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  • Black Files: How They Got the Weapon — four cases from a country where guns barely exist

    Black Files: How They Got the Weapon — four cases from a country where guns barely exist
    2026/09/04
    Japan is one of the hardest places on earth to get a gun. Entire years pass with fewer than ten shootings across a country of 125 million people. A licence takes months — a written exam, a psychological evaluation, police inspecting how the weapon is stored in your home, renewal every three years. For most people here, the only firearm they will ever see is the one on a police officer's hip. This compilation is about four different ways that wall came down. We start in 1968, with a nineteen-year-old who got into the residential housing of the US naval base at Yokosuka and walked out with a cheap .22 revolver. Twenty-five days, four cities, four people dead — and, eventually, a death-penalty standard that still carries his name. Then Nara, 2022. A man who could not buy a gun, so he built one from hardware store parts, and used it on a former prime minister standing on a sidewalk. Then Takarazuka, 2020, where the weapon wasn't a gun at all — a crossbow, sold over the counter to anyone over eighteen, because the law had never thought to ask. It asked afterwards. And we end in Nakano, 2023, with the hardest case of the four: a licensed farmer who had passed every check the state required. Two of those four weapons were entirely legal to own. In this compilation: • Episode 59: Norio Nagayama Serial Shooting • Episode 10: Assassination of Shinzo Abe • Episode 53: Takarazuka Crossbow Familicide • Episode 55: Nakano City Shooting
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    53 分
  • Episode 67: Sataro Fukiage Serial Killings

    Episode 67: Sataro Fukiage Serial Killings
    2026/09/08
    In 1906, in the shadow of one of Japan's most famous landmarks, a seventeen-year-old boy led an eleven-year-old girl to a quiet place and killed her. He was caught. He was imprisoned. He spent sixteen years behind bars teaching himself to read, working through ancient philosophy, and filling pages with his own words. When he walked out of prison in 1922, he was, by any outward measure, a changed man. Within a year, the killing started again. Sataro Fukiage murdered at least seven girls over nearly two decades. His case is not just about violence. It is about what happens when society discards a child — and then, years later, is surprised by what that child becomes. Sataro Fukiage Serial Killings · 1906 / 1923–1924 · Kyoto, Japan
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    14 分
  • Episode 66: Yasutoshi Kamata Osaka Ripper

    Episode 66: Yasutoshi Kamata Osaka Ripper
    2026/09/07
    Osaka, 1985. An unemployed man in his mid-forties lives alone in an apartment in the crowded southern district of Nishinari. He moves constantly — twenty or more known addresses over the years — and he keeps entirely to himself. He has no job, no family nearby, no ties that anyone around him can track. For nearly a decade, women enter his apartments and don't come out. He isn't caught by a detective closing in on a pattern, or by forensic evidence piling up. He is caught by accident — arrested for stealing clothes, of all things — and only then does the picture begin to come into focus. Five people dead. Four women and a nine-year-old girl. Bodies dismembered and scattered across woodlands north of the city. A name nobody recognized because nobody had been looking for it. This is the story of Yasutoshi Kamata — the Osaka Ripper. Yasutoshi Kamata Osaka Ripper · 1985–1994 · Osaka, Japan
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    12 分
  • Episode 65: Yuka Takaoka Stabbing

    Episode 65: Yuka Takaoka Stabbing
    2026/09/05
    Shinjuku, Tokyo, before sunrise, May 2019. A young woman sits on the floor of a building corridor, perfectly still, one leg stretched out, the other bent at the knee. Beside her on the floor, a man lies bleeding. She holds a cigarette between her fingers. A police officer stands nearby. She doesn't look at him. Someone takes a photograph. Within hours, it is everywhere. The man survived. She was twenty-one years old. And in the weeks that followed, something unsettling happened: a corner of the internet fell in love with her — not in spite of what she had done, but because of it. This is the story of Yuka Takaoka, the woman Japan called its real-life yandere. Yuka Takaoka Stabbing · 2019-05-23 · Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan
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    12 分
  • Episode 64: Murder of Rikako Okamoto

    Episode 64: Murder of Rikako Okamoto
    2026/09/04
    On the first day of May, 2006, a woman drove to an apartment building in Hiratsuka, a quiet coastal city in Kanagawa Prefecture. She was there to check on her son. He hadn't been in contact for weeks, and she was worried in the way that mothers get when the silence goes on too long. She unlocked the door and stepped inside a single room. What she found would take investigators months to fully unravel. There were five bodies in that apartment. Two adults. Three children. And the strangest, most disturbing detail wasn't the number — it was the timeline. One of those children had been six years old when he disappeared in 1984. The woman who lived in that apartment had told her neighbors, for twenty-two years, that North Korean agents had taken him in the night. He never left the apartment. This is the Hiratsuka Five-Body Case. And at the center of it is a woman named Chizuko Okamoto. Murder of Rikako Okamoto · 2005-10 · Hiratsuka, Kanagawa, Japan
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    12 分
  • Episode 63: Ashikaga Murder Case

    Episode 63: Ashikaga Murder Case
    2026/09/03
    On May 12, 1990, a four-year-old girl named Mami Matsuda vanished from a pachinko parlor in Ashikaga, a small city about an hour and a half north of Tokyo. Her body was found the next day in the Watarase River. She had been sexually assaulted and killed. Seventeen months later, police arrested a kindergarten bus driver named Toshikazu Sugaya. The evidence against him was a DNA test. It said he was a match. The court believed it. A judge sentenced him to life in prison. He served seventeen and a half years before the evidence was retested. The new test said he was not a match — not even close. The confession he gave? It turned out he had been kicked and had his hair pulled until he gave it. He was released in 2009 and formally acquitted in 2010. By then, the girl who died in the Watarase River had been waiting twenty years for justice. The man who really killed her? He was eventually identified. But the statute of limitations had expired. No charges were ever filed. This is the Ashikaga Murder Case — a story about a child's murder, a ruined man's life, and a justice system that failed both of them. Ashikaga Murder Case · 1990-05-12 · Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan
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    15 分