Episode 13: Niigata Girl Confinement

Black Torii — Japanese True Crime · Jul 13, 2026 · 14m

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…