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Japan Hangs Takahiro Shiraishi for the 2017 Murders of Nine People in Zama

The man who lured nine people to his apartment near Tokyo after they posted about suicide became the first person Japan had executed in nearly three years.

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Illustration: evidence folders, notebooks and old photographs spread under a desk lamp

In 2017, investigators found the dismembered bodies of nine people in a small apartment in Zama, Kanagawa Prefecture, about 60 kilometers from Tokyo. On Friday, June 27, 2025, Japan hanged the man who lived there. Takahiro Shiraishi, 34, was the first person executed in the country in nearly three years.

Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki announced the execution at a press conference that day and said he had signed the order on Monday, June 23. He set out what the courts had found. Over about two months, in his home, Shiraishi had assaulted nine victims, strangling them among other violence, and killed them, then taken their money, cut up their bodies, hidden some of the remains in boxes and thrown others out at garbage collection points. The crimes were robbery with rape and murder, robbery-murder, and damaging and abandoning corpses. Suzuki said Shiraishi had acted "for the genuinely selfish reason of satisfying his own sexual and financial desires," in the translation reported by ABC News, and that the killings had caused great shock and anxiety in society.

The victims were between 15 and 26 years old, and all but one were women. Shiraishi, then 27, reached them on Twitter, now X, where they had posted about taking their own lives, telling them he could help them with their plans or even die alongside them, and lured them to his apartment. He hid parts of their bodies there in coolers and toolboxes sprinkled with cat litter. The killings came to light when police looking for a missing 23-year-old woman, who had reportedly tweeted about wanting to kill herself, were led to his apartment after her brother got into her Twitter account.

The Tokyo District Court's Tachikawa branch sentenced him to death in 2020. His lawyers had argued that he deserved prison rather than execution because the victims had expressed suicidal thoughts and so had consented to die. The judge rejected that, calling the crimes "cunning and cruel" and saying Shiraishi had preyed on people who were "mentally fragile," according to reports at the time.

The hanging came about four years and five months after his sentence became final, Suzuki said, against an average of about nine years and six months for prisoners executed from 2015 through 2024. Japan's previous execution, of Tomohiro Kato in July 2022, followed his 2008 stabbing rampage in Tokyo's Akihabara district; the gap of two years and eleven months was, Suzuki agreed, the longest since the ministry began announcing executions in November 1998. With Shiraishi's death, 105 people remained under final death sentences, 49 of them seeking retrial. Suzuki declined to say whether Shiraishi had sought one or why he had been chosen. "It is not appropriate to abolish the death penalty while these violent crimes are still being committed," he said.

Suzuki's account of the crimes, the order date, the death-row figures and the timing comparisons come from the Justice Ministry's own Japanese transcript of the June 27, 2025 press conference. The ministry did not name the facility where the hanging took place.

Sources