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  • Black Files: Poison from the Fields — three killings with farm chemicals

    Black Files: Poison from the Fields — three killings with farm chemicals
    2026/10/23
    In postwar Japan, some of the deadliest substances in the country weren't kept in laboratories. They sat in sheds and storerooms and on the shelves of agricultural supply stores. They were insecticides and weed killers, made to protect crops, and they could be bought or brought home without much trouble. Tonight's Black Files covers three cases where those chemicals were turned on people. We begin in Kumamoto City in late 1960. Sadame Sugimura was deep in debt, and the pesticide parathion came into her home through her partner's delivery work. Within about two months she had poisoned four women she knew, through food and drink. Three of them died. A few months later, in March 1961, about twenty women met at a community center in a mountain village in Mie Prefecture. Someone had laced the wine with an agricultural insecticide, and five women died. One man confessed, took the confession back, and died on death row still insisting he was innocent. More than sixty years later, his family is still asking for a retrial. Finally, 1985. Across western Japan, someone left bottles laced with paraquat near vending machines for strangers to find. At least thirteen people died. No one has ever been identified. It started with neighbors, then a whole village meeting, and ended with complete strangers. All three cases used poison bought for the fields. In this compilation: • Episode 105: Sadame Sugimura Serial Poisonings • Episode 107: Nabari Poisoned Wine Case • Episode 89: Paraquat Murders
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    39 分
  • Black Files: Meiji and Taisho — five killings from Japan's first modern decades

    Black Files: Meiji and Taisho — five killings from Japan's first modern decades
    2026/10/16
    The Meiji Restoration remade Japan almost overnight. Within a single generation the samurai class was gone, the cities filled with gas lamps and brick, and a new national police force was formed. It was still learning how to catch a killer. Tonight's Black Files goes back before the Showa era, to five cases from Japan's first modern decades. We begin in 1880s Tokyo with Sadakichi Shimizu, a masseur who robbed the homes of his own clients. He carried a Western revolver, and he is believed to have killed five or six people before a young patrolman stopped him. Then a mountain village in Nagano, 1905. On festival nights over two years, six people were killed. The man responsible was a trusted neighbor nobody suspected. Next comes Tokichi Ishii, a lifelong robber who heard that an innocent man was about to hang for a murder Ishii had committed. So he confessed. Then Sataro Fukiage. He killed a child in Kyoto at seventeen and spent sixteen years in prison, where he taught himself to read. Within about a year of his release, he was killing again. And finally the autumn of 1923. Tokyo lay in ruins after the Great Kanto Earthquake, and a military police officer killed two famous radicals and a six-year-old boy. He was sentenced to ten years and was released after about three. A new nation, with new laws. The old dangers hadn't gone anywhere. In this compilation: • Episode 98: Sadakichi Shimizu Meiji Murders • Episode 100: Katsutaro Baba • Episode 103: Tokichi Ishii • Episode 67: Sataro Fukiage Serial Killings • Episode 92: Amakasu Incident
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    1 時間 8 分
  • Episode 116: Tokushima Radio Merchant Murder Case

    Episode 116: Tokushima Radio Merchant Murder Case
    2026/10/26
    It is past midnight in a small city on the island of Shikoku. A man is dead. His common-law wife is injured, lying in the same room. Their nine-year-old daughter has just seen something horrifying. And she will try to tell people what she saw. No one in authority will believe her. This is the story of Fuji Shigeko — a woman convicted of murder on evidence that was coerced, fabricated, and concealed. She served over a decade in prison. She spent the rest of her life fighting to clear her name. She died fighting. And six years after she was gone, a Japanese court finally said: not guilty. This is the Tokushima Radio Merchant Murder Case. Tokushima Radio Merchant Murder Case · 1953-11-05 · Tokushima City, Tokushima Prefecture, Japan
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    14 分
  • Episode 115: Hiroshi Nakamura Dissident Shootings

    Episode 115: Hiroshi Nakamura Dissident Shootings
    2026/10/25
    November 23, 1956. A young man who used to study at Tokyo University — the most elite institution in Japan — stands in front of a police officer on the outskirts of Tokyo and pulls the trigger. He is twenty-six years old. He believes he is at war. He goes to prison for twenty years. He comes out. And then, thirty-nine years later, in the spring of 1995 — with the entire city still shaking from one of the worst terrorist attacks in Japanese history — someone waits outside the home of Japan's highest-ranking law enforcement official and shoots him on his way to work. Japan throws fifteen years and enormous resources at solving that second case. They never do. The statute of limitations expires. And in May 2024, Hiroshi Nakamura dies in prison at the age of ninety-three, taking whatever answers he had with him. This is the story of a man who may have shot Japan twice. Sixty-eight years apart. Hiroshi Nakamura Dissident Shootings · 1956-11-23 · Tokyo, Japan
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    15 分
  • Episode 114: Noda City Child Abuse Death

    Episode 114: Noda City Child Abuse Death
    2026/10/24
    She was ten years old. She had found a way to ask for help — a school welfare questionnaire handed out by her teacher, meant to be confidential. So she picked up her pencil and she wrote the truth: my father is hurting me. Can't you do anything? The system received her message. Then it handed it directly to her father. Mia Kurihara died on the morning of January 24, 2019, in the bathroom of her family home in Noda, Chiba. She had been dead for weeks before any of the institutions that had known she was in danger answered for what they had failed to do. Noda City Child Abuse Death · 2019-01-24 · Noda, Chiba Prefecture, Japan
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    12 分
  • Episode 113: Zama and Shibuya Shootings

    Episode 113: Zama and Shibuya Shootings
    2026/10/23
    July 29, 1965. A summer morning in a quiet suburb south of Tokyo, the fields still cool, the city still waking up. An eighteen-year-old named Misao Katagiri was out in the countryside near Zama-machi, Kanagawa, doing something he apparently did often: shooting birds with a rifle. Sparrows, by most accounts. Nothing dramatic. A private obsession on a Thursday morning. A police officer stopped him. What happened in the minutes after that stop — and in the hours that followed — would leave one officer dead, turn a commercial street in the heart of Tokyo into an open gunfight, and freeze five thousand bystanders in place as they watched something none of them had a frame for. One of those bystanders was a sixteen-year-old named Norio Nagayama. He would spend the next three years drifting. Then he would steal a gun, and use it. This is the story of the 少年ライフル魔事件 — the Boy Rifle Fiend Incident — and how a single encounter on a summer morning unraveled an entire day. Zama and Shibuya Shootings · 1965-07-29 · Zama, Kanagawa / Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan
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    12 分
  • Episode 112: Yamaguchi Arson and Murders

    Episode 112: Yamaguchi Arson and Murders
    2026/10/22
    In the summer of 2013, a tiny mountain hamlet in Yamaguchi Prefecture woke to smoke and silence. Two homes had burned to the ground overnight. Beneath the charred timber, five elderly people lay dead — beaten to death before the fires were set. Five victims out of a community of twelve. One-third of the village, in a single night. When investigators looked at the home of the one neighbor who had disappeared, they found something in the window. A handwritten verse, a haiku: "Setting a fire — smoke gives delight — to a country fellow." The man who had written it was already gone, somewhere in the surrounding mountains. Japan would spend the next five days searching for him. When they found him — dressed only in his underwear, alone in the woods — he offered an explanation that would divide public opinion and eventually be rejected by every court that examined it. This is the story of the Yamaguchi arson and murders. Yamaguchi Arson and Murders · "2013-07-21" · "Mitake hamlet, Shunan, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan"
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    12 分
  • Episode 111: Assassination of Inejiro Asanuma

    Episode 111: Assassination of Inejiro Asanuma
    2026/10/21
    October 12th, 1960. Hibiya Public Hall, in the heart of Tokyo, a short walk from the Imperial Palace. Three political parties are holding a televised debate — cameras rolling, audience seated, the kind of event that looks safe precisely because it's so formal. At 3:05 in the afternoon, a seventeen-year-old in the crowd broke from his seat. He vaulted onto the stage, crossed the floor in two or three strides, and drove a short sword into the left side of Inejiro Asanuma, the chairman of the Japan Socialist Party. A photographer named Yasushi Nagao was standing in the room with a camera. He caught the exact moment the blade entered the man's body. That photograph would win the Pulitzer Prize. Asanuma died within minutes. And the boy who killed him would be dead three weeks later — found in a juvenile detention cell, a message written in toothpaste on the wall. This is the story of the assassination of Inejiro Asanuma — and of the radicalized teenager who carried it out in front of the entire country. Assassination of Inejiro Asanuma · 1960-10-12 · Hibiya Public Hall, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan
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    13 分