In the autumn of 1968 four men died in four Japanese cities over 26 days. The first was in Tokyo on October 11, the second in Kyoto three days later, the third near Hakodate on the northern island of Hokkaido, and the fourth in Nagoya. The man responsible, Norio Nagayama, was 19. He was arrested in Tokyo in April 1969, and he never left custody again.
What followed in the courts lasted more than two decades. The Tokyo District Court sentenced him to death in 1979. The Tokyo High Court replaced that sentence with life imprisonment in 1981, reasoning that society and the state shared some of the blame for the life that had produced him. In 1983 the Supreme Court of Japan reversed that judgment, and in doing so set out the considerations a court must weigh before it chooses death. Those considerations, known in Japan as the Nagayama standard, have been cited in capital cases ever since. The Tokyo High Court sentenced him to death again in 1987, the Supreme Court confirmed it in 1990, and he was executed on August 1, 1997, at the age of 48.
In the years between, Nagayama taught himself to read and write in his cell and became a published author. His first book, a memoir written in prison notebooks, was a best seller in 1971. He sent his royalties to the families of the men who died, and in his last wishes he left them to help working children in Peru.
Nagayama was born in 1949 in Abashiri, a town on the northeastern coast of Hokkaido. He was one of eight children in a poor household. His father worked in apple orchards and drifted away from the family; his mother supported the children by peddling goods.
When Nagayama was about five, his mother took three of the children back to her family home in Aomori Prefecture, on the northern tip of the main island of Honshu, and left him and three of his siblings behind in Abashiri. The children spent a hard Hokkaido winter largely on their own, living on food scavenged from rubbish bins. Toshio Sakamoto, a former prison officer who came to know Nagayama well in custody, later described this as neglect of a kind that would today be called child abuse by abandonment.
A welfare office arranged for him to rejoin his mother in Aomori the following year. The move brought no relief. He grew up there under violence from an older brother and from his mother, and at school he was bullied over his Hokkaido accent. He attended middle school only fitfully. The household was so poor that he had never watched television before he left for Tokyo.
His first contact with the juvenile system came at 16, after an attempted theft. He was placed on probation in the mid-1960s, and he ran away from home and drifted more than once.
In 1965, after finishing junior high school in Aomori Prefecture, he left for Tokyo under a collective job placement, one of the programs that carried rural school leavers to work in the cities during the postwar boom. He was one of about 500 middle school graduates on a train bound for Ueno station. The young workers were called "golden eggs" in the press of the day. No one from his family came to see him off.
He began at a fruit shop in Tokyo and then moved from job to job. He was bullied at work, and he later described the loneliness and sense of inferiority he felt as a newcomer in the capital. By 1968 he had been working for about four years in all, and by the autumn of that year he had no settled home.
On October 8, 1968, Nagayama committed a theft in Yokosuka, in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo. Three days later, on October 11, a 27-year-old man died in Tokyo. On October 14 a 69-year-old man died in Kyoto. Then a 31-year-old man died near Hakodate, in Hokkaido, and a 22-year-old man in Nagoya, the last of the four in November. All four deaths fell within 26 days of the first.
The Supreme Court, reviewing the record in 1983, found that the first two men had been killed so that Nagayama could escape being caught, and that the deaths near Hakodate and in Nagoya came in the course of robberies. It described the four men as people of working age who had done nothing to bring harm on themselves.
The National Police Agency treated the four deaths as a single case and concluded that the same person was responsible for all of them.
Nagayama was arrested on April 7, 1969, in Shibuya, Tokyo. He was 19. About half a year after the last of the four deaths he had returned to Tokyo, and the case against him included one further count from that period, an attempted robbery-murder in Tokyo in which no one died.
Because he was a minor, the Juvenile Act's bar on reports that identify young offenders applied in principle. The police nonetheless released his name, citing the gravity of the case, and most of the press followed. He has been named in Japanese and international reporting ever since, and he published his own books under his own name.
The case went first to the family court, as the law required for a juvenile. The family court sent it back to the public prosecutor for trial as an adult, and he was indicted before the Tokyo District Court.
He was tried for theft, murder, robbery-murder, attempted robbery-murder, and offences under two arms-control laws. The theft at Yokosuka, the four deaths and the attempted robbery-murder in Tokyo in April 1969 were all part of the one case, and all were part of the final judgment. He was between 19 years and three months and 19 years and nine months old across the period of the offences.
Nagayama arrived in custody barely able to read. Once he was allowed notebooks, he began to study intensively. He read difficult works of philosophy and literature, and at first he kept himself closed off from interrogators, from his lawyers and, for the most part, from the courtroom.
The novelist Magoroku Ide, a winner of the Naoki Prize, took a strong interest in the case. He noticed the notebooks Nagayama was filling in his cell, proposed that they be published, and won Nagayama's eager agreement. The result was Muchi no Namida (Tears of Ignorance), published by Godo Shuppan in 1971. It sold about 60,000 copies in three weeks.
Under his contract with the publisher, Nagayama arranged for the royalties to go to the children and families of the men who died. He told those around him that he regarded his writing as a form of compensation and atonement. After his arrest he came to the view that "poverty and ignorance" lay behind what he had done, a phrase he used at his trial. Not every family accepted the money. Two of the four declined it.
Ide also urged him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, telling him that otherwise no lesson would ever be drawn from the case. Nagayama agreed.
The evaluation was carried out by Yoshihiro Ishikawa, a young psychiatrist who had studied juvenile delinquency and had recently returned from training in Britain. It ran for 278 days, from November 28, 1973, to August 31, 1974, while he was in custody. Instead of the narrow question of criminal responsibility that dominated such evaluations at the time, Ishikawa let Nagayama talk freely, recording about 100 hours of interviews on some 50 tapes. He went to Aomori to interview Nagayama's mother and eldest sister, and he traced the family back through his parents to his grandparents. His report ran to 182 pages in two columns.
It described, in detail, the neglect of his early years, the winter he and his siblings nearly starved in Abashiri, the bullying in Aomori and the violence of an older brother. It also set out the abuse that Nagayama's mother had herself suffered. Ishikawa concluded that layer upon layer of childhood trauma had kept Nagayama from developing either intellectually or emotionally, and that abuse by his parents and siblings and his loneliness were central to the crimes. Kyoko Otani, who became Nagayama's defense lawyer, regarded the report as highly valuable because it rested on his detailed account of his own life and traced a cycle of abuse across generations.
Nagayama himself said that the report seemed at first to describe somebody else. He kept it until his death and annotated it heavily. Ishikawa said the experience showed him the limits of forensic psychiatry, and he later moved into clinical practice.
The trial at first instance lasted a decade. Early in it Nagayama refused to plead for leniency. He wanted no mitigation, he told the court, and asked for the death penalty. In July 1979 the Tokyo District Court, with Judge Shigehiro Minohara presiding, sentenced him to death, as the prosecution had asked. The court found that he had shown no remorse. The judgment gave little weight to the psychiatric findings, and the Ishikawa report was not accepted as evidence.
Toshio Sakamoto had first met him the year before. Sakamoto had served six years at Osaka Prison and was then working in the accounts section of the Ministry of Justice, spending about six weeks each year at the Tokyo Detention House to prepare budget papers. He sought out men under sentence of death to understand the work of the staff who carried out executions. Nagayama's first words to him were a curt "Hey, you." Sakamoto's first impression was poor: he found a young man without the most basic social manners. After reading the court judgments he changed his mind, seeing the roughness as the product of the childhood they described. He came to regard Nagayama as highly intelligent, curious and eager to learn, rough in speech but not defiant toward orders, and the two spoke more than ten times between 1978 and 1983.
In the months after the death sentence Nagayama was volatile. He dismissed lawyers and made disruptive statements in court. It was then that Kyoko Otani first met him. He asked her whether she would defend him "with a mother's feelings." She chose to argue for mitigation.
On December 12, 1980, he married in custody. His wife had first written to him as a correspondent from the United States. The marriage changed his circumstances and his state of mind, and in the appeal hearings he curbed the outbursts of the first trial.
His wife traveled to Kyoto, Hakodate and Nagoya to offer condolences to the victims' families, and Otani also visited families to seek their forgiveness. From the royalties of his memoir Nagayama paid 2,524,400 yen to the family of the man who died in Kyoto and 4,631,600 yen to the family of the man who died near Hakodate. The family in Nagoya and the mother of the man who died in Tokyo refused to accept payment. The marriage did not last; the couple divorced in 1987, after he had again been sentenced to death.
On August 21, 1981, the Tokyo High Court, with Judge Mitsuo Funada presiding, overturned the death sentence and imposed life imprisonment.
The court found that Nagayama's emotional and mental maturity at the time of the offences was comparable to that of someone under 18, and that the spirit of the Juvenile Act's bar on the death penalty for offenders under 18 should therefore apply to him. It held that it would be "unfair to ignore the lack of proper welfare policies and lay all the responsibility on the defendant," and linked the crimes to failures of the state's welfare system. It weighed his marriage and the payments to the families in his favor. It told him, in effect, to atone by living.
The High Court also set out its own test for a death sentence: death should be chosen only where the circumstances were such that any court, whoever sat on it, would have chosen it.
The judgment drew sharp public criticism. Many people asked how a man responsible for four deaths could receive a life sentence. Sakamoto, who had watched Nagayama change inside the detention house, thought it the right decision.
Nagayama went on writing. His novel Kibashi (Wooden Bridge), which drew on the Ishikawa report, was written after the life sentence and won a literary prize. Muchi no Namida remained his best-known book, and his later work included Naze ka, umi (Why, the Sea). In the years after his death he was remembered in Japan as a writer whose work drew attention far beyond the country.
The prosecution appealed, and on July 8, 1983, the Second Petty Bench of the Supreme Court of Japan, with Justice Susumu Ohashi presiding and Justices Tadayoshi Kinoshita, Yoshiyasu Shiono, Goichi Miyazaki and Keiji Maki, reversed the High Court's judgment and sent the case back to it.
The court first set out the test. Under a legal system that retains the death penalty, it held, a death sentence may be chosen when a court, weighing all the circumstances together, finds that the offender's culpability is so grave that the ultimate penalty is unavoidable from the standpoint both of balance between crime and punishment and of general deterrence. The circumstances to be weighed were the nature of the crime; its motive; the manner in which it was committed, especially the persistence and cruelty of the killing; the gravity of the result, especially the number of victims; the feelings of the bereaved families; the effect on society; the offender's age; any prior record; and his conduct after the crime.
It then applied the test. Against Nagayama it weighed the four deaths in succession, either to avoid being caught or to take money; the persistence and callousness the court found in them; and the severe suffering of the families. In his favor it weighed his age of just over 19, an extremely unfortunate upbringing, his marriage and the partial restitution.
The court rejected the High Court's reasons one by one. A man of 19 with a deeply rooted pattern of offending could not, without special circumstances, be treated as if he were under 18. The claim that the crimes were a one-time occurrence was not supported by the evidence, given their repetition and their motives. His upbringing had been hard, but his brothers and sisters had come through similar conditions without following his path. The link the High Court drew between the crimes and failures of national welfare policy was inappropriate. The court also criticized his consistent shifting of blame onto his family, society and the state, in court and in his prison writings, and held that the High Court had overvalued the marriage and the payments. The reduction to life imprisonment, it concluded, was a serious error in sentencing that could not be allowed to stand.
Sakamoto later argued that the standard had been built to justify a result already decided. In his view the death penalty came first and the reasons afterward.
The case returned to the Tokyo High Court, which reimposed the death sentence in March 1987. When the ruling against him came, Nagayama asked whether this was really how the court did things.
Shortly before his sentence became final he applied to join the Japan Writers' Association. The application caused a public dispute. The association refused to admit him, and at least four members resigned in protest.
On April 17, 1990, the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal, and the death sentence became final. He was 40. Sakamoto noted that the court read out only the operative part of its judgment, not its reasons, which he took as a sign that the outcome had been settled in advance. Amnesty International and a German writers' association wrote to the Japanese government through its embassy asking for clemency.
Japanese law provides that a death sentence should be carried out within six months of becoming final, but in practice the rule is almost never followed. When Nagayama's sentence became final in 1990, more than 90 people were believed to be on death row in Japan, about 40 of them had sought retrials, and seven to ten years commonly passed between a Supreme Court ruling and an execution.
He spent his last years in the Tokyo Detention House. He kept up a correspondence with supporters. Letters he sent between September 1994 and May 1997 argue that the death penalty must be abolished, thank supporters for parcels of clothing, and show that he kept a will to live and was pursuing the possibility of a retrial. He was preparing a petition for retrial in the summer of 1997.
Staff who had known him for years did not expect him to be executed soon. At the time more than 30 people under sentence of death were held at the Tokyo Detention House, and more than ten of them had been sentenced before him. By order of seniority, his turn would have been several years away. Sakamoto later said that long-serving officers believed he would not be executed at all, because he kept making amends to the victims' families in a way they had not seen in any other condemned prisoner.
That changed in the summer of 1997, after a 14-year-old boy was arrested in Kobe over a series of killings earlier that year. According to Sakamoto, the most prominent condemned prisoners are the hardest to execute, and Nagayama was the most prominent of all; but the public mood after the Kobe arrest gave the authorities a rare chance to show that even a crime committed by a minor could end in death.
After the boy's arrest, the Ministry of Justice sent the Tokyo Detention House a written inquiry about Nagayama's status. Senior staff, anticipating what the ministry wanted, prepared a report stating that there were no circumstances preventing his execution. Long-serving frontline officers held the opposite view. Sakamoto, who had left the prison service that year to become a writer, said the officers who had dealt with Nagayama day after day, joking with him and coming to respect him, were deeply distressed by what they were asked to do.
Norio Nagayama was executed in Tokyo on Friday, August 1, 1997. He was 48 and had been in custody for 28 years. Three other prisoners, all convicted of murder and including a woman, were executed in Japan the same day. As was the practice, neither the prisoners nor their families were given advance warning. Amnesty International condemned the executions, noting that since 1993 Japan had carried out 25.
At the time Japan did not announce executions. The Ministry of Justice began disclosing the number of executions only in October 1998, and in September 2007 Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama ordered it to release the names of those executed and the places of execution.
Shortly before his execution Nagayama set down his last wish: that the future royalties from his books should go to poor children in Peru, so that they might be spared a life like his. He had come to believe that poverty had to be removed if crimes like his were to be prevented. His supporters believe the idea came from a newspaper report in February 1997 on child workers in Peru, published alongside coverage of the hostage crisis in Lima.
His lawyers and supporters set up the Nagayama Children Fund to carry out the bequest, with Kyoko Otani at its head. By 2009 the fund was planning to send about 500,000 yen a year; by 2012 it was giving scholarships of about that sum each year to some 30 college and vocational students in Peru, covering half their tuition. By 2017 it had sent about 20 million yen to working children in Peru, from royalties and from the proceeds of events. A charity concert has been held each July since his death, close to the anniversary of the execution.
At a public meeting in Tokyo in 2009, attended by hundreds of people, Otani said that had he not been executed he "would have led a life of atonement." She said he had come to see his crimes as born of the ignorance, poverty and discrimination around him, and the death penalty as a cycle of violence. She said the High Court's life sentence had entrusted society with a share of the responsibility, and that the retrial left him feeling tossed about by society. Koji Yakushiji, a family court investigator who wrote a book about Nagayama, said at the same meeting that he wished Nagayama had lived longer to explain his crimes and his atonement. At the fund's 2012 concert Otani said that detention had given him the chance to study that he never had before, and that "if he had had certain relationships with others, he would still be alive."
The Ishikawa report and the recordings behind it became the subject of a 2013 book by the journalist and documentary maker Keiko Horikawa, Nagayama Norio: The Sealed Evaluation Record, which described how heavily he had annotated his copy. Ishikawa learned only after Nagayama's death how closely he had read it. In 2017, on the twentieth anniversary of the execution, Ishikawa and Otani spoke together at a church in Tokyo as part of the fund's annual event. In 2023 Ishikawa argued publicly that psychiatric evaluations of young offenders should be preserved, with care for privacy, because they could help prevent future crimes and guide treatment.
Nagayama's papers survive. A supporter who had been drawn to his books, corresponded with him and was his last visitor before the execution, holds about 200 cardboard boxes of his manuscripts, diaries, letters, paintings, court records and books, not all of which she had been through by 2025. Legal researchers began work to digitize and archive them, and a crowdfunding campaign was launched to pay for it. In October 2025 an exhibition at a bookshop in Akabane, in Tokyo's Kita ward, showed copies of 40 of his letters to supporters for the first time.
The 1983 judgment became the reference point for capital sentencing in Japan. The factors it listed, usually counted as nine, are cited by courts and in public debate as the basic guideline for applying the death penalty. In practice two of them carry the most weight. Former Supreme Court Justice Itsuo Sonobe has said that the method of killing and the number killed matter most, and that "only in exceptional circumstances can a death sentence be seen as appropriate when only one person has been killed." Informal rules of thumb grew up around the standard: a single victim rarely brings death, three or more usually do, and cases with two victims divide.
The standard has worked in both directions. In a later murder-for-insurance case, the Second Petty Bench cited the 1983 decision when it quashed the death sentences imposed by the lower courts and substituted life imprisonment, holding that it could not say death was unavoidable. In 2006 the Supreme Court used the same framework to overturn a High Court life sentence for a man who was 18 at the time of two killings in Hikari, Yamaguchi Prefecture, in 1999, holding that death was the only choice unless there were special circumstances. That death sentence became final in 2012, the first final death sentence for a juvenile offender with two victims; earlier juvenile death sentences had involved four.
Japanese law bars the death penalty for anyone who was under 18 at the time of the offence. Offenders of 18 and 19 remained juveniles in law, and their cases began in the family court, which could send the most serious back to prosecutors for trial as adults, as happened with Nagayama. The Juvenile Act bars reports that would allow a juvenile offender to be identified, such as a name or photograph. A revision of the law that took effect in April 2022 created a category of "specified juveniles" aged 18 and 19, allowed more of their cases to be sent to prosecutors, and lifted the reporting bar once such a juvenile is indicted.
Nagayama's case remained the point of comparison for later juvenile capital cases. When the Supreme Court in December 2001 upheld the death sentence of a man who was 19 at the time of four killings in Chiba Prefecture in 1992, it was the first time since Nagayama's case in 1990 that a death sentence had become final for someone who was a minor at the time of the crime. When that man was executed in December 2017, it was the first execution of its kind in 20 years. By 2010 nine juvenile offenders had received final death sentences in Japan since 1966, and seven had been executed.
In Japan the Minister of Justice signs every execution order. The ministry publishes no criteria for choosing who is executed and when, and the decisions have varied with the views of individual ministers. Lawyers and relatives are not told beforehand. By the end of 1997 executions had been carried out every December since 1994, often timed for holidays and the parliamentary recess, and Amnesty International was condemning what it called the official secrecy and arbitrary nature of execution decisions.
Whether the courts relied on the Ishikawa evaluation is disputed. Ishikawa said in 2023 that the evaluation was not accepted as evidence and that the final judgment does not mention it, and he believed that judges, prosecutors and lawyers alike had preferred evaluations that suited their own views. The 1981 High Court judgment that briefly spared Nagayama nonetheless drew on it, together with the payments to the families. Sakamoto's view that the 1983 standard was written to justify a death sentence already decided is his own, and the standard has since been applied to spare defendants as well as to condemn them.
The names of the four men are not on record, and neither are the exact dates of the deaths near Hakodate and in Nagoya.
1949: Norio Nagayama is born in Abashiri, Hokkaido, one of eight children.
About age five: his mother returns to Aomori Prefecture with three of the children; he and three siblings spend the winter largely alone in Abashiri.
Following year: a welfare office returns him to his mother in Aomori.
Age 16: first contact with the juvenile system, after an attempted theft.
1965: leaves junior high school in Aomori Prefecture and moves to Tokyo under a collective job placement.
October 8, 1968: theft in Yokosuka.
October 11, 1968: a 27-year-old man dies in Tokyo.
October 14, 1968: a 69-year-old man dies in Kyoto.
October to November 1968: a 31-year-old man dies near Hakodate, Hokkaido, and a 22-year-old man in Nagoya, the last in November; all four deaths fall within 26 days.
April 7, 1969: arrested in Shibuya, Tokyo, aged 19, after an attempted robbery-murder in Tokyo in which no one died; police release his name.
1969: the family court sends the case back to prosecutors; he is indicted before the Tokyo District Court.
1971: Muchi no Namida (Tears of Ignorance) is published by Godo Shuppan.
November 28, 1973 to August 31, 1974: psychiatric evaluation by Yoshihiro Ishikawa.
1978: first meeting with the prison officer Toshio Sakamoto.
July 1979: Tokyo District Court sentences him to death.
December 12, 1980: marries in custody.
August 21, 1981: Tokyo High Court replaces the death sentence with life imprisonment.
July 8, 1983: Supreme Court, Second Petty Bench, reverses and remands, setting out the factors known as the Nagayama standard.
March 1987: Tokyo High Court reimposes the death sentence; the couple later divorce.
1990: application to the Japan Writers' Association refused.
April 17, 1990: Supreme Court dismisses his appeal; the death sentence is final.
September 1994 to May 1997: letters to supporters urging abolition of the death penalty.
1997: after an arrest in Kobe, the Ministry of Justice inquires about his status.
August 1, 1997: executed in Tokyo, aged 48, one of four people executed that day.
After 1997: the Nagayama Children Fund begins sending his royalties to working children in Peru.
October 1998: the Ministry of Justice begins disclosing execution figures.
September 2007: the ministry begins naming those executed.
2009: hundreds attend a commemoration in Tokyo on the twelfth anniversary.
2013: Keiko Horikawa's book on the evaluation record is published.
August 1, 2017: twentieth anniversary; the fund has sent about 20 million yen to Peru.
December 2017: execution of the Chiba offender, the first of its kind since Nagayama's.
April 2022: revised Juvenile Act creates the category of specified juveniles.
October 2025: exhibition of 40 of his letters in Tokyo; supporters seek funds to archive about 200 boxes of his papers.