 · Uruma City, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan

  4. 3d ago

    Episode 125: Osaka Konohana Pachinko Arson

    July 5, 2009. A Sunday morning in Konohana Ward — a working-class neighborhood on the western waterfront of Osaka, built on reclaimed industrial land. Inside a six-story commercial building, a pachinko parlor is already open and already packed. The noise is constant: hundreds of steel balls rattling through hundreds of machines, music layered over the top of it, cigarette smoke thick in the air. Reports indicate around ninety-five people are on the parlor floor. Another thirty-six are elsewhere in the building. It is a Sunday. This is what people do on Sundays. One man walks in carrying a container of gasoline. He pours it across the floor. He lights a match. And then he walks out. Five people inside that building will not walk out. They die in a fire that arrives with no warning, in a place they chose to spend a morning. And the man who set it will travel three hundred kilometers through the night before walking into a police station the next morning and telling investigators exactly what he wanted: to kill as many people as he could, as fast as he could. He did not know any of them. He did not care who they were. This is the story of the 2009 Osaka Konohana Pachinko Arson. Osaka Konohana Pachinko Arson · 2009-07-05 · Konohana Ward, Osaka, Japan

  5. 4d ago

    Episode 124: Osaka Movie Theater Arson

    Just before three in the morning, inside a narrow building in Osaka's entertainment district, twenty-six men are sleeping. Not in beds. In booths — tiny, two-square-meter cubicles designed for watching adult videos in private, rented by the hour. Some of them have been there for hours already, curled up on the floor or in a chair because this is cheaper than a hotel and the trains stopped running long ago. The venue is called Cats. It is the kind of place that doesn't advertise, that most people don't talk about, that the city mostly pretends doesn't exist. Then the fire alarm goes off. The duty manager hears it. He walks over and turns it off. He thinks it is a false alarm. He is wrong. By the time the sun rises over Osaka, sixteen men will be dead. This is the story of the Osaka Movie Theater Arson. Osaka Movie Theater Arson · 2008-10-01 · Naniwa Ward, Osaka, Japan

  6. 5d ago

    Episode 123: Amagasaki Derailment

    Nine-nineteen in the morning, April 25th, 2005. A Monday. Rush hour in the suburbs of Osaka. A seven-car train is rolling along the Fukuchiyama Line, packed with hundreds of commuters heading to work, to school, to the kind of ordinary places people go on ordinary mornings. In about two seconds, it is going to enter a curve at nearly twice the speed limit. The driver's name is Ryujiro Takami. He is twenty-three years old. He has been on the job for eleven months. In this moment, he is not panicking. He is not confused. By all accounts, he is doing arithmetic — calculating how many seconds he has lost and whether he can get them back before the logs are reviewed at the end of the line. He is running 90 seconds late. And at the company where he works, 90 seconds is not a small thing. One hundred and seven people died when that train left the rails. And almost every one of them died not because a young man lost his nerve — but because a company had spent years building a system that made him afraid of the wrong thing. This is the story of the Amagasaki derailment, Japan's worst train disaster in over forty years. And while the crash took two seconds to happen, the conditions that caused it were more than a decade in the making. Amagasaki Derailment · 2005-04-25 · Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan

  7. 6d ago

    Episode 122: 1995 Okinawa Rape Incident

    September 4, 1995. Three American servicemen rent a van, drive to a quiet village on Okinawa Island, and abduct a twelve-year-old girl on her way through the neighborhood. They tape her eyes, hands, and feet. They rape her and beat her. Then they leave. Japanese police identify all three suspects within days. But here is the part that turned this into a political explosion: they cannot arrest them. Not yet. Under the US-Japan Status of Forces Agreement — SOFA — American military personnel accused of crimes outside duty hours remain in US military custody until Japan files a formal criminal indictment. That paperwork takes twenty-five days. By the time the three men are handed over, Okinawa has already begun to shake. This is the story of an attack that exposed fifty years of unresolved tension between a small island, a military alliance, and the question of whose safety actually counts. 1995 Okinawa Rape Incident · 1995-09-04 · Kin Village, Okinawa, Japan

  8. Oct 31

    Episode 121: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Bombing

    It is twelve forty-five on a Friday afternoon in Tokyo. August 30, 1974. The streets around Marunouchi — the financial heart of the city, pressed between Tokyo Station and the Imperial Palace grounds — are busy with lunchtime crowds. Workers are stepping out for noodles. Shoppers are passing through. Inside the lobby of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries headquarters, hundreds of people are going about their day. Eight minutes earlier, the switchboard rang. A caller said there was a bomb in the building. The operator decided it was a prank and hung up. Four minutes earlier, the phone rang again. Same warning. Same dismissal. At 12:45 PM precisely, the bomb detonated. Eight people were killed. Somewhere between 376 and 380 were injured. And Japan had just experienced the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in its postwar history — carried out not by foreign agents or organized crime, but by a group of young Japanese citizens who had decided that their own country's corporations were legitimate military targets. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Bombing · 1974-08-30 · Marunouchi, Tokyo, 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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