On the evening of January 12, 1948, two patrolmen from the Waseda police station in Tokyo stopped a man riding a bicycle through Shinjuku Ward. Strapped to it were four wooden crates printed with pictures of mandarin oranges. When he opened them at the officers' order, they held the bodies of five infants wrapped in knitted shirts and diapers. He was an undertaker, he said, and the children came from the Kotobuki maternity home in Ichigaya Yanagichō.
The home's director, Miyuki Ishikawa, was one of the best-known midwives in the city. Within days the police and the press had laid out what she and her husband, Takeshi, had been doing: taking in infants that mothers could not keep, collecting a fee for each, selling some of the children to people who wanted them, and feeding the rest so little that most of them died. Newspapers of the time gave death tolls ranging from 85 to 169. The courts, working from the evidence they could test, convicted the couple of causing five of the deaths by omission. On appeal she was sentenced to four years in prison. She lived until 1987.
The case is documented in records of the National Diet, an official Diet report on the history of Japan's Eugenic Protection Law, an academic paper, an essay written in the week of the arrests, and two series published by Bunshun Online that reconstruct the case from the 1948 press and the official history of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. Those sources do not always agree.
Miyuki Ishikawa was born Miyuki Komaru in 1897 in Miyazaki Prefecture, in southern Kyushu. After graduating from a prefectural vocational school she moved to Tokyo at 18 and entered the midwifery course attached to the hospital of Tokyo Imperial University, the predecessor of the University of Tokyo. It was an unusually advanced education for a woman of her generation. She graduated in 1919. Because the Home Ministry had designated the course, its graduates were licensed as midwives without having to sit the national examination.
She practiced in Tokyo for more than 20 years, first in Nihonbashi and then in Ushigome, according to Koike's account of the 1948 press. By early 1948 she held several posts in her profession: she was a director of the national association of midwives, nurses and public health nurses, head of the Ushigome branch of the Tokyo midwives' association, and president of the Ushigome midwives' association. The 1947 edition of a women's yearbook, the Fujin Nenkan, presented her as one of the leading figures in Japanese midwifery. In April 1947, soon after Shinjuku Ward was created, she stood for its first ward assembly and lost. Accounts differ on whether she ran as an independent or as a Liberal Party candidate.
Her husband, Takeshi Ishikawa, was born in 1894 in Ibaraki Prefecture, northeast of Tokyo. He left an agricultural school after two years, volunteered for the army at 18 and was discharged as a sergeant in the Kenpeitai, the military police. In 1919 he joined the Tokyo Metropolitan Police as a patrolman, and in the same year, according to Bunshun Online's 2026 account, he married Miyuki, who was three years younger. He served at the Yanaka and Ōji police stations and left the force in 1926. After that he had no regular job and helped with his wife's business.
The couple had no children of their own. Their household of six included Takeshi's son from an earlier marriage and three adopted children, two boys and a girl. To their neighbors they looked prosperous and respectable, the kind of couple who were pillars of a neighborhood.
The Kotobuki home stood in Yanagichō in Ichigaya, in Shinjuku Ward. Accounts disagree on when it opened. Bunshun Online's 2026 account says April 1942, shortly before the air raids on Tokyo. The House of Representatives report on the Eugenic Protection Law, published in 2023, says the couple began taking in infants in April 1943. Hitomi Yoshida, a historian of medical ethics, dates the taking-in of infants for adoption at the home from 1944.
What the home did is less in dispute. It was what the press called a special maternity home: besides delivering babies, it took in children whose mothers could not raise them and handed them on to people who wanted a child. Under the abortion provisions of the Penal Code, a woman who ended a pregnancy, and the doctor or midwife who helped her, faced prison. A child born outside marriage could ruin a woman's prospects. The Diet's 2023 report lists the women who brought their children to the Kotobuki home as unmarried women, war widows, dancers, café waitresses and women who worked on the street. Bunshun Online's 2026 account adds that during the war the government had encouraged such homes as a way to raise the population.
The Ishikawas found their clients through short classified advertisements in newspapers and magazines. The fee for taking a child was 5,000 to 10,000 yen, according to the Diet report and Bunshun Online's 2026 account; the Asahi Shimbun in January 1948 gave it as 5,000 to 6,000 yen. Adoptive parents then paid a second fee for the child they took home. The Asahi reported that they were charged 400 to 500 yen. A woman who had adopted a girl from the home later described Ishikawa showing her two children and pricing one at 300 yen and the other, whom she called better-looking, at 500.
The number of children taken in grew each year. The Diet report says it reached 100 in 1947 and that the home took in 211 infants in all.
Children who were adopted generally survived. Those who were not were fed far less than they needed. A former worker at the home told the Yomiuri Shimbun in January 1948 that Ishikawa set the portions herself: two spoonfuls of powdered milk and three of sugar mixed with water, six times a day, about half of what a normal infant would take. The midwives on the staff, more than ten of them over the years, asked for more milk and were told to follow instructions. The Asahi Shimbun reported that all of them left within a month of starting, shocked by how the children were cared for, and that several said the director was trying to kill the children.
Neighbors had complained for months. The police box at Yanagichō told reporters after the arrests that since the previous August people living near the home had reported that the babies were never bathed, even in summer, that they were left unclothed on the floor of an alcove where mosquitoes reached them, and that they cried all day. Neighbors also said they had never heard prayers said for the dead. Women who came to the home to give birth saw how the infants were treated and called Ishikawa the oni sanba, the demon midwife; according to the Asahi, some of them left before they had recovered from childbirth. One such woman complained to the patrolman responsible for the area, who reportedly told her it was a terrible place and that she had been brave to go there at all.
Diapers were seldom changed. The infants grew thin, and most of those who died, died of malnutrition; in winter, some died of cold because they were not kept warm. When a child died, a doctor wrote the death certificate. Bunshun Online's 2026 account says the couple obtained close to 60 false certificates. The doctor who signed them told the Asahi that by the time the children were brought to him they were beyond help, that he had never given a single dose of medicine, and that he had warned the couple repeatedly with no result.
The deaths also brought in goods. Under the rationing system of the time, the home drew milk and sugar for each infant. For each death, the Shinjuku ward office issued tickets for two shō of sake for the funeral. According to Bunshun Online's 2026 account, the couple sold the milk, sugar and sake on the black market. Before the case came to light, that account says, they had made about a million yen, enough to install a telephone, then a rarity, buy land in Tokyo and Ibaraki Prefecture, and come close to buying a car.
Almost nothing is on record about the children as individuals. They were newborns and infants, the oldest a few years old, most of them born to mothers who could not acknowledge them. Some, as a father told reporters in January 1948, were born within marriage. The mothers paid to leave them in what had been advertised as a place of care. Very few came back to ask after them; an editorial in the days after the arrests counted two or three. In the week the case broke, mothers who had left children at the home went to the police and to the house in Ichigaya, and at least one found her infant alive and took the child home.
Their names were printed in some of the 1948 coverage.
The undertaker stopped by the patrolmen that evening, a man of 54, told them he was taking the five bodies from the Kotobuki home to his house in Enokichō, also in Shinjuku Ward, so that they could be cremated the next day; it was too late to go to the crematorium that night. He said the home had been asking him to handle its dead since August of the previous year. Bunshun Online's 2026 account says he told the officers he had cremated more than 30 for the home. The official history of the Tokyo police, as cited by Koike, records that he had burial permits for three of the five bodies. The patrolmen let him go.
The report reached the chief of the Waseda station, Isamu Ide. Five dead infants from one maternity home in a single day, and more than 30 before them, struck him as more than misfortune. The next day he sent detectives to the undertaker, ordered that the bodies be held for examination and notified the prosecutors.
There are two versions of the medical findings. In Bunshun Online's 2026 account, autopsies at the National Tokyo First Hospital found that three of the infants had starved and two had frozen to death, and none had any food in the stomach. Koike's account of the press reports says the pediatrics chief of the National First Hospital examined the five bodies on the morning of January 15 and diagnosed three with pneumonia and malnutrition and two with death from cold, and that an autopsy at Keiō University Hospital that afternoon found no trace of food in their stomachs.
Early on January 15, the Waseda police arrested Miyuki Ishikawa, the director of the home, then 52; her husband, Takeshi, given as 55 in Bunshun Online's 2026 account; and the undertaker. The papers of the following days gave slightly different ages for the couple. The Asahi Shimbun named all three on January 16, under a headline about children dying one after another and suspicion falling on a maternity home and an undertaker.
At the house, according to press reports summarized by Koike, investigators found seven infants still alive, lying on a bamboo bed in a small room of three tatami mats. They also found ten pounds of milk and stores of sugar and rice. The couple described the home to reporters as a conscientious, charitable undertaking.
Bunshun Online's 2026 account says the police sought their warrant on the theory of murder by omission, killing by failing to act. Koike, drawing on the 1948 coverage, says they first sought a warrant for fraud connected with the burials while the inquiry continued. Five years later a Supreme Court official gave the Diet a third version.
The question of how many children died at the Kotobuki home was never settled, and the numbers began to move on the first day.
In an early report the Asahi Shimbun said the couple had taken in 199 infants and that about 85 percent of them, 169 children, had died. The same paper quoted Chief Ide as saying that Ishikawa had admitted intending the children's deaths, and predicted a case of mass killing of infants. By the evening of January 17 the Asahi was reporting that the earlier figure was wrong: the home had taken in 204 children from 1944 onward, and 103 had died. Deaths had been few in 1944 and 1945, had risen from late 1946, and had reached about 80 percent in 1947. Of the 101 children who survived, most had been handed to people answering the advertisements; a few had gone back to their parents. The Yomiuri Shimbun of the same date put the dead at more than 80. Writing on January 23, the novelist Yuriko Miyamoto said that more than 200 children had been left at the home the previous year and that about 80 percent had been killed.
The Shinjuku ward office's sanitation section, which received death notices and issued burial permits, told the Asahi it had received 103 death reports from the home. Officials there said they had thought so many deaths odd. The ward's economics section, which issued the sake tickets, said it had found the paperwork in order and issued them without question.
Later writers chose among these figures. The official history of the Tokyo police, published in 1978, gives 85, which Koike treats as the minimum. Hitomi Yoshida, in a 2013 paper, writes of an estimated 103 deaths. The House of Representatives report of 2023 says more than 100 infants died and records 85 in connection with the prosecution. Bunshun Online's 2026 account uses 169, about 85 percent of those taken in, with a peak of 53 deaths in 1947. None of these totals was ever tested in court.
On January 17, according to the Asahi of the next day, both Ishikawas admitted to investigators that they had known the amount of food they were giving could kill the children. They also admitted a ration fraud: when a child whose mother was on record died, they reported the death as that of a child with no registered mother, so that the rations drawn for the first child kept coming. That day the prosecutor in charge, Hirayama of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office, sent the couple to be held on suspicion of murder. The undertaker was held on suspicion of aiding murder. Prosecutors also considered charges of fraud, violation of the Food Control Law and abandonment of bodies.
On January 18 police arrested an assistant midwife at the home, a woman of 25, and the doctor who had written the death certificates. Crowds gathered outside the Waseda station, where the couple were held, shouting that the "demon couple" should not be fed. A search of a house near the home turned up bundles of diapers, baby clothes and padded jackets that, the Asahi reported, parents had given for their children and the couple had kept.
On January 21, Ishikawa answered written questions from the Yomiuri Shimbun, which published her replies the next day. Asked how she felt, she wrote that she would not resent it even if she were sentenced to death as atonement for her crime. Asked why she had not given the children enough food, she wrote that she had known very well the children would die on what she gave them, and that she had cut their food because there was no prospect of paying for more. Asked what she felt as they died, she said she had been frightened at first, but after watching children die day after day she had stopped feeling anything.
Bunshun Online's 2026 account also attributes to her, under questioning, the view that the mothers had left their children without paying for their keep, so their deaths were only natural, and that she had nothing to be ashamed of. That account has her asking who was worse, the parents or herself. Koike places a similar question in her 1969 magazine interview.
The press did not stop at the Ishikawas. On January 21 the Asahi Shimbun ran a long article asking whose crime the killings were. It pointed to the staff who had left without reporting what they had seen, the women who had given birth there, the neighbors, the doctor, the local police and above all the ward office, whose officials had processed more than a hundred death reports and sake tickets without asking why. The Asahi called it bloodless office work.
A commentary in the Jiji Press current-affairs bulletin of January 26, quoted at length by Koike, went further. An infant fed only on the official ration, it argued, would die: the ration was two 450-gram cans of milk a month, when eight to ten were needed. Even without any intent to kill, a home that relied on the ration alone and bought nothing on the black market would see its children die. It called the case a silent and severe protest by many young lives.
Yuriko Miyamoto, writing in the Communist Party paper Akahata on January 23, rejected the idea that the deaths mattered less because many of the children were illegitimate. Some of them had been born within marriage, she noted, and in any case the distinction meant nothing to a child. "Children are all children of society," she wrote, "and have a right to have their lives guaranteed." She called on the state to build public orphanages, maternity homes and day nurseries.
On January 26, 1948, the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office indicted Miyuki Ishikawa, Takeshi Ishikawa and the assistant midwife for murder. The undertaker was not indicted, for lack of evidence, and was released. What became of the doctor who had signed the death certificates after his arrest was not reported.
The case reached the House of Representatives within three weeks of the arrests. On February 2, 1948, Michiko Yamazaki of the Japan Socialist Party raised it in a plenary session as one of a series of crimes that, she argued, showed the state of the country. Pregnant women who knew a birth would ruin both mother and child, she said, had nowhere to go but to people like the Ishikawas, because no public institution protected newborns. She called the case the tip of the iceberg. She described how hard it was to keep any infant alive: no firewood for bathing, diapers made from black-market cloth at about 10,000 yen a set, black-market milk at 2,000 to 3,000 yen a month, and a ration that could not sustain life. She asked for public maternity homes, infant homes, nurseries and mother and child hostels, a eugenic protection law, and an accounting from the police, doctors and officials who had let the case go on.
The Minister of Justice, Yoshio Suzuki, called the case truly lamentable. The suspects had been arrested and indicted, he said, and the matter was now before the court; his ministry would work with the Ministry of Health and Welfare to prevent anything like it. The Minister of Health and Welfare, Sadayoshi Hitotsumatsu, said a main cause was that facilities taking in infants were not properly supervised and the law governing them was incomplete, and he promised stronger regulation. He said it was regrettable that so many of the dead were children born outside marriage, and, when Yamazaki pressed him, that such children must be cared for in full like any others. He agreed that the milk ration was not enough to raise an infant.
The case came up again in June. Shirō Hanamura of the Democratic Liberal Party told a joint session of two committees that, as one person had put it to him, the children had not been killed so much as given their rations and starved: the infant milk ration was one pound a month, a doctor's plea might raise it to two, and an infant needed four to five. Jirō Arita of the same party told the Health and Welfare Committee that the case grew out of defects in the medical system, and argued for public medical examiners to establish the true cause of death rather than leaving it to the doctor who had treated the patient.
The Kotobuki home was not the only one. After the arrests, the Tokyo metropolitan health bureau surveyed private maternity homes, and in February 1948 similar cases came to light at the Yodobashi home in Shinjuku Ward, the Komagomebashi home in Bunkyō Ward and the Hasegawa home in Hongō, Bunkyō Ward, according to the House of Representatives report. The Asahi Shimbun reported on February 10 and 11 that 61 infants had died at the Yodobashi home, where police seized documents and questioned the director, a woman of 44. At the Komagome home, Koike writes, 22 deaths had been recorded as those of unregistered children so that the home could keep drawing their supplies. The Hasegawa case revealed large fees for abortions performed on more than ten women, and its director became, according to the Diet report, the first person prosecuted for abortion in postwar Japan.
Nor was the Kotobuki case the first of its kind. Before the war, the killing of children taken in for money in Iwanosaka, a poor district of Itabashi in Tokyo, had drawn wide attention. Yasuyuki Takahashi of Niigata Prefectural University has traced how cases of this kind from 1930 onward fed the pressure that produced the Child Abuse Prevention Act of 1933.
The trial of the Ishikawas and the assistant midwife opened in the Tokyo District Court on June 2, 1948. At the first hearing both Ishikawas denied any intent to kill. Miyuki Ishikawa admitted only that she had failed to supervise the home, saying she had left the work to her assistant. On August 20 the couple were released on bail and went back to live in the building that had been the home, which was now closed.
On September 3 the prosecution made its closing submission. It told the court that 84 infants had died at the home between April 1946 and January 1948 and that in 27 of those deaths the evidence of murder was clear. It asked for 15 years' imprisonment for Miyuki Ishikawa, seven years for Takeshi Ishikawa and three years for the assistant.
The court gave judgment on October 11, 1948. It found the evidence insufficient on 22 of the 27 deaths. On the remaining five, it found that the couple had jointly caused the infants' deaths from malnutrition by omission, by failing to give them the food they needed. It sentenced Miyuki Ishikawa to eight years' imprisonment and Takeshi Ishikawa to four. The assistant midwife was acquitted: the court found that she had done what she could, repeatedly asking for more milk for the infants.
The Ishikawas appealed. On April 28, 1952, the Tokyo High Court set aside the judgment of the District Court and sentenced Miyuki Ishikawa to four years' imprisonment and Takeshi Ishikawa to two, half the original terms. The source for this, as Koike notes, is the official history of the Tokyo police. The couple appealed again, and the Supreme Court upheld the High Court's judgment, which then became final. The date of the Supreme Court's decision, and whether the High Court changed the legal description of the offense, were not reported.
April 28, 1952, was also the day the Treaty of San Francisco took effect and the Allied occupation of Japan ended, Koike points out. A 1969 magazine article said that Ishikawa was released under the amnesty that marked the treaty. Koike raises the question of whether she was in fact freed then and leaves it open. How much of her sentence she served remains unclear.
After the case, according to Bunshun Online's 2026 account, Ishikawa made a living as a door-to-door seller of soap, cosmetic cream and fish. By 1969 she was running a real estate business in Tokyo. Takeshi Ishikawa had died by then; the date is not recorded.
In its issue of June 21, 1969, the weekly magazine Shūkan Shinchō published an interview with her, under a pseudonym, as part of a feature on how the years had treated people once in the news. The headline described her as the Kotobuki demon who had become a millionaire. She was 73. She told the magazine she had been wrongly convicted and had worked for years to clear her name. She had never killed a child with her own hands, she said; the children had died, but she had fed them as well as she could and taken them to a doctor, and infants were dying of hunger in other homes and institutions too. The parents who left their children with her never came to see them. She asked which of them was worse, she or the parents, and told the reporter to think about it. Her former defense lawyer, quoted in the article, called her a woman of formidable strength and guessed she had made perhaps a hundred million yen.
Miyuki Ishikawa died in May 1987, at the age of 90, according to Bunshun Online's 2026 account.
The Kotobuki case is regularly cited as one of the events behind Japan's Eugenic Protection Law of 1948, the law that first permitted abortion on stated grounds. The House of Representatives report of 2023, in its chapter on how that law was made, opens its account of the background with the Kotobuki case and the other homes exposed in February 1948. In 2000, Akiko Dōmoto told a House of Councillors committee that after cases such as Kotobuki the law had been passed in a single night, so that in Japan abortion services came before contraception.
According to Koike, the law was promulgated in July 1948 and took effect in September; at first the government refused to accept economic hardship as a ground for abortion, but because most abortions were in practice sought for economic reasons, that ground was added in 1949. Bunshun Online's 2026 account places the law in October 1948. Koike also notes the view of the writer Yōko Morosawa that the case grew from women's lack of any right not to give birth: women who conceived against their will had no choice but to bear the child.
The law on maternity homes changed the same year. On June 24, 1948, the parliamentary vice-minister of health and welfare, Naraji Kita, explained to the House of Representatives the Medical Care Bill, which brought homes run by midwives, known as maternity homes or homes for pregnant women, under national regulation for the first time. Recent cases, he said, had shown the need for prompt legal control. The bill gave all such places the single name of midwifery home, limited how many people they could hold, and restricted their advertising as strictly as doctors'. In November 1948, the head of the ministry's Children's Bureau, Tokuo Kojima, told the House of Councillors that the earlier Kotobuki case was one reason the ministry was taking a serious view of a new case in Osaka, and that minimum standards for child welfare institutions, with inspections every six months, would take effect in December.
Tokyo moved more quickly. The Yomiuri Shimbun reported on January 18, 1948, that the city had only two public infant homes, with room for 200 children between them, while 14,000 to 15,000 infants needed places because their mothers had died or could not care for them, and that it planned ten more from April and an emergency inspection of private and unlicensed homes that advertised. In early February the Yomiuri reported that the Saiseikai maternity hospital had begun taking in abandoned infants through a consultation office.
Hitomi Yoshida, writing in 2013, argues that the case marked the end of an older arrangement. Before and during the war, midwives had looked after pregnant women and infants together, giving advice on infant health and sheltering children awaiting adoption. After the Kotobuki case, midwives were barred from those roles, and the postwar child welfare system handled pregnant women and infants separately.
The case stayed in official memory. On July 21, 1953, Seiichi Kishi, director of the Criminal Affairs Bureau of the General Secretariat of the Supreme Court, used it to explain to the House of Representatives Judicial Affairs Committee how judges handled arrest warrants. In what he called the Kotobuki infant killing case, he said, the police had not at first asked for a warrant for murder. They had asked for one for fraud over rationed rice, the more certain matter. The judge had pointed out that the investigation did not seem to be aimed at that point, and the request had been withdrawn. In 1973 a Socialist member of the House of Councillors, Tsuyoshi Suzuki, cited the Kotobuki case in a debate on adoption law as the kind of thing that had happened in the confusion after the war and could happen again if children could be passed from hand to hand for money.
Proven by final judgment: that Miyuki and Takeshi Ishikawa jointly caused the deaths of five infants in their care by omission, through malnutrition, on an indictment for murder (Tokyo District Court, October 11, 1948; sentences reduced by the Tokyo High Court on April 28, 1952; upheld by the Supreme Court).
Charged but not proven: 22 further deaths, on which the District Court found the evidence insufficient; and the prosecution's wider figure of 84 deaths between April 1946 and January 1948.
Estimated, never tried: totals of 85 (Tokyo police history), 103 (Asahi Shimbun, January 1948; Yoshida, 2013), more than 100 (House of Representatives, 2023) and 169 (an early Asahi report, later corrected by the paper; Bunshun Online, 2026). The number of children taken in is given as 199, 204 and 211 in different accounts.
Points on which accounts differ: the year the home opened (1942, 1943 or 1944); the street where the undertaker was stopped (sources name Bentenchō, Yaraichō and Tenjinchō); whether the police first sought a warrant for murder by omission, for fraud over burials, or for fraud over rationed rice; whether the autopsies were done at the National Tokyo First Hospital or at Keiō University Hospital, and whether two of the five deaths were from cold alone; whether the "demon midwife" name came from her staff or from the women who gave birth there; the couple's ages in January 1948; the fee charged to mothers; her party in the 1947 ward election; whether her question about the parents was put to the police in 1948 or to a magazine in 1969; when the Eugenic Protection Law came into force; and whether she was released under the 1952 peace treaty amnesty.
1894: Takeshi Ishikawa is born in Ibaraki Prefecture.
1897: Miyuki Komaru is born in Miyazaki Prefecture.
1919: she completes the midwifery course of the Tokyo Imperial University hospital; Takeshi joins the Tokyo Metropolitan Police; the two marry.
1926: Takeshi leaves the police.
1942 to 1944 (accounts differ): the Kotobuki home in Ichigaya Yanagichō begins taking in infants.
April 1946 to January 1948: the period of the 84 deaths the prosecution later put before the court.
April 1947: she stands for the Shinjuku ward assembly and loses.
August 1947: the undertaker begins handling the home's dead, by his account.
January 12, 1948, evening: Waseda patrolmen stop the undertaker and find five infants' bodies.
January 15, 1948: Miyuki and Takeshi Ishikawa and the undertaker are arrested.
January 17, 1948: the couple admit to investigators they knew the feeding could kill; they are held on suspicion of murder.
January 18, 1948: the assistant midwife and the doctor are arrested.
January 21, 1948: she answers the Yomiuri's written questions.
January 23, 1948: Yuriko Miyamoto's essay on the case appears in Akahata.
January 26, 1948: the couple and the assistant are indicted for murder; the undertaker is released.
February 2, 1948: the case is debated in a plenary session of the House of Representatives.
February 1948: the Yodobashi, Komagomebashi and Hasegawa cases come to light.
June 2, 1948: the trial opens in the Tokyo District Court.
June 24, 1948: the Medical Care Bill, bringing maternity homes under national regulation, is explained to the Diet.
July 1948: the Eugenic Protection Law is promulgated (Koike).
August 20, 1948: the couple are released on bail.
September 3, 1948: the prosecution asks for 15, seven and three years.
October 11, 1948: the couple are convicted of five deaths by omission (eight and four years); the assistant is acquitted.
1949: economic grounds are added to the Eugenic Protection Law.
April 28, 1952: the Tokyo High Court sets aside the first judgment and imposes four and two years.
Date not reported: the Supreme Court upholds the High Court.
July 21, 1953: a Supreme Court official describes the case's arrest warrant to the Diet.
June 21, 1969: Shūkan Shinchō publishes her interview; she says she was wrongly convicted.
May 1987: Miyuki Ishikawa dies, aged 90.
2023: the House of Representatives report on the Eugenic Protection Law recounts the case.