Telephone dating clubs were a common Japanese business in the 1990s and early 2000s. A customer paid to sit in a private booth containing a telephone, and talked to a woman on the other end of the line. In Kobe they were called telekura, and Kayoko Nakai ran two of them in Chuo Ward.
Her trade was falling away and she blamed a rival chain called the Rin Rin House, which had several branches. When the Rin Rin House opened new premises in the same ward, the competition came to a head.
On March 2, 2000 Molotov cocktails were thrown into two Rin Rin House clubs. Four male customers died of burns and smoke inhalation. Others were injured.
Nakai threw nothing. The court found that she had ordered it, and that she had done so to disrupt the rival's business.
The man who organized it was Akihiro Sakamoto, a leader of a drug trafficking group based in Hiroshima, who put together the men who did it. He was forty-seven at the time of the verdict.
Within days of the fires a man was arrested in Kobe on suspicion of theft, in connection with them. Nakai herself was not arrested until February 7, 2006, almost six years later, and the case reached judgment on November 27, 2007, when she was sixty-six.
She denied it throughout. Her position in court was that there was no evidence she had conspired with the men who threw the bottles and that she had not asked them to do anything to the two clubs.
The Kobe District Court convicted her of murder and of arson of inhabited structures. Prosecutors asked for her to be hanged.
The presiding judge, Makoto Okada, refused. He sentenced her to life, and his reasoning was that she had aimed at disrupting a business rather than harming people, and that she had not known what method the men would use. We cannot say, he said, that the degree of her murderous intent was high.
That is the whole of the case and it is worth stating plainly, because the sentence rests on a distinction the court drew and not on anything she admitted. A woman who had never been in either building, who denied ordering anything, and who the court accepted had not known there would be fire, was convicted of murdering four men and came within a judge's reasoning of a death sentence.
The four men who died have never been named in the published reporting. Japanese newspapers of the period customarily withheld the names of victims in cases of this kind, and the Kyodo report of the verdict identifies them only as customers of the clubs.
It was a commercial arson with fatal consequences rather than a series of killings: one night, two buildings, four dead, on the order of a woman who stood to gain from her rival's ruin.