Futoshi Matsunaga was sentenced to death in 2005 for a series of killings that Japanese prosecutors and reporters have treated as one of the worst crimes in the country's postwar history. Between February 1996 and June 1998, in rented apartments in Kokurakita Ward, Kitakyushu, seven people died while living under his control. One was a real estate agent of 34. The other six were the parents, younger sister, brother-in-law, nephew and niece of his common-law wife, Junko Ogata.
Reporters who followed the case say he avoided killing with his own hands. He kept the people around him confined, hungry and afraid, punished them with electric shocks, and then had them harm one another. Four of the seven were strangled by other captives, often by relatives, under his and Ogata's direction. No remains were ever found. The case came to light in March 2002 only because a 17-year-old girl who had lived with the couple since she was a young child escaped and went to the police with her grandfather. Matsunaga has always denied the killings. His death sentence became final in December 2011; Ogata, found to have acted under his domination, is serving life.
The Fukuoka District Court's published judgment identifies the victims by letters. The writer Kazuteru Ono, who has reported on the case for Bunshun since 2002 and published a book-length account in 2023, states that every proper name in his work other than Matsunaga and Ogata is a pseudonym, including the names of buildings.
Matsunaga was born on April 28, 1961, in Kokura, in what is now Kokurakita Ward, Kitakyushu, the eldest son of parents who ran a tatami shop. In about October 1968 his father took over a futon business that the grandfather had run, and the family moved to the father's home town of Yanagawa, in the south of Fukuoka Prefecture. Both the prosecution and the defense set out those details in their opening statements, Ono reported.
His defense lawyers told the court that he was bright, earned near-perfect marks with little study, was often class leader and held student council posts, and read widely. Classmates and teachers quoted in a 2024 book excerpt published by Bunshun Online remembered him differently: as domineering toward weaker children and given to lies that made him seem important. He entered Mizuma High School in Kurume in 1977 and was later moved to a private high school in Kurume after a disciplinary case involving a junior high school girl, according to the same excerpt. He did not go to university.
In May 1981 he took over his father's business and founded a door-to-door futon sales company called World, based at the family home in Yanagawa. The book excerpt says the company sold futons costing about 30,000 yen for about 250,000 yen. The company grew for a time: a three-story head office was finished around April 1985, and in 1986 the company was incorporated with Matsunaga as its president. He married in January 1982, and a son was born in February 1983, the excerpt reports.
Junko Ogata was born in February 1962 in Yasutake, in Kurume, into a farming family that was among the most prominent in its village; her grandfather had served on the village council, and her father farmed and worked for a steel wire maker. She went to the same public high school as Matsunaga, then to a junior college in Fukuoka City, and from April 1982 worked as a kindergarten teacher.
According to the 2024 excerpt, Matsunaga telephoned her in the summer of 1980, saying he had found her name in a school yearbook, and pressed her to see him; a relationship began around October 1982, while his wife was pregnant. When her parents learned of it in 1984, they hired a private investigator and asked him to end it. Instead he won them over. From then on he was violent toward Ogata, and in February 1985 she gave up her kindergarten job. Ono reports that he had her separate her family register from her father's, and that she eventually moved into the third floor of the company's head office.
A judicial reporter quoted by Ono in 2019 described long-term beatings and electric shocks and said Ogata came to believe the abuse was her own fault, a pattern common among victims of domestic violence. She tried to escape twice, the reporter said, and each time she was brought back and punished more severely. Those findings would decide her sentence many years later.
In autumn 1992 the business collapsed. Matsunaga could not repay money he had obtained from a group connected to organized crime for a money-lending operation, and in early October 1992 he fled Yanagawa with Ogata, who was pregnant with his child. The company's one remaining employee went with them. After looking at a hiding place in Ishikawa Prefecture, they settled on Kitakyushu, where World had once had a branch office. On about October 10, 1992, they rented a unit in an apartment building in Kokurakita Ward. The agent who handled the lease was the man who would later become the first of the seven to die. Ogata gave a false first name.
Prosecutors told the court that the couple turned on the employee as their only remaining source of money and had his mother send large sums, which Ono's 2021 report puts at about 130 million yen in all. When she told her son in early December 1992 that there was no money left, his value to them ended. They took his driver's license and padlocked the door. In mid-January 1993, while they slept, he removed the lock and escaped.
Tadashi Makino, a former senior prosecutor who worked on the trial and the appeal, told Ono in 2024 that investigators could never trace where the money went. The couple lived modestly, owned no luxury cars or second homes, and seemed always short of cash; Makino believed they had received large sums at some point, but its use was never established. Ono estimates that Matsunaga had collected more than 100 million yen during the World years, and concludes that most of it went on years of living in hiding, often renting several apartments at once.
In early 1993 Matsunaga renewed contact with a woman he had dated when she was about 20. She had married a man who worked at a municipal office in the Chikugo region in 1988 and had given birth to triplet girls in October 1991. Ono, quoting trial documents, writes that between January 19 and April 2, 1993, the couple took 2.4 million yen from her in four payments, with Ogata telling her she was struggling to raise a child. In April 1993 the woman left home, and from October 1993 to March 1994 she and one of her daughters lived with the couple. Both died. The girl, who was two, was reported to have died in an accident in October 1993; the mother, who was 32, drowned. The deaths were handled at the time as an accident and a suicide, and the remaining two daughters were returned to the family.
Neither death was ever charged. Ono, who uses pseudonyms for the mother, the child and the family, has written that the mainstream press has largely left these two deaths out of its accounts of the case. They are not among the deaths for which Matsunaga was convicted.
The first of the seven to die was the real estate agent who had arranged the 1992 lease. According to Ono, his daughter began living with Matsunaga and Ogata in October 1994, when she was in the fourth grade, and from February 1995 her father lived with them too, in an apartment building in Katano, Kokurakita Ward. Ono writes, citing the prosecution's closing argument, that the father and daughter were allowed bedding only on his first day, then slept on a board in the entrance, later in a lidded wooden box locked from outside, and finally on the floor of the bathroom, with no heat in winter.
The district court found that the defendants confined him, denied him adequate food, bedding and warmth, and subjected him to electric shocks, beatings and long periods of forced standing or squatting. He had a serious liver and kidney condition. The court found that they carried on knowing he might die, and he died of multiple organ failure on or about February 26, 1996. He was 34. The court classed his death as murder. Matsunaga told the court it was an accident; Ogata argued it was injury resulting in death.
His daughter stayed with the couple. A 2002 Shukan Bunshun report, written before the couple's names were known, said she had been made to witness a killing and then kept silent and obedient for years through threats and violence.
The district court also convicted Matsunaga of crimes against a second woman, who was 34 when he met her. Posing as a prospective husband, with Ogata presented as his sister, he took 3.6 million yen from her in three payments between July and September 1995, said to be for wedding preparations; some of it came from consumer loans she was induced to take out. She and her younger daughter, then three, came to live with the couple. Between December 29, 1996, and March 10, 1997, on seven occasions, the court found, the defendants used electric shocks or threats of them to force her to get money from her mother and others, a total of 1,989,000 yen, which the court treated as robbery. From December 30, 1996, she was confined in a locked room. At about 3 a.m. on March 16, 1997, fearing more abuse, she jumped from a window. She was injured and spent about 133 days in hospital. Both the confinement and the injuries were counted against Matsunaga and Ogata.
The Ogata family was wealthy and strict, and in Ono's account that is what made them vulnerable. When Junko Ogata got into trouble, the family preferred to settle things privately, without the police, and that need for secrecy drew them deeper under Matsunaga's control. Ono has said that Matsunaga made family members write statements admitting their own part in wrongdoing, so that they felt unable to go to anyone. He also used the younger sister's children as leverage, taking them away, for example to a festival, so that their parents had to travel from Kurume to Kitakyushu to see them.
The younger sister, a dental hygienist, had married in July 1986 a man five years older who took the Ogata family name as an adopted son-in-law. He had served as a Chiba Prefectural Police officer and later worked for an agricultural cooperative in Kurume. Prosecutors argued at trial that Matsunaga saw the marriage as a threat to his plans for the family's property and tried to break it up, and that his aim of gaining control of the family's assets was finally achieved in 1997. By late 1997 Ogata's father, mother, sister, brother-in-law and their two children, a girl of about 10 and a boy of about 5, were living with Matsunaga, Ogata and the girl in the apartment in Katano. How much money the family lost was not reported.
Life in the apartment, as described from the trial evidence in a 2024 Bunshun Online book excerpt, ran on a strict ranking. Those lower down were punished with electric shocks by those above them. Food, sleep and even use of the toilet were restricted. Matsunaga hinted that he had hidden listening devices, so no one spoke against him.
The district court's findings, in order:
Ogata's father, 61, died on or about December 21, 1997, while being given electric shocks. The court found injury resulting in death, not murder: the defendants had not been shown to intend his death. Every other count of killing was murder.
Ogata's mother, 58, was strangled with an electric cord on January 20 or 23, 1998; the court could not fix the date more closely. Her son-in-law did it, with her younger daughter holding her legs, acting together with the defendants.
Ogata's younger sister, 33, was strangled with an electric cord on or about February 10, 1998, by her husband. Their daughter, then 10, was made under threat to hold her mother's legs.
The sister's husband, 38, had been confined, starved and given electric shocks since about November 1997. He developed a gastrointestinal disorder and peritonitis. The court found that the defendants, afraid that their abuse would be discovered, refused him medical treatment, intending that he die. He died on or about April 13, 1998.
The couple's son, 5, was strangled on or about May 17, 1998. The court found that his sister, 10, was made under threat to do it, while the girl, then 13, held his ankles and Ogata held his arms. A 2024 book excerpt says Matsunaga ordered the boy's death because he feared the child might take revenge one day.
The son's sister, 10, died on or about June 7, 1998, from electric shock or strangling, after she had been tied down and given shocks. The court found that the girl, 13, strangled her under threat, with Ogata taking part.
Of Ogata's family, only she and the two sons she had with Matsunaga were left. The bodies were disposed of after each death, and the survivors, including the girl, were made to help. Nothing was ever recovered. Makino, the former prosecutor, told Ono that investigators searched as far as the sewers and found no remains.
The killings stopped, but the arrangement did not. The girl went on living with Matsunaga and Ogata into her teens. By early 2002 the couple had two apartments in Kokurakita Ward, and the girl was being made to look after four children at one of them; two were the couple's own sons. Ono reports that before their arrest Matsunaga used the name "Miyazaki" and Ogata "Mori," and that a 1999 neighborhood register listed the household under other false names.
Neighbors at the Katano building told Ono in 2002 that they had seen a small, thin girl in plain clothes who never smiled and always looked at the ground. When she paid three years of neighborhood association dues at once and was asked who she lived with, she said "my aunt." The woman of the household wore sunglasses and turned her back when anyone passed.
Around January 23, 2002, the couple summoned the girl to their second apartment and held her there until about January 29. On January 30, at about 4 a.m., according to Ono's 2026 reconstruction with the police, she left the apartment where she was minding the children and reached her grandparents' home in Moji Ward, about 8 kilometers away. She had lived with them for a year after her parents divorced in 1990 and still remembered their address and telephone number. The 2002 Shukan Bunshun report says she first made a brief call to them at about 1:30 that morning.
She told her grandfather that her father was no longer alive and that she had done something she could not show anyone. She did not go to a hospital. In early February she found a job at a restaurant near Moji Station, due to start on February 19; the manager remembered her as pale and thought she wore heavy makeup, when in fact she was covering a bruise. Believing that repaying the "cost of raising her" would free her, she had an aunt open a bank account and posted the passbook with an apology to the couple's mailbox.
Matsunaga persuaded her aunt that the girl had been caught stealing and was mixed up with criminals, and in mid-February he came to the grandparents' apartment in a suit and tie, in the aunt's car, to take her back. He told the grandparents that her father had asked him to look after her until she was 18. Ono gives the visit as February 14; the 2002 report gives the night of February 15. The court found that she was held from February 15 to March 6, 2002, in the second apartment, where she was threatened, made to sign a loan document and a pledge, given electric shocks and choked with a cord. Her injuries needed about a month of treatment.
On March 6 she escaped again, and this time she went to the police with her grandfather.
On March 7, 2002, Fukuoka Prefectural Police arrested a man and a woman, both about 40, for confining and assaulting the girl. They would not give their names. The investigator who led the special team on the ground, identified by Ono only as T, recalled in 2026 that at the moment of arrest "Mori" wished "Miyazaki" good luck, he told her not to get worked up, and they shook hands before being driven off in separate cars. About two hours later, at around 11 p.m., police took the four children into protection at the other apartment.
Early reports described the case as a long confinement with abuse. Ono, who reached the scene two days after the arrests, learned from newspaper reporters that people had died. The first hearing, held at the Kokura Branch of the Fukuoka District Court on June 3, 2002, dealt only with the confinement and injury counts and the fraud and robbery.
On September 18, 2002, Matsunaga and Ogata were arrested on suspicion of murder for the first time, and the trial was put on hold. Further arrests followed for each death. By the hearing of May 21, 2003, six murders had been charged; one more was added later.
The investigation had almost no physical evidence of the killings. Police seized more than 30,000 items, including more than 200 books, which T said looked like study material for deceiving people: police procedure, criminal procedure law, medicine and pharmacology. But T told Ono that Matsunaga had been obsessed with destroying evidence, and that no fingerprints were found at the scenes. Former residents of the Katano unit later described a padlock fitting on the door and a device on the bathroom window that stopped it from opening fully.
The prosecution's case rested on the girl's testimony and on Ogata's. At the time of the arrest Ogata was loud and defiant, T recalled; in court she was calm. She largely admitted the charges and said Matsunaga had led everything. The girl's evidence, Ono writes, helped bring Ogata to talk.
From October 2003 hearings were held about once a week, under a law meant to speed up trials. The prosecution said the crimes were planned: the victims were abused and controlled, and when they were no longer useful as a source of money they were killed to keep them quiet, often after being made to help kill and dispose of their own relatives. Prosecutors argued that Ogata was inseparable from Matsunaga and no less to blame, and sought to hold both as joint principals. Because of the number of victims, the sentencing demand did not come until March 2, 2005; prosecutors asked for death for both.
Ogata argued that her father's death and the death of the girl's father were injury resulting in death, not murder; she largely admitted the rest and asked to be spared the death penalty because she had helped bring out the full facts. Matsunaga accepted partial involvement in Ogata's father's death and argued it was injury resulting in death. He said the girl's father died accidentally after falling in the bathroom. For the other five members of the Ogata family he pleaded not guilty, arguing that they had killed one another because of quarrels within the family.
On September 28, 2005, the Second Criminal Division of the Kokura Branch sentenced both defendants to death. It convicted them of six murders, one count of injury resulting in death (Ogata's father), confinement causing injury of the second woman and of the girl, fraud and robbery. The court described Matsunaga as the ringleader, who not only controlled the Ogata family but drove its members into suspicion and distrust of each other, and described conditions in the apartment as a living hell. It found that Ogata had quickly grasped his intentions and acted on her own initiative. In the court's words, as reported by Bunshun, he was a mastermind who had lost all restraint between good and evil, and she an earnest, obedient executor.
Matsunaga appealed to the Fukuoka High Court the same day. Ogata appealed on October 11, 2005, after her lawyers persuaded her to.
Appeal hearings began on January 24, 2007. On September 26, 2007, the Fukuoka High Court upheld Matsunaga's death sentence and reduced Ogata's to life imprisonment. Bunshun Online's 2024 account says the court reasoned that Matsunaga's violence may have left her in the psychological state typical of victims of domestic violence. Ono, writing in 2019, put the High Court's reasoning more simply: she had acted under Matsunaga's strong influence.
On December 12, 2011, the Supreme Court rejected Matsunaga's appeal, and also rejected the appeal that the Fukuoka High Public Prosecutors Office had brought against Ogata's life sentence, according to Ono's 2024 account. Matsunaga's death sentence and Ogata's life sentence both became final.
A judicial reporter quoted by Ono in 2019 explained the outcome for Ogata. Under the guidelines Japanese courts use in choosing the death penalty, a case with this many victims would normally call for death, the reporter said, but the courts took into account that she had acted under Matsunaga's mental domination after years of beatings and electric shocks.
Ono first met Matsunaga at the Fukuoka Detention Center in November 2008, while the case was before the Supreme Court. He arrived in a sweatsuit, cheerful and talkative, carrying thick bundles of court papers. He said he was being framed, called the trial a "runaway of justice" and a witch hunt, and complained that judges were following stories written by the media and authors rather than finding facts. Ono described him as flattering between complaints and showing no sense of guilt.
Bunshun Online reported in July 2024 that Matsunaga was on death row at the Fukuoka Detention Center and that Ogata was serving her sentence at Fumoto Prison in Saga Prefecture. The same account said the girl had been placed in a children's home after the case and later married and had two children.
In 2026, the 25th year since the case came to light, Shukan Bunshun ran a 13-part series by Ono, "Pride," in which T, the former leader of the Fukuoka Prefectural Police special investigation team, then 78, described the inquiry publicly for the first time. The series appeared from April to July 2026. Its last installment reported that demolition of the Katano building had begun in February 2026; a snack bar on the ground floor, whose owner had lived on the floor below the apartment, closed in June 2025 after the owner's death.
Matsunaga remains under sentence of death. Japan carried out one execution in 2026, that of the man convicted of the 2009 arson of a pachinko parlor in Osaka, on August 21, 2026, according to Nippon.com; the previous execution was in June 2025. No execution of Matsunaga had been reported as of October 2026.
Proven by final judgment: six murders (the girl's father, Ogata's mother, younger sister, brother-in-law, nephew and niece), the injury resulting in death of Ogata's father, the confinement causing injury of the second woman and of the girl, fraud and robbery. The court found Matsunaga a joint principal in each death, although in four of them the person who strangled the victim was another captive acting under threat.
Denied: Matsunaga has never admitted the murders. He told the court the girl's father died in a fall and that the Ogata family members killed each other.
Never charged: the deaths in 1993 and 1994 of a woman of 32 and her two-year-old daughter who had been living with the couple, treated at the time as a suicide and an accident. Ono attributes them to the same pattern of control, but no court has ruled on them.
Points that differ between sources: whether Matsunaga took the girl back from her grandparents on February 14 (Ono) or February 15, 2002 (the 2002 Shukan Bunshun report; the court dates her confinement from February 15); and the date Ogata's mother died (January 20 or 23, 1998, as the court left it). A 2024 book excerpt describes the brother-in-law's death differently from the court.
April 28, 1961: Futoshi Matsunaga is born in Kokura, Kitakyushu.
February 1962: Junko Ogata is born in Kurume.
About October 1968: the Matsunaga family moves to Yanagawa, Fukuoka Prefecture.
May 1981: Matsunaga founds the futon sales company World.
Around October 1982: his relationship with Ogata begins.
February 1985: Ogata leaves her kindergarten job.
July 1986: Ogata's younger sister marries.
Early October 1992: Matsunaga and Ogata flee Yanagawa; about October 10 they rent an apartment in Kokurakita Ward, Kitakyushu.
Mid-January 1993: the former employee escapes.
October 1993 to March 1994: a woman of 32 and her daughter of 2 die while living with the couple (never charged).
October 1994: the girl begins living with the couple; her father joins them in February 1995.
July to September 1995: a second woman is defrauded of 3.6 million yen.
About February 26, 1996: the girl's father dies (murder).
December 30, 1996, to March 16, 1997: the second woman is confined; she escapes by jumping from a window.
About December 21, 1997: Ogata's father dies (injury resulting in death).
January 20 or 23, 1998: Ogata's mother is killed.
About February 10, 1998: Ogata's younger sister is killed.
About April 13, 1998: the sister's husband dies.
About May 17, 1998: the sister's son, 5, is killed.
About June 7, 1998: the sister's daughter, 10, is killed.
January 30, 2002: the girl, 17, escapes to her grandparents in Moji Ward.
February 15 to March 6, 2002: after being taken back, she is confined again.
March 6, 2002: she escapes and goes to the police with her grandfather.
March 7, 2002: Matsunaga and Ogata are arrested; four children are taken into protection.
June 3, 2002: first hearing, Fukuoka District Court, Kokura Branch.
September 18, 2002: first arrest on suspicion of murder.
May 21, 2003: six murders charged by this hearing; one more is added later.
March 2, 2005: prosecutors ask for death for both.
September 28, 2005: both are sentenced to death.
October 11, 2005: Ogata appeals.
January 24, 2007: appeal hearings begin.
September 26, 2007: Fukuoka High Court upholds Matsunaga's death sentence and reduces Ogata's to life.
November 2008: Ono interviews Matsunaga at the Fukuoka Detention Center.
December 12, 2011: the Supreme Court rejects Matsunaga's appeal; Ogata's life sentence is also upheld.
February 2023: Ono's book on the case is published.
February 2026: demolition of the Katano building begins.
April to July 2026: Shukan Bunshun publishes the investigators' account.
August 21, 2026: Japan's first execution of 2026; Matsunaga is not among those executed.
October 21, 2026: on death row; no execution reported.