Black Files: Echoes of Shōwa — five cases from the era that shaped modern Japan

Black Torii — Japanese True Crime · Aug 21, 2026 · 1h 13m

Most of the cases we cover on this show happened within living memory. Tonight, we go further back — into the Shōwa era, the six decades of upheaval that carried Japan through war, occupation, and reconstruction. These five cases are history now. But not one of them is finished. We begin in 1938, in a dark mountain hamlet in Okayama, where a 21-year-old man killed thirty of his neighbors in roughly ninety minutes — the worst one-man killing spree in modern Japanese history. Then, occupied Tokyo, 1948: a polite stranger posing as a health official walks into a bank, and twelve employees are…