On May 6, 1996, the decomposing body of a teenage girl was found inside a pipe in an agricultural irrigation channel on the outskirts of Hiroshima. The police could not at first say who she was. When Hiroshima prefectural police set up a task force of 164 officers on May 8, they had a young woman's remains, a blood group, an appendix scar and dental work on four teeth, and they expected a long investigation. They asked the prefectural dental association to search its members' records, concentrating on patients born without a particular pair of premolars. She was identified on May 14. By the time the case broke that September, three more women were dead.
All four had been picked up at night in the old pleasure quarter of Naka Ward, the streets of Nagarekawa, Shintenchi and Yagenbori, by a taxi driver named Hiroaki Hidaka. He was thirty-four and owed about 3.5 million yen to consumer lenders. He killed the women in or beside his cab, strangling them with the necktie he wore for work and in one case a belt, and left their bodies in the hills. Investigators later noted that every site lay within about thirty-five kilometers of the city, and took it as the work of a professional driver who knew where no one would look.
The girl in the pipe was sixteen, a first-year student in the evening course at a prefectural high school in Kure who also worked at a hairdresser's. She had last phoned home on April 17. According to the account later published by the editors of the magazine Shincho 45, drawn from investigative files and testimony in court, she had been seen from time to time around Yagenbori looking for men who would pay her. On the evening of April 18 Hidaka approached her in Shintenchi Park and invited her into his taxi, paid her twenty thousand yen and took her to a hotel. There she told him, in tears, that she had come from Osaka to work off her father's debts and that the one hundred thousand yen she was carrying would clear them. Moved by the story, he paid her and did not touch her. It was the money he wanted.
On the way back, with the lights of Kure ahead, he turned onto an empty road and stopped. He told her the engine was acting up and asked her to lift the floor mat by her feet so he could check the wiring. When she bent down he loosened his tie, got out, came up behind her and strangled her. She had not been carrying a hundred thousand yen. With his own twenty thousand she had about fifty thousand; the story had been invented. He was back at the taxi company at about four in the morning, where he replaced the sheet on the rear seat with a clean one.
The rainy season ended, August came, and there was still no sign that the police were looking at him and nothing about him in the news. His confidence grew, and with it a conviction that women who sold sex could vanish without anyone raising the alarm. On August 13 he returned to Shintenchi Park and picked up a woman of twenty-three who worked at a snack bar, agreed on thirty thousand yen, and took her to a hotel. Driving her back, he laughed that the car broke down a lot and asked her to lift the floor mat. He had bought a pair of cotton work gloves for the purpose. He slipped into the back seat behind her and strangled her with his necktie while she begged for her life, took fifty-two thousand yen from her and threw her body into the woods.
Less than a month later, on September 7, he stopped his taxi on a mountain road with a forty-five-year-old hostess who had agreed to sex for thirty thousand yen, strangled her in the dark car with a belt and finished with the necktie, and took eighty-two thousand yen. Her body went into a concrete ditch on the slope of a riverbank. Neither of the August and September victims had been found. By his own account, killing had by then become a pleasure in itself, and the urge to do it rose in him as he drove the evening streets. It frightened him, he said; once he took off the white driving gloves he wore at work, thinking that if he was somehow not his usual self the urge might pass.
It did not. The fourth woman was thirty-two and went by the name Ai-chan, and Hidaka had been with her several times before. He strangled her with the necktie in the back seat, took fifty-six thousand yen, and threw her body onto a wooded slope in the town of Yuki, now part of Hiroshima's Saeki Ward. One published account puts the killing on the night of September 13; the official chronology dates it September 14, the day she was found. About five hours after he left her, an elderly woman walking her dog came across the body. Someone had seen her getting into his taxi the night before.
The police sought a warrant for him on September 18, and he was arrested on September 21 and confessed to killing her. The other three deaths came out through a misunderstanding of his own. When a detective asked whether there was anything else he was hiding, Hidaka later explained, he assumed the police already knew where the bodies were and were waiting for him to volunteer it so the court could take it into account. On December 4 he was rearrested for the robbery-murder of the girl found in April, and ten days later he took investigators to the places where he had left the other bodies. From the four women he had taken about 240,000 yen in all.
His life had begun with every promise. Born on April 17, 1962, in Miyazaki Prefecture, the youngest of three children in a farming family, he went to the best high school in the district, won the school marathon, had friends and a girlfriend, and meant to become a teacher. In his final year he was recommended for the University of Tsukuba and rejected. He failed the entrance examination for the national teacher-training university in Fukuoka too, went instead to the law faculty of Fukuoka University, a private school, sank into drinking and gambling, and dropped out. What he kept, by the Shincho 45 account, was his pride: he was a man who had been recommended for Tsukuba, he told people, and not like them.
The slide went on. He was caught riding a motorcycle drunk, snatched purses for spending money, and was finally arrested for robbery after forcing his way into an office worker's home with a kitchen knife and taking twenty thousand yen; Japanese accounts date that arrest to January 1986, and he served two years. In 1989, at twenty-seven, he moved to Hiroshima to rely on an uncle, and that April he started driving a taxi. Through the uncle he met a wife; they married in 1991 and had a daughter in 1993. Soon afterward his wife fell mentally ill and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and the baby went to her parents. At the taxi company colleagues knew a quiet, conscientious driver who changed when he drank, lost his temper without reason and sometimes drove drunk with beer cans rolling across the floor. In his neighborhood he played on a local baseball team, took part in the residents' association and seemed mild.
He was tried in the Hiroshima District Court for robbery-murder and abandoning a corpse. In November 1999, after his lawyers had made their closing argument, he spoke for the last time, fists clenched and in tears, apologizing to the victims. When he thought about why he had been born at all, and about the way he had lived, he said, he felt nothing but pain and sorrow.
The court sentenced him to death on February 9, 2000, treating the later killings as driven by an abnormal fixation on the act itself and weighing against him that the women had been trapped in a moving vehicle and their bodies discarded. He did not appeal. The sentence became final later that month without review by any higher court, a choice rare enough in Japan that the case is still cited as the example of it.
He was hanged at the Hiroshima Detention House on December 25, 2006, at forty-four, one of four prisoners executed in Japan that day. Afterward his lawyer, Shuichi Adachi, protested that prison authorities had unlawfully refused him access to his client in the days before the execution. His age during the killings appears as thirty-seven in some Japanese summaries; the police and court record give thirty-four at arrest, which fits his birth in 1962. None of the four women has been reliably named in public, and the first of them was a girl of sixteen.
April 17, 1962: Hiroaki Hidaka is born in Miyazaki Prefecture, the youngest of three children in a farming family.
January 1986: by Japanese accounts, he is arrested for robbery after forcing his way into an office worker's home with a kitchen knife; he serves two years.
1989: at twenty-seven he moves to Hiroshima, and that April he starts driving a taxi.
1991: he marries; a daughter is born in 1993.
April 18, 1996: by a published account, he picks up a sixteen-year-old girl in Shintenchi Park and later strangles her with his necktie.
May 6, 1996: her body is found inside a pipe in an irrigation channel on the outskirts of Hiroshima; she is identified on May 14.
August 13, 1996: he strangles a twenty-three-year-old snack bar worker with his necktie and takes fifty-two thousand yen.
September 7, 1996: he strangles a forty-five-year-old hostess on a mountain road and takes eighty-two thousand yen.
September 14, 1996: the body of a fourth woman, thirty-two, is found on a wooded slope in Yuki; one account puts her killing on the night of September 13.
September 21, 1996: Hidaka is arrested and confesses to killing her.
December 4, 1996: he is rearrested for the robbery-murder of the sixteen-year-old girl; ten days later he leads investigators to the other bodies.
November 1999: at the close of his trial in the Hiroshima District Court, he apologizes to the victims in tears.
February 9, 2000: the court sentences him to death; he does not appeal, and the sentence becomes final later that month.
December 25, 2006: he is hanged at the Hiroshima Detention House at forty-four.