Hiroaki Hidaka was born in April 1962 at Miyazaki, the youngest of three children in a farming family. He went to a good local high school and meant to be a teacher. He did well, won a marathon, and had friends and a girlfriend. In his final year his form teacher put him forward for a recommended place at the University of Tsukuba.
He did not get in. He failed the teacher-training university at Fukuoka as well, and went instead to the law faculty of a private university in the same city, which he left without finishing. Japanese accounts of the case treat that as the turning point, and note that he had himself mocked teachers who came from private universities of no name. He borrowed money, drank, went to hostess bars and gambled.
In April 1989 he moved to Hiroshima and began driving a taxi. He married in 1991 and had a daughter in 1993. His wife was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
On the evening of April 18, 1996, working the entertainment district of Hiroshima, he picked up a girl of sixteen who was walking there looking for paid company. She was a pupil on the evening course at a high school in Kure and worked at a hairdresser's. One account says he gave her money and did nothing, moved by what she told him about her circumstances. He then killed her and buried her body. One source names her as Miyaji Rie.
Three more women followed, in August and September, killed in the same way and buried in various places around Hiroshima. The last was on September 14. The four were between sixteen and forty-five years old. He took between fifty and eighty thousand yen from each, about two hundred and forty thousand in all, against about a hundred and twenty thousand he had paid out.
On his own account the first killing was for money, and as he repeated it he came to find pleasure in killing. The court treated the later killings as having a sexual motive and an abnormal fixation on the act itself, and weighed against him that he had trapped the women in a vehicle, from which there was no getting out, and had disposed of their bodies.
The first body could not be identified, and on May 8, 1996 the prefectural police set up a task force of a hundred and sixty-four officers on the view that the investigation would be a long one. They established the blood group, an appendix scar, and treatment on four teeth, and asked the prefectural dental association for help, concentrating on women who were missing a particular pair of premolars from birth.
He was arrested on September 21, 1996 and confessed. Colleagues at the taxi company described a man who kept to himself but worked conscientiously, who changed when he drank and would take his clothes off, who lost his temper for no reason, and who sometimes drove drunk with beer cans rolling about the seats. The same man turned out for a local baseball team and took an active part in the neighbourhood association, and struck people there as mild.
The Hiroshima District Court sentenced him to death on February 9, 2000. He lodged no appeal. In Japan that makes a sentence final at once and puts the prisoner in line for the order, and it is rare enough that his case is still cited as an example of it.
He was hanged on December 25, 2006, aged forty-four, along with others including a man convicted in an unrelated case at Imaichi.
Two corrections to this entry as it stood. It described him as having given up appeals already lodged; in fact he never lodged any. And it said the four victims were not named in anything available; the Japanese record gives their ages, from sixteen to forty-five, and one account names the first of them. His age at the time of the killings is given as thirty-four in some accounts and thirty-seven in others; born in April 1962, he was thirty-four.