Sataro Fukiage was hanged at Ichigaya Prison in Tokyo on the morning of September 28, 1926. He was 36 by the count of the Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun, which reported the execution that day. In 1906 he had strangled an 11-year-old girl in Kyoto and been sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in March 1922, he moved to Tokyo, and in the summer of 1924 he was arrested and charged with killing six girls in the prefectures around the capital and in Nagano. A court in Maebashi convicted him of three of those killings and sentenced him to death.
The case is a fixture of Japanese crime histories of the Taisho period. The writer 小池新, who went back over the newspapers, police histories and memoirs for Bunshun Online in 2022, found that the coverage at the time was quick to credit him with far more crimes than the record supports. Fukiage himself added to the confusion. In custody he gave numbers that rose and fell, confessed to killings for which other men had been arrested, and then withdrew those confessions in open court. In his cell he wrote an autobiography of more than a thousand manuscript pages, of which one volume was printed and then banned.
Much of what is known of his early life comes from that autobiography, 娑婆 (Shaba, a Buddhist word for the everyday world), which 小池 used with caution because of its self-centered tone. By its account Fukiage was born in February 1889 in Kyoto, the son of a weaver in Nishijin, the city's silk-weaving district. The family was very poor. He had six younger siblings, and one of his sisters died. He never went to elementary school; he learned to read and write later, in custody.
He was sent out to work as a boy. At about 11 he was an apprentice at a weaving shop, and the writer 穂積昭雪, in a 2021 article for Kodansha's Gendai Business, says he was dismissed for theft and then worked for a sake dealer in Kyoto. Shaba describes the weaving shops as places of 18-hour working days where the talk and the songs were coarse. At about 12, sent to buy thread, he spent the money at the theater and was sent to a reformatory. There, by his account, he learned the kana syllabary, the multiplication tables and basic arithmetic, and memorized the first two volumes of a school reader. Back in the weaving trade, he found that word of the reformatory had followed him, and he left. A job carrying restaurant deliveries did not last.
He drifted into pickpocketing and burglary and was held in police cells again and again. He went to Osaka with an older thief, lost him, and returned to Kyoto, where he lived for a while with a woman of about 40 until he stole her money. Arrested in Kyoto for pickpocketing, he served a year in a reformatory. He later wrote that he preferred custody to the weaving shops: the meals, work, sleep and baths came at regular times, and he could study.
He went home to Nishijin and found his family gone. They had left on what was called a pilgrimage to Shikoku and was, 小池 writes, a begging journey. He followed them to Shikoku, stayed on, and became a barber's apprentice, then took 10 yen from the barbershop and returned to Kyoto. With no money and nothing to eat, he confessed to the theft and was given two months in Kyoto prison. Afterward he found his parents begging in the city and lived with them for a time on what he stole.
In 1905, the year of the celebrations of Japan's victory over Russia, he went back to a wandering life in the city's entertainment districts. At 17, according to Gendai Business, he was living with a woman of 53; 小池 describes her as an older woman of some standing in the Kyoto underworld.
According to Shaba, on September 24, 1906, the autumn equinox holiday, Fukiage attacked and strangled an 11-year-old girl from his old neighborhood in Kyoto. The birth date in Shaba made him 17, 小池 notes. 小池 points out that the account in Shaba of what he intended was written long afterward, after he had been through police, prosecutors and judges, and that Fukiage claimed not to know his own motive at the time.
小池 could not find the first newspaper report of the killing. He found a follow-up in the Hinode Shimbun, a forerunner of the Kyoto Shimbun, that named Fukiage and gave his age as 18. That item is dated September 7, 1906, which does not fit the date in the autobiography; the discrepancy is unexplained. After the killing Fukiage went to the woman he had been living with and asked her for money to escape. She went to the police, and he was arrested.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing. The Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, summing up his record in July 1924, said the sentence was passed by the Kyoto District Court; Gendai Business dates it to 1908, when he was 19.
He spent more than 15 years at Miike Prison in Fukuoka Prefecture, according to 小池. He was a difficult prisoner. He attacked a guard, and he was put in punishment cells more than 40 times. He also studied. After his arrest in 1924 he told reporters that he had learned English in prison from a well-known school reader and had worked through a book about Woodrow Wilson with a dictionary. Gendai Business describes him as a reader of Socrates and Aristotle and of religious texts.
His life sentence was cut to 15 years, Gendai Business reports, by an imperial amnesty and by a review of the penalty because he had been a minor at the time of the killing. He was released on March 18, 1922.
He went to Tokyo. In 1923 he worked for a rice dealer in the Kanda district, and he left that job after an attack on a 10-year-old girl in the household. Her father reported it to the local police station, but no formal complaint was filed, and the police took a statement from him under a false name and let the matter drop, according to the Metropolitan Police history of the period as quoted by 小池. Gendai Business reports that he moved around the region under several false names in the months that followed. In September 1923, when the Great Kanto Earthquake struck, he was working on a tunnel in Chiba Prefecture, and he later said he had barely escaped with his life in a collapse.
The charges brought against him in 1924 named six killings of girls between the summer of 1923 and the spring of 1924. Three were later tried. In the account 小池 assembled from the indictment, the press and the police histories, they ran as follows.
In Gunma Prefecture a 12-year-old girl was killed at Numata. On August 16, 1923, a 14-year-old girl who had gone with friends to a Bon dance was killed in Nagano Prefecture, according to the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun's 1924 summary of the charges. On August 23, 1923, an 11-year-old girl was killed in a village in Gunma that is now part of the city of Shibukawa. On September 21, 1923, a 16-year-old was killed in a village in Chiba that is now part of Futtsu. In March 1924 a 16-year-old was killed in a village in Saitama now part of Chichibu, and in April 1924 another 16-year-old was killed in a village in Gunma now part of Isesaki. The girls were strangled.
Little of this reached the public at the time. 小池 found no newspaper reports of several of the cases. The earthquake of September 1, 1923, consumed the attention of the press and the police across the Kanto region, and it was followed that winter by the Toranomon Incident and other cases of treason and lese-majesty, and then by the crown prince's wedding.
The police did connect the cases. Shortly before the arrest, detective chiefs of the Metropolitan Police and the Kanto prefectural forces met in Gunma to discuss the killings since the previous year. In each, the victims were young girls killed in the same way, and the killings followed the movements of the man the police suspected. The forces agreed to search for him together on July 28 and 29. A coordinated search of this kind was still unusual at the time, 小池 notes.
What they had was a photograph. According to the Jomo Shimbun, a Gunma paper, the prefectural police brought two items to the meeting: a scrap of handwriting found at the scene of the April 1924 killing, and a picture taken in July 1923 at a party in Nagano Prefecture, where the photographer had posed the suspect with five geisha. Copies went to the Metropolitan Police and on to the stations.
At one of those stations, detectives looking at the copy thought they had seen the man before. One recognized him as the rice dealer's worker they had questioned the year before over the attack on the 10-year-old. He remembered that the man had started to sign his statement with a character from a different surname and had then corrected himself, and he concluded that the name the man had given was false and that his real name was Fukiage. A historian of the period, quoted by 小池, put it simply: posing for a souvenir picture with women was his undoing.
The arrest came before the planned joint search. At about 6 p.m. on July 28, 1924, detectives from that station arrested Fukiage at a workers' camp on the northern edge of Tokyo, where he was living and working as a laborer. Police history records that he was taken as he came back from lunch.
The Tokyo Asahi Shimbun carried the arrest in its evening edition the next day. It said he had confessed to attacking and killing more than 20 young girls from Hokkaido to Tokyo, and a follow-up said the killings numbered 17. The Yomiuri Shimbun reported on July 30 that he had killed 13. 小池 doubts the larger figures and suggests that reporters of the day attributed unsolved cases to him freely.
At the Metropolitan Police he was defiant. According to 森長英三郎's history of notable trials, he told his interrogators that their investigation had been slack and said that 18 or 19 killings were being put down to him. Gendai Business reports that he told questioners he had attacked 91 women and killed 13, twice the number of killings later charged.
Several prefectures wanted him. After several rounds of negotiation Gunma took custody, and on the evening of August 9, 1924, he arrived by car at the Maebashi police station with three officers. The Jomo Shimbun gave the story more than half of three pages. He arrived in handcuffs and a summer coat, called out to the photographers to take a good picture once he was out of the car, and greeted a senior officer he remembered from Tokyo. In the detectives' room he changed into a cotton robe from his trunk, sat cross-legged and fanned himself. He said he was tired and asked for beer, and the police bought it with about 22 yen from his purse.
He talked freely. He said he expected to be executed and wanted to die cleanly. He said he had six younger siblings. He said he had been brought to Gunma because it had the most cases, and asked whether he would have to face the girls who had survived; he did not mind, he said, but feared for their reputations. He blamed the earthquake for what he had done, saying he had nearly died in it. 小池 notes that the killings had begun before the earthquake and that his statements were full of lies and evasions.
On August 9, 1924, he was indicted over attacks on 27 girls, 16 of them under 15, and with strangling six of them, four under 15 and two aged 15 or older. The case went before a preliminary judge, who sent only three of the killings to trial: two in Gunma, of the 12-year-old at Numata and the 11-year-old in the village now part of Shibukawa, and one in Nagano.
Fukiage objected. According to 森長, he complained that the decision left him unsatisfied and said he could not die at peace unless all six killings were tried, and he filed an objection. An internal Justice Ministry commentary on notable criminal cases later sided with him and mocked judges who would rely only on formal evidence.
He then asked for the trial to be put off on the ground of nervous exhaustion. When it opened in 1925 he was defiant throughout and denied the charges. His court-appointed lawyer urged him to write the story of his life as a way to steady himself, and he took it up with energy; that manuscript became Shaba.
The verdict came on May 7, 1925, at the Maebashi District Court. Spectators gathered early and the opening was delayed by half an hour. The presiding judge found the charges proved and sentenced him to death. Fukiage reached for an inkstone, and spectators feared he would throw it. As the prosecutor was leaving he tried to question him about the judgment and was told to put his questions in writing. The hearing lasted 15 minutes.
He appealed. On May 22, 1925, he was moved to Tokyo for the hearing before the Tokyo Court of Appeal.
His confessions soon reached beyond his own case. In Maebashi he had said that he had also killed a girl in Ibaraki. On March 7, 1924, a 16-year-old girl had been strangled in Shimodate, Ibaraki. A local man had been tried for the killing at the Shimodate branch of the Mito District Court, where the prosecutor asked for life imprisonment and the court acquitted him for lack of evidence. The prosecution appealed, and the case went to the Tokyo Court of Appeal.
On June 13, 1925, the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun reported that Fukiage's confession had raised serious doubts about that case. A party of three appeal judges, a prosecutor and a clerk took Fukiage to Ibaraki to inspect the scene, and they found that parts of his account fitted the evidence: he had been working as a carpenter in Shimodate at the time, the clothing of the suspect matched, and he appeared to have burned evidence when he left the town.
At what was expected to be the last hearing, on August 22, 1925, Fukiage gave evidence as a witness and took the confession back. He said that in Maebashi he had confessed to six killings and only three had been taken up, so he had stopped admitting the rest. His Shimodate confession, he said, was his own invention, built from newspapers and rumor; at the time he had been looking for work. The judges were thrown, and the prosecutor, 中野並助, who also handled Fukiage's own appeal, asked for a week's adjournment, and the hearing was halted. The acquitted man had been due to go free that day after more than a year in custody.
中野 later described Fukiage as shrewd and hard to handle. In an account published in 1951 that 小池 believes 中野 wrote, the prosecutor said that besides the three tried cases there had been one similar case each in Chiba and Ibaraki after the earthquake. Suspects had been arrested in both. Fukiage claimed both killings, asked for the two men to be freed and for himself to be charged, and, when a confession alone was not enough to charge him, turned resentful and denied everything. He had been near one of the scenes at the time, the account says, but he had a habit of posing as a man of honor and telling tall tales. Later he said the real culprits might be those men after all, then apologized for lying. In the same account the two suspects were acquitted and the cases were all but confirmed as his; neither was brought against him in court.
At the Tokyo Court of Appeal he again denied the killings he had admitted earlier. The presiding judge proposed to skip reading the large file of evidence, since the first court had heard it. Fukiage insisted that it be read aloud, and after two or three hours of it he said he would tell the truth and admitted the charges he had been denying.
On April 17, 1926, the prosecutor asked for the death penalty. Fukiage asked the court to replace a word in the charges describing his conduct as a habit with "innate" or "hereditary"; the court refused. Asked whether he had anything to say, he said he had a great deal. The Tokyo Asahi Shimbun reported the next morning that he blamed a split, animal side of his nature, his surroundings, his uneducated parents and a joyless home; that he cited Socrates, the journalist 徳富蘇峰 and the physiologist 永井潜; and that he said he believed in neither gods nor Buddha but held that each person must bear his own sins. He spoke for more than an hour. He said he had written an autobiography of more than a thousand pages so that society would know his history and such crimes might be prevented, and that on the advice of the preliminary judge he meant to publish it and wanted the royalties spent on memorial services for the victims.
The Tokyo Court of Appeal sentenced him to death on April 24, 1926. He came into court at 10 a.m. on a day of spring rain, looked around the thin audience and grinned, and rubbed his hands and smiled as the sentence was read. Led out, he thanked the court for its trouble and left wearing a straw hood.
He filed his last appeal on April 29, the final day allowed, reportedly to gain time to finish the autobiography. It was dismissed on July 2, 1926. Afterward he asked his lawyer to bring him storybooks and read them.
The Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun reported on the evening of September 28, 1926, that Fukiage, a laborer living on the northern edge of Tokyo, aged 36, had been executed at Ichigaya Prison at 10 that morning in the presence of a prosecutor of the court of appeal. It noted that both his trials had ended in death sentences, which were final, and that his autobiography had been published. His farewell verse said goodbye as he set out one step ahead on the journey of death.
A 1980 biographical essay by the writer 小沢信男, quoted by 小池, says that before the hanging he calmly ate the offerings set before the Buddhist altar, drank tea and prayed in silence, and told the prosecutor that he had to die for the sake of the many spirits. He stayed calm to the end. Gendai Business reports that he received a copy of his book shortly before his death.
The autobiography was planned in three parts. Only the first was printed, by 巌松堂書店 in 1926, shortly before his death, and it was soon banned, probably as contrary to public order and morals, 小池 writes; the other two parts did not appear. Gendai Business describes the printed volume as about 308 pages, with the two sequels announced as forthcoming, and says few copies survived. He dedicated it to the girls who had died because of him, and in its pages he used the pen name 神州麿. The Yomiuri Shimbun reported its publication.
小池 found it self-dramatizing and unstable in tone but of some value for its argument that surroundings shape people. Fukiage wrote of a child born with a white heart who falls into the black ink of poverty and is handled by an unskilled dyer. The book closes with five precepts for parents: never let a child go hungry; send a child to school when the time comes; let children play fully when it is time to play; make home a happy place where parents are valued; and never say or do anything obscene where a child can see it.
The number of victims has been uncertain from the start. A magazine of the 1920s said that by the summer of his 36th year he had attacked 91 girls and killed dozens; 小池 concludes that the evidence does not support anything like that. The Tokyo Asahi Shimbun reported in July 1924 that he had confessed to killing more than 20 girls from Hokkaido to Tokyo, then gave the number of killings as 17. The Yomiuri Shimbun gave 13, the figure Gendai Business reports he gave his questioners. The Jomo Shimbun wrote in August 1924 that he had killed more than ten people across seven prefectures. The indictment named six killings, and three were tried.
His own statements cannot be relied on. He confessed to the Shimodate killing and to a case in Chiba, both of which had other suspects, and then withdrew the confessions; the prosecutor who handled his appeal believed the cases were his, but neither was tried against him. He gave the earthquake as his motive, though the killings charged against him began before it. He told reporters he had served 20 years on his life sentence; 小池 calls that an exaggeration. Even the date of the 1906 killing is in some doubt, since the autobiography's date falls after a newspaper report that named him.
February 1889: born in Kyoto, the eldest son of a Nishijin weaver, by his own account.
About ages 11 and 12: apprentice at a weaving shop; sent to a reformatory for spending his employer's money.
1905: returns to a wandering life in Kyoto.
September 24, 1906: kills an 11-year-old girl in Kyoto (date from his autobiography); arrested after the woman he lived with reports him.
1908 (Gendai Business): sentenced to life imprisonment; later held at Miike Prison, Fukuoka.
March 18, 1922: released after an amnesty and a review of his sentence.
1923: works for a rice dealer in Tokyo; questioned by Tokyo police over an attack on a 10-year-old girl.
July 1923: photographed at a party in Nagano Prefecture.
August 16, 1923: a 14-year-old girl is killed in Nagano (one of the charged cases).
August 23, 1923: an 11-year-old girl is killed in Gunma (tried).
September 1, 1923: Great Kanto Earthquake.
September 21, 1923: a 16-year-old is killed in Chiba (charged, not tried).
March 7, 1924: a 16-year-old is killed in Shimodate, Ibaraki; another man is later tried and acquitted.
March and April 1924: 16-year-olds are killed in Saitama and Gunma (charged, not tried).
July 28, 1924: arrested in Tokyo.
August 9, 1924: taken to Maebashi; indicted over attacks on 27 girls and six killings.
May 7, 1925: sentenced to death by the Maebashi District Court for three killings.
May 22, 1925: moved to Tokyo for his appeal.
August 22, 1925: retracts his Shimodate confession in the Tokyo Court of Appeal.
April 17, 1926: prosecutor asks for death on appeal.
April 24, 1926: Tokyo Court of Appeal sentences him to death.
April 29, 1926: files his last appeal.
July 2, 1926: last appeal dismissed.
1926: first volume of Shaba published, then banned.
September 28, 1926: hanged at Ichigaya Prison, Tokyo.