On January 30, 2002, a seventeen-year-old girl slipped out of an apartment in Kokurakita Ward, Kitakyushu, on the northern tip of Kyushu, and made her way to her grandparents' home elsewhere in the city. She had been held captive for years. Two weeks later, on February 15, the man who had held her found her, took her back and tortured her with electric shocks. On March 6 she got away again, and this time the police were told. The next day, when Futoshi Matsunaga and his common-law wife, Junko Ogata, came to retrieve her, both were arrested. Four children were taken out of their care, the couple's two sons and a pair of twins who had been handed to them the year before, and the girl's account opened a case that prosecutors later said had no equal in the criminal history of Japan. Much of the Japanese press, for a long time, would not print the details.
Matsunaga was born on April 28, 1961, in Kokurakita Ward and grew up in Yanagawa, in the south of Fukuoka Prefecture. He did well at school and could be charming, but he was a discipline problem, and he was moved to another high school after he became involved with a junior high school girl. He married at nineteen, had a son, and during the marriage kept at least ten mistresses. Junko Ogata, born in Kurume on February 25, 1962, had known him slightly as a schoolmate in Yanagawa. She came from a well-off family, worked at a preschool and was remembered by people who knew her then as gentle. In October 1982 the two began a relationship, and he abused her severely for the next twenty years.
In 1984 he promised to marry her. Her mother, Shizumi, opposed the match because of the way he treated her daughter, and Matsunaga raped her. The following year, after Ogata attempted suicide, he persuaded her that her family hated her for it, and she moved in with him. That same year he bought a building for a futon business that was largely a fraud, and on its third floor he began giving his employees electric shocks. He would shout at men that a spirit behind them was sucking away their fortune, and he talked of samsara and kami. By 1992 he had taken about 180 million yen through fraud and blackmail, and he and Ogata were on the run and on the national most-wanted list.
In April 1993, living in a condominium in Kokurakita Ward, he persuaded a married woman with three children to leave her husband, introducing Ogata as his sister. One of the children died in unexplained circumstances that September; the other two went back to their father. Matsunaga took 11.8 million yen from the woman, and in March 1994 she too died in circumstances no one could explain. The police could not prove he had killed either of them, and neither death is among those he was convicted of.
Kumio Toraya came next. He had confided his own criminal past to Matsunaga, who used it to blackmail him and then took Toraya and his young daughter into the apartment. There Matsunaga gave Toraya electric shocks, starved and humiliated him, forced him to eat his own feces and made the girl bite her father. Toraya, thirty-five by most accounts and thirty-four by some, died of the abuse on February 26, 1996. Matsunaga convinced the girl that she had killed him, and had her and Ogata dispose of the body. It was pulverized and thrown into the sea off the Kunisaki Peninsula. He kept the girl.
A woman who had known Toraya followed. Matsunaga told her he was a graduate of Kyoto University, promised to marry her, took 5.6 million yen from her, and then confined her and her daughter in the apartment. In March 1997 she escaped by jumping from a second-floor window. She was taken into a psychiatric hospital, and her daughter was let go.
The next month Ogata left for work and did not come back. Matsunaga turned on her family. He threatened them, used the old rape to blackmail Shizumi, and then faked his own suicide, which brought Ogata back to him and to more abuse. He raped her married younger sister, Rieko. The Ogatas paid him some 63 million yen, and then he took them in: her father, Takashige; her mother, Shizumi; Rieko; Rieko's husband, Kazuya; and their children, Aya and Yūki. In the apartment he rationed their food and sleep, made them give one another electric shocks and set them against each other, a regime of control later writers compared to that of the cult leader Shoko Asahara.
They died one at a time over six months. On December 21, 1997, Matsunaga had Ogata shock her sixty-one-year-old father until he died; the courts found the couple had not meant to kill him, which is why his death was treated as manslaughter. When Shizumi, fifty-eight, began to break down, he ordered Rieko and Kazuya to strangle her, and on January 20, 1998, they did. Several weeks later he ordered Kazuya to strangle Rieko, who was thirty-three, while ten-year-old Aya held her mother down. Kazuya, thirty-eight, was then shut in the bathroom and starved, and he died there on April 13, 1998. Ogata and Aya were made to kill Yūki, who was five. On June 7, 1998, Toraya's daughter, on Matsunaga's orders, strangled Aya. She testified at trial that the couple had first tortured Aya with electricity; Ogata's account differed, and she suggested the girl's memory had been colored by guilt over the first killing she had been made to commit. Each body was cut up and boiled in pots, and the remains were flushed away or thrown into the sea. Of Ogata's family, only she and her two sons were left.
Nothing about his life changed. In July 2000 he persuaded another woman to leave her family for him on the promise of marriage, and in August 2001 she handed her twin children to him and Ogata, along with 20 million yen he said would be needed to raise them. Toraya's daughter was still in the apartment when she ran for the first time.
The first reports described only a confinement, much like the case of Fusako Sano uncovered in Niigata two years earlier, until the killings came out. The couple were charged with Aya's murder on September 18, 2002, and over the following months with the deaths of Takashige, Shizumi, Yūki, Kumio Toraya and Rieko, and finally, on May 30, 2003, with Kazuya's. No charges were brought against Toraya's daughter. No remains were ever recovered and there was no physical evidence of any of the seven deaths, so the prosecution rested on the girl's testimony and on Ogata's. Ogata confessed calmly to her part. Matsunaga said the women had invented their stories, and blamed Ogata for the killings.
On September 28, 2005, the Kokura branch of the Fukuoka District Court convicted both of six murders and one count of manslaughter and sentenced both to death by hanging. On September 26, 2007, the Fukuoka High Court upheld Matsunaga's sentence and reduced Ogata's to life imprisonment, finding that she had killed under his domination after years of brutal abuse. On December 12, 2011, the Supreme Court dismissed the appeals, leaving both outcomes in place. It is extremely rare in Japan for anyone involved in so many deaths to escape the death penalty, and the difference turned on the relationship of master and subordinate the courts found between the two.
The writers Ryūzō Saki and Masayoshi Toyoda each published a book on the case in 2005, Saki's asking why the family killed one another and Toyoda's calling them the extinguished family. The director Sion Sono drew on it for The Forest of Love, released by Netflix on October 11, 2019. Matsunaga, who turned sixty-five in April 2026, is reported to be held at the Fukuoka Detention Center and to maintain his innocence, and he had not been executed as of 2026. The victims were Kumio Toraya and six members of one family: Takashige, Shizumi, Rieko, Kazuya, Yūki and Aya Ogata. The girl whose escape exposed the case had spent much of her childhood as his prisoner.