Akira Nishiguchi killed five people in Japan in the last three months of 1963. The killings came in three separate incidents, weeks apart and hundreds of miles from one another: two men in Fukuoka Prefecture on October 18, two women in Hamamatsu on November 18, and an elderly lawyer in Tokyo on December 29. Between them he lived on frauds, staged his own suicide, and passed himself off as a university professor and then as a lawyer. Police across the country hunted him for 78 days. He was caught on January 3, 1964, at a temple household in Kumamoto Prefecture, because the priest's 10-year-old daughter recognized him from a wanted poster.
He was sentenced to death at the end of 1964, gave up his last appeal in 1966 and was executed in 1970. The case later became the basis of Ryuzo Saki's Naoki Prize-winning book Fukushu suru wa ware ni ari (1975) and of Shohei Imamura's film of the same title, released in English as Vengeance Is Mine (1979).
Much of the detail comes from three articles published by Bunshun Online in April and May 2026, adapted from a 2026 nonfiction collection on crimes of Japan's high-growth era, and from a 2018 article by the filmmaker and novelist Toshikazu Nagae in Kodansha's Gendai Business. Where they disagree, no court judgment, police record or contemporary newspaper report is available to settle the point.
Nishiguchi was born in 1925. Bunshun Online gives his birthplace as the Goto Islands of Nagasaki Prefecture, an area with a long tradition of hidden Christianity, and says his Christian parents had gone to Osaka to work and returned to the islands when he was about three. Gendai Business says the family was Catholic and that he was baptized at the age of five. His father fished and ran an orchard, and in 1941 bought a hot spring inn in Beppu, Oita Prefecture, which the family then ran. Bunshun Online describes the household as comfortably off.
His father hoped he would become a priest. He was sent to a mission school in Fukuoka but left in his third year, unable to adapt to the strict dormitory rules. Nagae writes that he rebelled against his father's strict religious discipline and drifted into delinquency.
At 16 he began stealing. For close to 20 years after that he moved in and out of prison for theft, fraud and extortion. At 20 he married a woman a year younger than himself, and they had three children. By 1963 he had four prior convictions, according to Gendai Business, and had worked as a driver.
In 1961, after his release from Beppu Prison, he left his wife and children at his parents' home in Beppu and moved in with a woman who worked as a hairdresser in Yukuhashi, Fukuoka Prefecture. Bunshun Online's account describes him up to this point as a small-time criminal rather than a violent one, and dates the change to October 1963, when he was 37.
Ikuo Murata was 58 and worked for the Japan Monopoly Corporation, the state tobacco and salt monopoly that later became Japan Tobacco. His work involved carrying large sums of cash and tobacco products. Goro Mori was 38 and drove a truck for a transport company. Little more about either man's life has been reported, and the accounts of the case say nothing of their families.
Nishiguchi learned that Murata was carrying a large amount of cash. On October 18 he approached him, offering to help with the deliveries and to guide him to a tobacco field, and rode with him in the truck that Mori was driving. On a mountain road in the Kanda area of Fukuoka Prefecture, the truck stopped. Nishiguchi led Murata away to a secluded spot and killed him, then went back to the truck and killed Mori. He took a wallet containing 260,000 yen, which Bunshun Online equates to about 3.2 million yen in present-day money.
Gendai Business reports that Murata was found on a mountain road and that Mori's body was found about two kilometers away. Bunshun Online says the truck and the bodies were left at a mountain pass about two kilometers from where the killings took place.
Witness statements and other evidence led the Fukuoka Prefectural Police to Nishiguchi quickly, and he was placed on a nationwide wanted list for murder and theft. That night he stayed at a hotel in Fukuoka City with the hairdresser he lived with. The next morning's newspaper told him he was already under investigation.
A radio report said police thought he had fled toward the Kansai region, so he decided to stay in Kyushu. Over two days at the Karatsu boat races in Saga Prefecture he won 210,000 yen.
On October 23 the Yukuhashi police station received a letter signed with his name and dated from Tokyo. In it he said that he was the man wanted for the monopoly corporation robbery and murders, that he had meant to run away with his lover but now regretted what he had done and had decided to kill himself, and that the police would never catch him.
On October 25 the Kagawa Prefectural Police told the Yukuhashi station that there were signs he had jumped from the Setomaru, a ferry bound for Tokyo. His jacket and shoes were found on the deck, with a suicide note in the jacket pocket. The Japan Coast Guard searched along the shipping routes but found no body, and police concluded that the suicide had been staged to throw them off.
Gendai Business says he then moved east under false names, from Okayama through Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto and Nagoya.
Three days after the staged suicide, on the 28th, Nishiguchi arrived in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, wearing thick glasses and a formal suit. He took a room at the Fujimi, a house that rented out rooms, presenting himself as a Kyoto University professor named Masaoka. To support the story he made telephone calls to Shizuoka University, and he often invited young geisha to his room.
The Fujimi was run by Yuki Fujimi, who was 41, with her mother, Harue, who was 61. Both women believed he was the professor he claimed to be. Bunshun Online reports that Yuki was drawn to him and that they became close.
He did not stay. In Hiroshima he bought five television sets for 220,000 yen, saying they were a gift for a local orphanage, never paid the supplier and pawned the sets for 80,000 yen. In Tokuyama he spent two nights at an inn posing as a University of Tokyo professor. From there he went to Numazu.
On November 14 he returned to the Fujimi in Hamamatsu, where Yuki welcomed him and let him stay in her room. Four days later, on November 18, his money had run out. That day he strangled Yuki and her mother with a rope.
He pawned jewelry and other valuables from the house for 48,000 yen. The next day, posing as a representative of the Fujimi family, he sold the household's telephone line for 100,000 yen. He then left Shizuoka.
The two women were found on November 22. The National Police Agency named him a key wanted suspect and issued a special alert. Investigators from the Yukuhashi station went to Beppu and asked his family to write a letter urging him to give himself up, and the letter was printed in national newspapers.
In December Nishiguchi changed his disguise. On December 3, at the Chiba District Court, he posed as a clerk in the accounts section and took 6,000 yen from a mother who had come to pay her son's traffic fine. At Chiba Prison, posing as a lawyer, he took 50,000 yen in supposed bail money from the mother of a detained man. In Fukushima he stole a lawyer's lapel badge. In Hokkaido he extracted 50,000 yen from a local business owner. In Tokyo, presenting himself as a lawyer's assistant, he took 40,000 yen in claimed bail costs from the brother of a man arrested for securities fraud. Gendai Business also records frauds and a robbery in Chiba and Fukushima in this period.
Police printed 5,000 wanted posters bearing his photograph and sent them across the country.
The fifth victim was an 81-year-old lawyer, named in Bunshun Online as 神吉梅松. Gendai Business describes him as an elderly lawyer who lived alone in Toshima Ward, Tokyo.
In late December Nishiguchi happened to see him in a waiting room at the Tokyo District Court and chose him as his next target. He telephoned the lawyer, claiming he wanted to hire him for a civil case, and they met on December 29. Nishiguchi persuaded him to go back to his apartment in Toshima, and there he attacked him from behind and killed him. He took about 140,000 yen in cash, and Gendai Business says he also took the lawyer's badge. He then spent four days in the apartment with the body hidden in a chest of drawers.
On January 2, 1964, Nishiguchi arrived at a temple in Tamana, Kumamoto Prefecture (Bunshun Online gives the name as Ryuganji), wearing a lawyer's badge and introducing himself as a Tokyo lawyer named Kakuji Kawamura (川村覚次).
The head priest, Tairyu Furukawa, was 43. He was also a chaplain at Fukuoka Prison and worked for people he believed had been wrongly condemned. Bunshun Online reports that he was then working for the release of Sakae Menda, who had been sentenced to death for the murder of a couple in Hitoyoshi, Kumamoto Prefecture, in a case many thought doubtful. Furukawa also led the long campaign for a retrial for Takeo Nishi, condemned in the 1947 Fukuoka Incident, according to a 2015 NetIB-News report on Nishi's diaries, which were found among Furukawa's papers after his death. His son has carried that work on.
About ten years earlier Furukawa had visited Fukuoka Prison while Nishiguchi was an inmate there. Nishiguchi remembered him; Furukawa did not recognize Nishiguchi. The visitor offered to help with the campaign for Menda's release, and the family welcomed him into the house.
Furukawa's second daughter was 10 years old (Gendai Business gives her age as 11). A classmate at her primary school had a surname one character different from Nishiguchi's, and because of that she had often stopped to look at his wanted poster on a town notice board on her way to school. Looking at the visitor, she saw the face from the poster, including two distinct moles. She told her parents that the lawyer was the murderer Nishiguchi. Her father at first scolded her, but she would not be moved, insisting that the man was an emissary of the devil.
Furukawa began to pay closer attention. The visitor said he was an experienced lawyer, yet his knowledge of the law was that of a layman. Furukawa went to look at the wanted poster for himself and became convinced that the man calling himself Kawamura was Nishiguchi.
Furukawa decided not to let the guest know he had been recognized. He settled him in a room for the night, fitted a lock to another room and moved his family into it, and his wife kept the guest talking so that he would not hear the noise.
At about 11 p.m., after the guest had gone to sleep, Furukawa's wife and eldest daughter went to the Tamana police station. The police checked by telephone and found that the real Kakuji Kawamura was at home in Tokyo. They said it would take several hours to gather enough officers, and the two women went home. The station contacted the Kumamoto prefectural police headquarters, and a large number of officers were sent to surround the house.
At about 4 a.m. on January 3, Nishiguchi got up and greeted the family, and seemed to sense that something was wrong. He packed hurriedly, saying he had to leave for Fukuoka. As he stepped outside, police arrested him. He did not resist. His flight had lasted 78 days.
The chief of the National Police Agency remarked afterward that the eyes of 120,000 police officers had been no match for the eyes of one girl. Gendai Business quotes the same remark and describes the search as having mobilized about 120,000 officers.
Nishiguchi was taken to the Yukuhashi police station in Fukuoka Prefecture, where he confessed. He told investigators that he had planned to kill the Furukawa family, take their money and escape to Okinawa. Gendai Business reports that under questioning he gave his reasons for the killings as the need to pay off debts and to win the favor of a lover, and observes that no such reason could account for five deaths.
Prosecutors indicted him on five counts of murder, ten of fraud and two of theft. The case was tried at the Fukuoka District Court's Kokura branch. In their closing argument prosecutors asked for the death penalty and called him "the greatest black gold medal champion in history." On December 23, 1964, the court sentenced him to death; its judgment described him as a child of the devil. Gendai Business reports that at his sentencing he said he would accept the death penalty without complaint.
The Fukuoka High Court dismissed his appeal on August 28, 1965. On August 15, 1966, Nishiguchi withdrew his final appeal himself, and the death sentence became final. He was held at the Fukuoka Detention House.
Tairyu Furukawa, who had sheltered the man who later said he meant to kill his family, kept writing to him after the arrest. Bunshun Online reports that the priest held that criminals were people suffering from an illness of the mind, and that he lived by the saying that one should hate the crime but not the person.
Nishiguchi was executed at the Fukuoka Detention House on December 11, 1970. Before his execution he is reported to have said that nothing made him happier than to follow his mother, who had died before him, and to have asked that his ashes be scattered in Beppu Bay. He ended with "Amen."
Soon after his arrest a film company planned a picture about the case. Bunshun Online reports that a final screenplay, titled One Hundred Million Eyes (Ichioku-nin no me), was ready about a month after the arrest and that a new director was to make it. The company dropped the project after Nishiguchi's father pleaded that the film not condemn his grandchildren.
The search for Nishiguchi crossed prefectural borders again and again, and Gendai Business reports that the case led to the creation of a framework for wide-area major cases, under which prefectural police forces work together on serious crimes that span several prefectures. Bunshun Online describes a serial robbery-murder case in western Japan in 1965 as the first to be designated a wide-area major case.
Ryuzo Saki (1937 to 2015) published Fukushu suru wa ware ni ari in 1975, and it won the 74th Naoki Prize. The Nihon Daihyakka Zensho encyclopedia says the book takes the 1963 serial robbery-murder case as its subject and was built on a large body of trial records; the Digital Daijisen dictionary names the case as the Nishiguchi Akira case. Saki gave his central character the name Iwao Enokizu. His publisher, Bungeishunju, describes the book as a nonfiction novel that follows the crimes through to the culprit's execution, including the 78-day flight and the 10-year-old girl who exposed him, and issued a fully revised edition in 2010.
Shohei Imamura's film, produced by Shochiku and Imamura Productions, was released in 1979, starring Ken Ogata, with Rentaro Mikuni, Mitsuko Baisho and Mayumi Ogawa among the cast. It was ranked the best Japanese film of the year in the Kinema Junpo Best Ten and won Best Picture at the third Japan Academy Prize and Best Film at the Blue Ribbon Awards. The Criterion Collection, in a 1988 essay by David Ehrenstein, describes it as based on one of the most sensational true crime stories of modern Japan and praises it for refusing to glamorize the killer or offer easy explanations. Saki's book and Imamura's film are works of fiction drawn from the case, not records of what happened.
Nagae, writing in 2018, said the case and Saki's book had shaped his own novel about a condemned prisoner.
Proven by final judgment: five murders, with ten frauds and two thefts, as indicted. The charges and the dates of the judgments are known from Bunshun Online and Gendai Business rather than from the court record itself.
Separate events: the five deaths came in three incidents on three dates in three places, Fukuoka Prefecture on October 18, Hamamatsu on November 18 and Tokyo on December 29, 1963, with travel and frauds between them. The two Fukuoka deaths happened in a single incident, as did the two Hamamatsu deaths.
Admitted but never carried out: his stated plan to kill the Furukawa family.
Details that vary between sources: his birthplace (the Goto Islands in Bunshun Online; Osaka in some reference works); the age of the girl who recognized him (10 in Bunshun Online, 11 in Gendai Business); where the lawyer's badge came from (stolen in Fukushima, according to Bunshun Online, or taken from the Tokyo victim, according to Gendai Business); how the two Fukuoka men died, on which the two main sources give different accounts, leaving the method uncertain; the reading of the Tokyo lawyer's surname, which is romanized in more than one way; and the year in Bunshun Online's headlines, which date the case to both 1963 and 1964 (the killings were in 1963 and the arrest in 1964).
Not reported: what led police to name him so quickly after October 18 beyond witness accounts; the name of the trial judge; and the lives and families of the victims beyond their ages and work.
1925: Akira Nishiguchi is born, according to Bunshun Online in the Goto Islands, Nagasaki Prefecture.
1941: his father buys a hot spring inn in Beppu, Oita Prefecture.
At 16: begins stealing; nearly 20 years of theft, fraud, extortion and prison follow. At 20 he marries; three children.
1961: released from Beppu Prison; moves in with a hairdresser in Yukuhashi, Fukuoka Prefecture.
October 18, 1963: kills Ikuo Murata, 58, and Goro Mori, 38, in the Kanda area of Fukuoka Prefecture and takes 260,000 yen; placed on a nationwide wanted list.
October 23, 1963: Yukuhashi police receive his letter claiming he will kill himself.
October 25, 1963: signs found that he jumped from the ferry Setomaru; police judge it staged.
October 28, 1963: checks into the Fujimi in Hamamatsu as "Professor Masaoka."
Early November 1963: fraud in Hiroshima; stays in Tokuyama and Numazu.
November 14, 1963: returns to the Fujimi.
November 18, 1963: kills Yuki Fujimi, 41, and her mother Harue, 61.
November 22, 1963: the women are found; the National Police Agency names him a key wanted suspect.
December 3, 1963: begins frauds posing as a court clerk and a lawyer in Chiba; further frauds in Fukushima, Hokkaido and Tokyo.
December 29, 1963: kills an 81-year-old lawyer in Toshima Ward, Tokyo.
January 2, 1964: arrives at Tairyu Furukawa's temple in Tamana, Kumamoto Prefecture, as "Kakuji Kawamura"; the priest's 10-year-old daughter recognizes him.
January 3, 1964: arrested at about 4 a.m. after 78 days on the run; confesses at the Yukuhashi police station.
Early 1964: a planned film about the case is dropped after his father's appeal.
December 23, 1964: sentenced to death by the Fukuoka District Court, Kokura branch.
August 28, 1965: Fukuoka High Court dismisses his appeal.
August 15, 1966: withdraws his final appeal; the sentence becomes final.
December 11, 1970: executed at the Fukuoka Detention House.
1975: Ryuzo Saki's Fukushu suru wa ware ni ari is published; it wins the 74th Naoki Prize.
1979: Shohei Imamura's film Vengeance Is Mine is released.
2010: Bungeishunju issues a revised edition of Saki's book.