Shows / Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
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.
Episodes
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 54: Odakyu Line Stabbing
It was a Friday evening in August 2021. Tokyo was still hosting the Summer Olympics — empty stadiums, careful celebrations, the entire city putting on its most…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 53: Takarazuka Crossbow Familicide
On a quiet morning in early June 2020, a twenty-three-year-old university student woke up before dawn in his family home in Takarazuka — a city in Hyogo…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 52: Kumazawa Father-Son Murder
On the morning of June 1st, 2019, a 76-year-old man picked up the phone and called the police. He told them, calmly, that he had just stabbed his son. And then…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 51: Stabbing of Mayu Tomita
She had done everything right. She returned the gifts. She blocked him on social media. She went to the police — weeks in advance — told them a man was…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Black Files: Echoes of Shōwa — five cases from the era that shaped modern Japan
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…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 50: AKB48 Handshake Assault
There are roughly 200,000 tickets sold at a single AKB48 national handshake event. Fans spend thousands of yen for a few seconds of eye contact and a handshake…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 49: Ishinomaki Murder
It was 6:40 in the morning on February 10th, 2010, in Ishinomaki — a coastal city in Miyagi Prefecture, quiet and ordinary in the frozen winter dark. Most…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 48: Shimoyama Incident
July 5th, 1949. Sadanori Shimoyama, the most powerful railroad man in Japan, stepped out of his company limousine in central Tokyo. He was going to buy his…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 47: Teikoku Bank Affair
January 26, 1948. A well-dressed man steps into a bank branch in Toshima Ward, Tokyo, shortly after the bank has closed to the public. He says he's a…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 46: Tokyo Keio Line Attack
Halloween night, 2021. A packed commuter train rolls west toward Shinjuku, and among the passengers — some of them already in costume — sits a young man in a…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 45: Shinkansen Stabbing 2018
The Shinkansen is not just a train. It is a symbol. When it launched in October 1964 — the same week as the Tokyo Olympics — it represented Japan's postwar…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Black Files: No Name, No Face — Japan's Cases That Were Never Solved
Most of the cases we cover end with a name. An arrest, a courtroom, a sentence — some kind of line drawn under it. These three don't. Tonight, three Japanese…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 44: Sayama Incident
On May 1st, 1963, a sixteen-year-old girl walked home from school in a quiet city north of Tokyo, and never arrived. A ransom note arrived at her family's door…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 43: Glico Morinaga Case
In the spring of 1984, someone in Japan decided to go to war with the country's biggest candy companies. Not with bombs, not with a clear and reasonable…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 42: Yodo-go Hijacking
It was a Tuesday morning in Tokyo, and by every surface measurement, Flight 351 was a nothing flight — a short domestic hop from Haneda Airport to Fukuoka, two…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 41: Fukuoka Drunk Driving Sea Deaths
It's a summer evening in Fukuoka. A family of five is on a bridge. The parents are in the front seats. In the back are three children — a four-year-old boy, a…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 40: Tottori Serial Suspicious Deaths
In one of Japan's quietest, most rural prefectures, a woman worked the night shift at a snack bar. Nothing unusual about that. Tottori Prefecture has been…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 39: Tsuyama Massacre
It's 1:30 in the morning on May 21, 1938. A remote mountain hamlet in Okayama Prefecture is completely dark — someone cut the power lines eight hours ago. A…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 38: Akita Child Murders
In the spring of 2006, in a farming town in northern Japan with a population of just four thousand people, a nine-year-old girl was found drowned in a river…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Black Files: No One Ever Stood Trial — Japan's Cases That Never Reached a Verdict
Most of the cases in this series end in a courtroom. Someone is named, someone is charged, and a country says out loud what happened and who did it. The four…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 37: Hachioji Supermarket Murders
Hachioji City, Tokyo. A Sunday night in late July 1995. The summer is at its worst — hot, humid, the kind of evening where you want the day to be over. Inside…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 35: Okegawa Stalker Murder
Shiori Ino filed her first police report in the summer of 1999. She was twenty-one years old — a university student in Saitama Prefecture — and she was being…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 36: Nagasaki Boy Murder 2003
A 4-year-old boy named Shun Tanemoto was in the game corner of an electronics store in Nagasaki City while his mother shopped nearby. She was a few aisles…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 34: Toyokawa Housewife Murder
He was seventeen years old. Good grades. Respected by the younger kids at school. A member of the soft tennis club. Nothing about the way he looked or talked…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 33: Sasebo Schoolgirl Murder 2014
There's a city in western Japan, a port town called Sasebo. About two hundred and fifty thousand people live there. It's a quiet place — a naval base, some…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 32: Kitakyushu Serial Murders
There's a kind of evil that doesn't announce itself with violence. It arrives quietly — as charm, as trust, as the slow realization that you've already done…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 31: Amagasaki Serial Disappearances
When police in Japan's Hyogo Prefecture pulled a steel drum from the waters of Okayama harbor in October 2011, they knew something was wrong before they even…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 30: Nagoya University Poisoning
She was nineteen years old. She was studying at one of Japan's most respected national universities. By every outward measure — grades, campus life, social…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Black Files: Too Young to Punish — Japan's Juvenile Law on Trial
Japan's Juvenile Law was written in 1948. It was built on a simple premise: a child who commits a crime is still a child, and the state's job is to…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 29: Meguro Child Abuse Death (Death of Yua Funato)
A five-year-old girl woke up at four in the morning every single day, not to go to school, not because of a nightmare — but because her stepfather ordered it…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 28: Kawasaki Stabbing (2019)
It was 7:44 in the morning on a Tuesday in late May. A cluster of elementary school students was gathered at a bus stop in a quiet residential neighborhood in…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 27: Neomugicha Bus Hijacking
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…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 26: Shimonoseki Station Rampage
Wednesday afternoon. The end of the working day. A busy regional rail station in the western city of Shimonoseki, right on the tip of Japan's main island where…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 25: Ikebukuro Rampage
It is a Wednesday morning in September. The sun is already high over Tokyo. The wide boulevard running from Ikebukuro Station toward Sunshine City — one of the…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 24: Fukuoka Family Murder
There's a house in Higashi-ku, a quiet residential ward of Fukuoka city. It's a normal family home in a normal neighborhood — the kind of place that doesn't…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 23: Kanae Kijima Black Widow Poisonings
She arrived for every date with a home-cooked meal. Elaborate food, prepared with time and care — the kind of cooking that says I put thought into this, I put…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Black Files: The Shadow of Aum — Japan's Doomsday Cult
Some crimes stand alone. These three do not. They are chapters of a single story — the story of Aum Shinrikyo, the doomsday cult that spent six years…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 22: Osaka Clinic Arson
It was a Friday morning in Osaka's Kitashinchi district — one of the most vibrant entertainment and business areas in western Japan. The time was just after…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 21: Kabukicho Building Fire (Myojo 56 Building Fire)
It's just after one in the morning on a Saturday, and Kabukicho is still very much alive. This is the corner of Tokyo that never sleeps — neon signs blazing…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 20: Hikari Mother-Child Murder
April 14, 1999. A young mother is home alone with her baby daughter in Hikari City, a small coastal town in Yamaguchi Prefecture, at the western tip of Japan's…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 19: Concrete-Encased Schoolgirl Murder
She was seventeen years old, cycling home from a part-time job on a November evening in suburban Saitama. A few minutes from her front door. An ordinary…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 18: Miyazaki Otaku Murders
In the summer of 1988, small girls started vanishing from the streets of western Tokyo and Saitama. One family received a box in the mail a few months later…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 17: Sakamoto Family Murder
November 1989. A lawyer in Yokohama goes to sleep with his wife and their fourteen-month-old son. He is thirty-three years old, working to help families who…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 16: Aum Matsumoto Sarin Incident
Matsumoto, Japan. A quiet residential neighborhood. It is 10:40 at night on June 27, 1994, and most of the people on this street are asleep. A van rolls slowly…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 15: Sasebo Slashing (Killing of Satomi Mitarai)
June 1st, 2004. Lunchtime at a primary school in Sasebo, a port city in Nagasaki Prefecture. An eleven-year-old girl asks her classmate to come with her to an…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 14: Nara Girl Murder
A seven-year-old girl was walking home from school along a route she had taken dozens of times. It was a Wednesday afternoon in November, broad daylight, a…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 13: Niigata Girl Confinement
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…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 12: Lindsay Hawker Murder
She had been in Japan for less than three months. Twenty-two years old, a biology graduate from a small village in Warwickshire, England, teaching English to…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 11: Lucie Blackman Case
She was twenty-one years old, tall and blonde, and she had come to Tokyo looking for a fresh start. In less than two months she had a new job, a new city, and…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 10: Assassination of Shinzo Abe
July 8th, 2022. Morning in Nara, Japan. A former prime minister stands on a sidewalk outside a suburban train station, giving a campaign speech to maybe a…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 8: Kyoto Animation Arson
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…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 9: Wakayama Curry Poisoning
July 25, 1998. A Saturday evening in the quiet Sonobe neighborhood of Wakayama City. Families are setting up folding tables in a parking lot. Children are…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 7: Sagamihara Care Home Stabbings
At two in the morning on a Tuesday in July 2016, most of the residents of Tsukui Yamayuri-en were asleep. They were adults with severe intellectual and…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 6: Zama Serial Killings (Twitter Killer)
In the autumn of 2017, a twenty-seven-year-old man in a quiet Japanese city was killing people — one at a time, over ten weeks — and almost nobody noticed. The…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 5: Osaka Ikeda School Massacre
It was ten in the morning on a Thursday in June. Children in neat school uniforms were sitting at their desks, just like every other day. Parents had already…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 3: Kobe Child Murders (Sakakibara Case)
On the morning of May 27, 1997, teachers and students arriving at Tomogaoka Junior High School in Kobe found something waiting for them at the school gate…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 4: Setagaya Family Murder
It's New Year's Eve, 2000. Somewhere in the quiet western suburbs of Tokyo, a family of four is going to be murdered tonight. The killer who does it will leave…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 2: Tokyo Subway Sarin Attack
It's 8 o'clock in the morning in Tokyo. The trains are packed the way Tokyo trains always are during rush hour — shoulder to shoulder, silent, nobody making…
- Black Torii — Japanese True Crime
Episode 1: Akihabara Massacre
Noon, on a bright Sunday in the middle of Tokyo. The most famous electronics district in the world has just closed its main street to traffic, the way it does…