Episode 8: Kyoto Animation Arson

Black Torii — Japanese True Crime · Jul 9, 2026 · 13m

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…