Late on the night of October 10, 1951, a woman and her four children got off the train at Kazusa-Okitsu station on the Sotobo line in Chiba prefecture. Her husband had gone out peddling and had not come home, and she had come looking for him. A man at the station offered to help. Genzo Kurita led them out along the coast toward Kominato, to the sea cliffs known as Osenkorogashi, and after midnight he threw her son and one daughter over the edge. He raped the mother and threw her off with her youngest daughter still strapped to her back. The three had caught partway down the cliff, and he climbed down and killed them there with stones. The oldest daughter had hidden, and survived.
Kurita was twenty-five. He had been born in 1926 in a desperately poor household in Shinsei, in the Ogachi district of Akita prefecture, the third son of twelve children; his father, a river fisherman, was sickly, and his mother supported the family. He wet the bed well into his school years, was bullied for the smell, and left school in the third grade. Sent out as a farm servant, he was dismissed again and again for the same reason, more than ten times in a single year. Conscripted in 1945 into the 31st Infantry Regiment at Hirosaki, he was discharged after two months, again because of the bedwetting, which would trouble him almost until his execution.
After the war he went down the coal mines at Bibai in Hokkaido and came out, by the Japanese accounts, as rough as the men around him. By 1948 he was living as a black-market broker. That year, in Shizuoka prefecture, tangled in a triangle with two women he had promised to marry, he killed one of them. He later confessed to killing both, but only one death was charged.
On August 9, 1951, in Tochigi prefecture, he raped and strangled a housewife as she was putting her child to sleep, and violated her body. Two months later came Osenkorogashi.
On the night of January 13, 1952, at Kemigawa in Chiba county, he went back to a house he had burgled before, where there had been more kimonos and sashes than he could carry the first time. A woman of twenty-four surprised him; he strangled her and stabbed her aunt, sixty-three, who came at the noise, and violated the younger woman's body. The neighbors found them when the doors stayed shut for two days. Fingerprints at the scene identified him, and on January 16 police arrested him at the home of his sister and her husband nearby, where a bloodstained kitchen knife was found. He was also wanted in Akita for theft.
The Kemigawa killings were tried first. On August 13, 1952, the Chiba District Court sentenced him to death. Questioning after his arrest uncovered the others, and on December 21, 1953, the Utsunomiya District Court sentenced him to death a second time for the Tochigi and Osenkorogashi killings and the rest. It was the first time a Japanese defendant had received two death sentences at first instance. He appealed, then withdrew the appeals and was sent to the Sendai detention branch of Miyagi Prison, where his health collapsed and he petitioned repeatedly for retrial.
In 1956, when the Diet debated whether to abolish capital punishment, those arguing to keep it held him up as an incomparably vicious, exceptional criminal. In prison he wrote a memoir he called a confession, in which he said an old man had told him at nine that hitting and choking a woman in bed was very good; he tried to sell it and no one would take it. He was hanged at Miyagi Prison on October 14, 1959. The courts found him responsible for seven deaths; with the second woman in Shizuoka, his own account made eight.