(upbeat music)
Okay, so we did a previous
episode of Murder in Japan where
we talked about the girl who
essentially used her family.
She had full control over
her family and their situation.
And she basically forced her father to
drive her to a place where she found a guy,
got him to a love hotel,
killed him into Capitated him,
put his head into a suitcase
and brought him home.
The dad basically knew this happened.
So the mother and the father
are both on trial for murder.
Or at least connected to the murder.
I forget the word.
I just started this, complicit,
complicit in the murder.
But so the father was,
the psychology behind
this is actually the
biggest part of the story.
He helped her practice the murder.
So he let her tie him up and then sat there
and then she practiced splitting
his throat like she’d seen in movies.
She watched the terrifying and
then some other horror movies
to get sort of like where she
should cut or how she should do it.
And then she practiced with her dad
and then she got her dad to drive her to
the place where she knew this guy would be
and then got him to go
to a love hotel with her.
And then she murdered him.
So the question is, how
complicit is the father?
‘Cause he kind of knew
this was gonna happen.
And he said he actually was
praying that it wouldn’t happen.
But he did assist in
almost every aspect of it.
He was found guilty of
abandonment and mutilation
of a corpse, which
comes with a one year,
four month prison sentence that
has been suspended for four years.
So if he doesn’t do anything
wrong over the next four years,
he’s actually not gonna
get punished at all.
Now, I think his home life and everything,
there’s a lot of punishment
going on there anyways.
They were both, the mother and the father
were completely subservient
to the murderer in this case.
And it is absolutely terrifying.
But as these cases are finished, I
think it’s good to follow up to see
like how complicit they
were, how much trouble
do they get into, what
is the actual punishment?
It’s interesting to see those facts.
(upbeat music)
The second update was
for a story of two girls
who bullied another girl and basically, it’s
hard to tell whether they pushed her off
or bridge or she jumped,
but they forced her to do it.
Now, what happened
was this girl took a picture
of a group and one of
the bullies was in the group
and she said after that
was posted on social media,
said I didn’t give you permission
to post that on social media.
So I’m now gonna cause
you an immense amount
of terror and pain
over the next two days.
So her and her friends were bullying her,
torturing her, pushing her around,
beating her up, that kind of stuff.
And over the course of two days,
this accumulated with
them being on a bridge
out in the countryside
’cause they said like,
come out to this place, if you apologize,
we’ll stop and we’ll just let it all go.
So if she sees an opportunity
to get this to stop, she goes out.
They’re like, sit on
the edge of this bridge.
So climb up on the railing.
She’s sitting there and then she fell.
Now, it’s unclear as to whether she was
pushed or fell or just slipped or whatever.
But she was up there
because these two girls.
It seems like she was pushed.
So this is murder.
This is not attempted murder.
It’s not, the girls involved have basically
admitted that they pushed her off.
But there’s no actual
visible evidence of that.
The admission is pretty clear.
Prosecutors asked for 25
years in prison, the judge gave 23.
So bullying someone for
two days and then pushing
them off a bridge,
23-year prison sentence.
The girl is in her 20s.
She’s not gonna get out of
prison until she’s in her 40s.
The crime was extremely
cruel and malicious.
They showed no respect for the victim’s life
and integrity, which is absolutely true.
I mean, if you’re bullying someone for
two days and then push them off a bridge,
you’re not showing a lot
of respect for the person.
This is the more interesting
aspect of this case
is that the girl, she was only about 19
at a time, the bully, was 19 at the time,
and she was having a relationship
with a married police officer,
which cast a lot of aspersions as
to what was going on with this case.
It seems like that cop
tried to bury this case.
He was in a financial division of some sort
and he had this murder
case moved to their group
and then basically tried to suppress it.
So there’s a whole other aspect of this
case that was going on at the same time,
but at the end of the day, she got
caught, the other bully got caught.
She’s still on trial, so that
actually hasn’t been determined yet.
And the police officer has been fired,
but we don’t know he’s actually been
arrested or punished.
That’s the case, I actually,
I’m more interested in,
because this guy clearly was trying to
help this girl get away from with murder,
which actually would be a crime in itself.
I assume, but I don’t know
enough about Japanese law.
I gotta find a Japanese lawyer
who will just talk to
me for a couple of days,
so I can ask a whole bunch of questions,
because as we do these
stories over and over again,
I end up getting more and more sort of
detailed questions, but I’m on the lookout.
I don’t know how to find or track one down,
but if you, anyone knows a Japanese lawyer
who’ll be willing to talk
to you and introduce
Japan for like an hour,
every couple of months,
man, I would love to do that.
It does sound like the plot to a movie.
It actually sounds, it’s
one of those ones where
the movie, you’d be like,
well, that’s a bit much.
Like a lot of stuff in it, it’s like
almost like too much to be realistic.
So this is a story about a
murder that happened last week,
and the shocking element
more than anything
else, is that this woman
was live streaming,
her walk around the Yamanote line.
So there’s this very famous train line
in Tokyo that basically goes into loop.
People will ride it, get
off, take a little walk,
they’ll go to the next
station, they’ll write it for a bit.
It’s kind of a cool tourist thing to do.
A lot of Japanese people do it.
If you’re into trains, you
really know what this is.
It’s a very famous loop around Tokyo.
She was walking on one of the side streets.
There was no one else there.
She was streaming to about
6,000 people when a man came out
and started stabbing
her with a hunting knife.
He stabbed her for a full
minute up to 30 or 40 times.
Now, they always say
how many times they were
actually stabbed, but
it just shows the intent.
I think that more than anything else,
when they start talking
about like she was stabbed
30 times, it shows that
his intent was to kill her.
Because of course, when he was arrested,
he said I did not intend to kill her.
Because he doesn’t want
to be arrested for a murder,
he wants to be arrested for manslaughter,
which is a much lighter sentence.
When he was arrested and they asked
him, why did he murder this woman?
He said he had lent her
more than 2 million yen.
It seems like 2.5 million yen.
He had asked for it back and
she refused to give it to him.
So this was an act of revenge.
I saw the preview of a stream where
Sato went on foot around the Yamanote line.
So he said I saw her on stream.
I saw she was in Tokyo.
So what had actually happened
is she announced that tomorrow,
I’m going to go around the Yamanote line.
He was living in different
cities like tomorrow.
I’m going to go to Tokyo, find
one of those stations where she is
by watching her stream
hunter down and kill her.
When she was on the ground, a witness said
that he was aiming his phone at her face,
and they claim that he
said are you dead yet?
So this actually is
immediately counter to what
he said, what he
didn’t intend to kill her.
If he stabbed her that many times
and then the last words he said
to her corpse at this point
probably is are you dead yet?
Which I’m assuming the
stream was still running.
Because when she got
attacked, she dropped the phone.
It’s hard to say whether or not
they could actually still see it,
but they could certainly
hear what was going on.
And it seems like the last thing he
said to her was are you dead yet?
Then the police showed up very quickly.
He just put up his hands
and just immediately gave up
on immediately admitted
to being her attacker.
So because this is
such a high profile case,
we got the background of
the guys situation with her.
We got a lot of information
about the background of the victim,
and then we got sort of the
aftermath of what’s happening.
He saw her stream first in 2021.
So she was out streaming,
doing live streaming 2021.
In August 2022, he started
visiting bars where she worked.
So he had created that relationship.
So he’s like I’ve watched
this girl on stream.
He’s probably very attracted to her.
She was 18 at the time. He was in his 30s.
He was 38 and he said
I want to meet this girl.
I’ve watched her on stream.
I feel like I have a connection to her.
If I meet her in real life, you know
what was really going on in his head.
He’s like I actually already love her
and probably has convinced himself
that she actually already loves him.
He goes to the bars where she works.
Now she works at Cabaret bars.
She works at the kind
of bars where the girls
are paid to make you
think that they like you.
A Cabaret bar is where you go
and you sit down and you drink
and you buy drinks and you pay at thousands
and thousands of dollars for champagne.
And the more money you spend, the
more time you can spend with the girls.
So for the girls’ profits, she wants
you to stay there as long as possible.
So she wants you to fall in love with her.
This is the sort of weird
parasitic relationship
of the whole host club
Cabaret club system.
Where you’re manipulating
people to fall in love with you.
So they’ll give you money.
Now this goes back to last
year when I was obsessed
with the leading gen story
where she was scamming
guys online, trying to get
them to give her money.
This is to me only one step away.
Now I think because it’s a Cabaret
club, you should know going in
that the girls don’t actually like you.
They get money from like a
percentage of the money you spend.
So they’re trying to get you to
spend as much money as possible.
But he fogged by the love,
probably also fogged by the idea that
he’d spent so much time with her online
that he knew her that she
wouldn’t be treating him that way.
He’d convince himself to this.
She said she needed money.
She needed money for living expenses.
She needed, she has the
loans she had to work out.
She was having a lot of problems.
He took out two loans of a million
yen each and gave them to her.
So they found bank transfers and stuff.
She said she was going to go back.
She was going to pay you
back as soon as she could.
She’s also making claims
that she’s making tons
of money streaming,
which is probably not true.
There is a certain amount of
duplicity here on both sides.
Now I’m not going to imply that
she deserved to be killed because she
absolutely did not.
She probably deserved to be arrested.
She probably deserved to have her funds
taken away from her and given to the guy.
He sued her in 2023 and at
that time the judge said, yeah,
she should have to pay back the
2.5 million yen that she took from you.
You have proof of how
much money you’ve given her.
It’s all pretty clear she
should pay you back.
Then she disappears.
Now the problem with
disappearing and making
your primary source
of income or your life
streaming is that the
situation where you say,
“Tomorrow I’m going to go
around this yamanote line in Tokyo,”
means that the people who watch
you know where you’re going to be.
So you can’t really disappear
if you want to be a streamer.
That is falling in line
with a lot of the stuff
that’s actually happened
over the last two weeks
where really famous streamers
have had people break into their house.
They’ve been attacked on the street.
Live streaming seems to have
suddenly become more dangerous
because these, I think we’re
being honest, it’s primarily women,
attractive women.
These guys follow them online.
They’ve given money.
They feel like they have a connection.
They feel like you owe them something.
Then they start hunting
for you on the streets.
I don’t think any live
streamer who’s a female
should be going out without some
form of security, like someone with them.
They could stay off stream, but I think
they should actually have someone there.
But of course then you
can have to pay that guy.
And this woman, the victim here,
was clearly not good with money.
Now she does have a tragic backstory,
like there’s no good aspect of this.
She clearly did not
intend to pay the guy back.
People are terrible at
not doxing themselves.
That is true.
Like I know if you collected,
I never leave my house,
but I know if you went
through back all my podcasts
and all my streams
and all this other stuff,
you could figure out
probably exactly where I live.
Or at least you would know like the
city you would know this other stuff.
I mentioned to go a lot of times
because I don’t live in Nagoya,
but I bet you could
piece together a lot of
information about me if
you actually wanted to.
I’m lucky in that no one is interested
in a 50 year old man in that kind of way.
I’m not going to have to worry about
that sort of parasocial relationship.
She never intended to pay him back.
And so again, she deserves
to be punished for that.
But when you actually hear about
her life, there’s a lot of sympathy there.
The thing is, online, the
sympathy wavered back and forth.
This woman was killed.
She was murdered on the street.
I saw a vlogger show one shot
of the outside of their window.
And I immediately knew
which building in Chicago.
It’s the only window which is lucky.
And there’s usually just a judo suit there.
There’s a story way back in this guy.
Oh, wow, there was this guy who took a
picture from Instagram of some woman,
so I assume a woman
he found very attractive.
He found in the background some
stuff and then a reflection in her eye.
And with that information, he found
a way to triangulate where she was.
And that meant, since she was, you know,
the post was probably
like getting off work, going
home, that meant it was
close to where she lived.
That’s how she found out where she lived.
Essentially the reflection in her eye
is how she found out where she lived.
And when I read that
story, I was like, if you use
that power for good, he
could help so many people.
But of course, it’s just
all awful, selfish stuff.
The victim here had a pretty tough life.
I mean, that’s just, I think, fair to say.
The mother of the victim was an
alcoholic and she left the girl on her own
when she was a child
to take care of herself.
And we’re implying from when she was, like,
just two, three, four, five years old.
She was already on her own.
Her mom’s already an alcoholic.
She’s already trying to,
like, having a tough life.
She started working at a cabaret
as soon as she became an adult.
And that actually probably
means before she became an adult.
Before it was legal for her to
work there, she actually started
working in a cabaret, which
is where you start drinking.
So at a very young age, she starts
drinking a lot regularly with the customers
to keep them buying stuff
so that she makes money.
The mother would come into
the cabaret where she works,
drink all evening, and then say, my
daughter will pay for it and then left.
So her mother, even after her
daughter starts making money,
starts supporting herself, is already
created this situation where it’s like,
well, I’m going to put more on her
because she’s making money now.
Now we’re both kind of living
this sort of very tragic lifestyle.
She has a baby, but
she’s a really hard drinker.
And so she neglected her child and
then pretty much in the same way.
She would leave her
daughter in daycare and
go out drinking and
then not come back like,
staff at the cabaret, a place where
that is designed to abuse customers,
would say you need to go
get your kid, but she’s drunk.
So she would show up drunk to get her kid.
The state then eventually
took her child away from her.
This made her break down.
She then sort of does
a left turn and says like,
okay, I’m going to still
keep working at bars.
We’re going to start streaming
because streaming seems
like a good way for people
to be able to make money.
I’m assuming if she’s working at cabaret
clubs, she is conventionally attractive.
She’s attractive in some way.
That’s going to get you a
lot of traction on a stream.
She’s like, I’m going to put this together.
One of the things her friends said
about her was she was a hard worker.
So all these negatives you
can talk about, she was lying.
She lied to people.
She was now alcoholic.
She was willing to put in the work.
So that’s how she built up an audience
of 6,000 people watching her per stream.
The problem is because of the
sentiment of these crimes in the past,
like the these each,
where she was scamming
men, this seems like
she was in the same line.
She was just taking money from guys.
No intention of giving it back,
seeing it was perfectly acceptable.
If they give me the money, that’s fine.
That has actually created a
lot of online hate towards her
and a lot of sympathy for the guy
who actually committed the murder.
Now, the guy had
did a lot right against
giving her money was
probably not a good idea,
but then suing her to get it
back probably was the right idea.
Going through the legal
means to get your money back.
When she disappeared, I always run into
the problem of he was able to find her.
That means he could point the police
to her and actually catch her that way.
So instead of getting a knife
and going and hunting her down,
he should have called
the police and said, hey,
this person who owes me 2.5
million yen, I sued her for it in court.
She owes it to me.
She’s on the street right now.
I would like you to go get her.
And then like, I don’t
know, again, garnish her
ways, wages put
something on her, arrest her.
I don’t know something to push her
to pay me back before you jump to the,
I’m going to get a knife
and hunt her down myself.
Because he was able
to do it, he was able to
point the authorities
in the right direction.
And I think that’s where all
sympathy for him goes away.
Because of course, 2.5
million yen is a lot of money.
I’m sure he wasn’t rich.
He had to borrow money
to be able to give it to her.
He still don’t need to
kill someone for that.
So this was streamed live.
He said the reason he did the attack was so
that people would know about the situation,
so that people would know that she
was, she had stolen money from him.
But then as soon as he was arrested,
the first words out of his mouth
were, I did not intend to kill her.
So I am going to follow on this case.
Devil’s advocate, he told the
police and they wouldn’t actually.
Okay, if he had told the police, I think
that might have been because again,
I read 20 versions of
this story to make sure
I got all the little
subtleties back and forth
because I want to be
able to say what’s true.
And what’s true is going to be the
consistent throughs lines of all the stories.
I don’t know, no one
mentioned him calling the police.
So I think if he had done it,
one of the multitude of stories,
especially when they started
looking into his and her backgrounds,
like we got more background information
on this from Tokyo reporter and on the
the same Japan than any
other murder you’ll actually read.
Like now that this is
kind of what I do on my
day off is just collect
stories and read stories.
I know how much
information I’m usually going
to get and it’s usually
not very much because I
want all the information so that it’s
because that’s the more interesting part.
Like how did we end up in this situation?
Because the first story
is just guy comes out of
nowhere and kills woman
while she’s live streaming.
Then you find out they
had a history and then
you find out that she
was manipulating him,
then you find out that
like he had this idea
that they had a relationship
that did not exist.
Then your attitude goes
back and forth, but then I
never want to just end up
with a conclusion of who’s
right and wrong because there’s
still probably information I don’t know.
The internet being the
internet, all these like
in the cell guys are
taking this anti-female
stance and saying like she
manipulated him, she deserved it.
There’s guys jumping on
the memorials that were
put down like the flowers
where she was murdered.
There’s some people have put out memorials.
There’s guys like kicking
it over and jumping on
and stuff just being as
awful as they possibly can.
Because they have this
negative view towards
women because of the whole in-cell
community is just decided to band together.
She’s not completely innocent but
she did not deserve what happened.
But the guy absolutely
could have taken steps
because she was streaming because it
was right there out in front of everybody.
It was not too hard to find where she was.
She said, “I’m going to be
going around the Yamanote line.”
He could have called the police and said,
“Hey, this person owes me 2.5 million yen.
He’s going around the
Yamanote line tomorrow.
Could you please pick her up and
try to get someone money back?
” And that would have been a way better
resolution than what actually happened.
Basically, I’m just going
to keep following the story.
So in six months or another
year because of course,
justice system views
very slow in every country.
I will come up with follow-up, just like
I did at the beginning of this episode,
where it was the
follow-ups to the father of
the woman who committed
the murder in Hokkaido.
And the two bullies, one
has been convicted and
the other one is still
the trial is ongoing.
I’ll follow-up with those
as often as I can and
keep this series going
because this is essentially
an extra episode, an
extra series, murder in
Japan, where we just
go through the facts.
I don’t want to make
too many strong opinions,
but the interesting part
for me is how this system
works and how much
information you don’t get
before people form a
judgment and then how
more information changes
your opinion back and forth.
But I still think we
can always end up with,
we shouldn’t really
be committing murder.
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