Episode 27: Neomugicha Bus Hijacking

Black Torii — Japanese True Crime · Jul 28, 2026 · 13m

It's Golden Week in Japan — the biggest national holiday stretch of the year. Millions of people are traveling. The highways are full. And on a Nishitetsu express bus rolling out of Saga at lunchtime on May 3rd, 2000, there are twenty-one passengers who have no reason to think this will be anything other than a routine forty-minute ride to Fukuoka. They would not arrive in Fukuoka for fifteen and a half hours. And here is the thing that set this case apart from every Japanese hijacking that came before it: one hour before a seventeen-year-old boy pulled out a kitchen knife and seized control…