At the end of October 2017, police in western Tokyo were looking for a missing 23-year-old woman from Hachioji. Her family had lost contact with her on October 21. She had posted on social media that she wanted to die but was afraid to do it alone. Her brother got into her Twitter account and found her messages with a man who had offered to help her. Security camera footage showed her with a man near his apartment. The trail led to a small one-room apartment in Zama, a city in Kanagawa Prefecture about 90 minutes from central Tokyo. When officers went inside at the end of the month, they found the remains of nine people.
The tenant was Takahiro Shiraishi, 27. He was born on October 9, 1990, the first child of a couple who had married the year before. A sister followed in 1992, and the family bought a house in Zama. His mother's account, read aloud at his trial, described an ordinary suburban childhood. He was shy, prone to tonsil infections in his early school years, and absorbed by video games from the age of six. He quit a children's soccer club after a year because the other boys would not pass him the ball, and later quit his middle school baseball team. His best subject was Japanese; he had taught himself advanced characters, he said, to read game strategy guides. In his third year of middle school, separated from his friends, he began refusing to go to school and shut himself in his room.
His mother said she never struck him. His father, who worked as a parts designer for a subcontractor of a major carmaker, was by Shiraishi's account absorbed in his job. Conflict at home centered on games. When he would not stop playing, his father cut the power at the breaker, and the boy was angry enough to punch a hole in his bedroom wall. He went to a high school chosen to help him find a job, skipped classes, and worked part-time at a Summit supermarket. Before he graduated he ran away from home three times, to Hokkaido, the Hokuriku coast and the San'in region, and told his parents he had looked at suicide websites and joined a group planning to die together by charcoal burning. At trial he said those episodes had taught him something useful: after each one his father softened toward him and he could get money from him.
After school he joined the supermarket's bakery section and moved out to live alone. His parents later separated. He said in court that he had not seen his mother or sister for seven years. By his mid-twenties he was working as a scout in Tokyo's Kabukicho entertainment district, recruiting young women for the sex industry, and using Twitter to find them. In February 2017 he was arrested under Japan's Employment Security Act for referring a woman to work in prostitution. In May 2017 he received a suspended sentence.
Back in his father's house, he said, he decided to look like a man on the edge. He told his father he wanted to die, slept with a rope beside him and hung one from the balcony, and left notes addressed to his family and a hospital asking to be allowed to die. He testified that none of it was sincere. It was a way to get money, and it worked: his father paid his overdue resident tax and health insurance. He took a job in a refrigerated warehouse, eight hours a day, and found it tedious. In August 2017 he moved into a loft apartment in Zama. The court later found that he chose a unit with a loft on purpose, because it gave him a place to hang a rope.
Shiraishi told the journalist Tetsuya Shibui that he ran five Twitter accounts connected to the crimes. One, "I want to die," drew the most replies. Another was named "Kubitsurishi," usually translated as "hangman." He listed his age as 25, two years younger than he was, because he thought people would trust someone closer to their own age. He presented himself as someone who also wanted to die, or as someone who knew how to make death painless, and once a conversation started he moved it to the private messaging app KakaoTalk.
He told the nonfiction writer Kazuteru Ono, who visited him in jail, that his method worked like a flowchart. He first judged whether a woman seemed to have money. If she did, he would try to become her live-in boyfriend and live off her. If she did not, he would rape and kill her. He also said he had searched Twitter not for the word "suicide" but for words like "lonely" and "tired." Of the 13 people he said he met through these accounts, he killed nine. He let four go: a man who had little money, a woman he dated from August to October, a woman who stayed in his apartment for about ten days and went home after saying her mother was worried, and a high school girl who left after he told her what was in his cooler boxes.
A 21-year-old caregiver who exchanged messages with "Kubitsurishi" in September and October 2017 told Weekly Gendai that he gave her a false name, said he had no money and no siblings, and pressed her to meet and live with him. She stopped replying two days before his arrest.
The court referred to the nine victims by letters, A through I, in the order in which they died. Families told the court that the media had published their children's names and photographs against their wishes, and this account follows their request, except for the last victim, whose name was widely reported in English in 2017.
A, 21, from Kanagawa Prefecture, was the first. Her mother told the court her daughter was responsible and caring but had struggled with mental illness since adolescence, with repeated hospital stays. She had earned a computer qualification and since about May 2017 had been preparing to look for regular work. Shiraishi met her through Twitter in the summer of 2017. They walked hand in hand near Sobudai-mae station and went apartment hunting together, and in court he called their time together "happy days." On August 15 he met her together with C, a young man she knew. That night A messaged him that C had decided not to die and that she had decided to keep living too. Shiraishi said he killed her after sensing she was involved with another man, which threatened his plan to live off her. Her brother told the court he could not accept that someone who showed no remorse was a member of the same species.
B, 15, was a first-year high school student from Gunma Prefecture. She had posted about suicide online. On the day she died, the first day of the second school term, she traveled alone to Sobudai-mae station to meet Shiraishi, and by then, her parents said, she had told him she had decided to keep living. He told her to throw her phone away at Katase-Enoshima station to make it look as if she had disappeared. She did not. The phone was found there the next day, and her parents believed she had kept it because she meant to come home. Her body was identified on November 9, 2017, the day she would have turned 16.
C, 20, from Kanagawa Prefecture, worked at a care facility, where he sometimes played guitar for the residents. Music was his passion; he practiced hard and played live shows. He had been in the hospital for an illness and was recovering. On August 29, Shiraishi met him, listened to him talk about his band and his job, and by Shiraishi's own testimony C left feeling better and messaged that he would try to live properly from now on. Shiraishi called him back, offered him work as a host or scout, and had him leave his ID and tablet behind as if he were starting a new life. They talked for hours over drinks while listening to Nirvana songs C requested. Shiraishi said he killed C because C might lead police to him over A's death. C's father called the killing "the work of the devil." His parents had searched for him, borrowing money to hire a private detective.
D, 19, from Saitama Prefecture, was a university student. As a child she had led campfire activities, sung in her middle school chorus and spent three years in her high school drama club, and she had once wanted to be a teacher. She was planning for her coming-of-age ceremony and a New Year's countdown event. Shiraishi killed her while the woman he hoped to live off waited for him at a karaoke parlor. Her mother searched for months. Her DNA identification came through on her birthday. Her family rejected the idea that she had truly wanted to die, and said she had only wanted someone to listen.
E, 26, was the mother of a young child. She had arranged by message to die with Shiraishi by hanging, and when they met she told him to kill her once she fell asleep. In his apartment, though, she kept stepping out to talk with her former husband for long stretches, and Shiraishi feared she would leave. She was one of four victims about whom he said he felt deep regret. Told in court that her former husband was in the gallery, he apologized for leaving a child who would grow up without a mother.
F, 17, a high school girl, told a friend she was going to Kanagawa to die with the "hangman." Evidence at trial suggested she tried to go home after telling Shiraishi that her mother was worried about her. They both fell asleep. He woke first. The court found that he bound her while she slept and assaulted her after she woke, a method she had never agreed to.
G, 17, was also a high school student. Police said in 2017 that the victims included 17-year-old girls from Saitama and Fukushima prefectures.
H, 25, lived in Yokohama and had a part-time job. Her father told the court she was killed on October 18, 2017. He had left for work early that morning and never saw her. When she did not come home, he called her workplace, then went to a police box, where he was told to come back with a photograph. "Give me back my daughter," he said in court, facing Shiraishi. Her brother said he still dreamed about her laughing with a stuffed animal in her arms.
I, 23, from Hachioji in western Tokyo, was Aiko Tamura, whose name appeared in English-language reports in 2017. She met Shiraishi at Hachioji station and went with him to Zama. Her disappearance, and her brother's search, ended the killings.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department led the case because Tamura lived in Tokyo. Once her brother found the messages, investigators traced the account and the camera footage to Zama. When they entered the apartment, Shiraishi told them where each victim's remains were. He was arrested on October 31, 2017, on suspicion of abandoning a corpse, and told officers that he had killed the people whose remains they had found and had cut up the bodies to hide the evidence.
The remains were in seven cooler boxes and other containers, some covered with cat litter. Police found a saw and ten nylon ropes, each about three meters long. One rope had never been used, and investigators suspected he had been preparing to kill again. Shiraishi had disposed of other remains with household garbage. A neighbor told The Japan Times he had noticed an unusual smell from the apartment in August.
Identification took DNA work, and police fielded calls from families afraid that a missing daughter or son was among the dead. By mid-November 2017 all nine had been identified. Police believed the killings took place over roughly two months beginning around August 22, with gaps of 2 to 18 days between them. Shiraishi told police he took between 500 yen and 500,000 yen from the victims.
Investigators built the case one victim at a time. After 20 days of detention on the corpse charge, he was released pending a decision and immediately rearrested on November 20, 2017, on suspicion of murdering the Hachioji woman. Charges for the other victims followed, and then about five months of psychiatric evaluation. The examiner considered antisocial personality disorder but concluded that he had no mental disorder and could be held fully responsible.
The case set off a national discussion about suicide and social media. Within days, a cabinet-level meeting chaired by the chief cabinet secretary drew up measures to prevent a repeat, and two ministries asked social media companies to ban posts encouraging suicide and to remove them. Twitter changed its rules to prohibit promoting or encouraging suicide and self-harm, and began showing the contact details of suicide prevention services to users who searched for related terms. Twitter's chief executive, Jack Dorsey, told NHK it would be unrealistic to remove every tweet expressing a wish to die.
Al Jazeera reported that nearly 22,000 people had died by suicide in Japan in 2016, the lowest figure in 22 years but still the highest rate in the Group of Seven, and that suicide was the leading cause of death for people aged 10 to 19. Suicide-prevention researchers argued that people who posted such thoughts needed help reaching support, not censorship. Years later, Shibui interviewed young women who had wanted to die and who said they wished they could have been "the tenth victim," a measure, he wrote, of how desperate their situation was. Copycat cases continued: a man who held a high school girl he had met on Twitter for a month in 2020 said the Zama case had influenced him.
The lay-judge trial, with three professional judges and six citizen judges under Presiding Judge Naokuni Yano, opened at the Tachikawa branch of the Tokyo District Court on September 30, 2020. It heard evidence victim by victim. Shiraishi admitted the facts. The dispute was over consent.
His lawyers argued that the victims had come to his apartment to die, had asked to be strangled or hanged, and had entrusted him with their belongings, so that the crimes should be treated as murder with consent, a far lesser offense that cannot bring a death sentence. They also raised the possibility of diminished capacity. Shiraishi rejected his own defense. He said no one had consented, everyone had resisted, and he had killed "for financial reasons and to satisfy my sexual desires." He told the court he had wanted the case to end quickly with as little publicity as possible, to spare his relatives, and that the defense strategy broke that understanding. He held a grudge, he said, and on November 25 he answered about 50 of his lawyers' questions with "I will remain silent."
Prosecutors relied on the victims' messages. At least the first three had written to him that they had decided to live. Even those who still wanted to die had agreed to hanging, not to being attacked and strangled. In his testimony Shiraishi said the warehouse job had been more trouble than luring a woman home and killing her, and that while he was disposing of bodies he went on messaging other people, looking either for someone with money or for his next victim. He kept a hatchet beside his futon, he said, in case a victim's relatives came for him, and would have used it on a police officer who came alone. Asked why he had given jailhouse interviews, he said he had wanted to buy snacks sold inside the detention center.
On November 24, prosecutors read his mother's statement. She asked whether she had raised him badly and said she wanted to know why. Shiraishi said afterward that he could think of nothing else. On November 25 and 26 the families spoke. A's mother asked for the death penalty. B's parents' statement was read by a prosecutor whose voice broke as she read it: their daughter, they said, had already decided to live, and he talked her out of it. Of the six families who took part as victim participants, five asked in their own words for death. Shiraishi apologized to some families. He said he felt deep regret toward A, E, F and I, because of the time he had spent with them, their family circumstances, or the part they played in his arrest, and little toward the others. Asked by his own lawyers, he said he regretted his crimes "because I was caught." Prosecutors asked for death on November 26.
On December 15, 2020, 435 people lined up for 16 public seats. Judge Yano read the reasons first, a sign in Japanese courts that a death sentence is coming. The court found that the first three victims had been attacked without warning by a man they saw as a future roommate, a temporary provider, or someone who could find them a job. D, G, H and I had discussed dying by hanging, but the court held that each would have expected to choose the moment and to die as painlessly as possible, not to be choked unconscious and raped. E had not yet made up her mind. F was bound in her sleep. "None of the victims agreed to be killed," the judge said. "The defendant was found to be fully responsible."
The judgment called the crimes cunning and cowardly. It found that he had researched how to kill and dismember, deliberately rented an apartment with a loft for the hangings, gathered tools, and had his first three victims stage their own disappearances. The motives were money, sex and silencing witnesses, all serving his own desires. Because the victims were young people, some of them minors, who had voiced suicidal thoughts on social media, the crimes had shaken a society in which social media is part of daily life. Shiraishi said "yes, I understand" and nothing more.
His lawyers filed an appeal to the Tokyo High Court. Shiraishi withdrew it, as he had said he would, and the death sentence became final in January 2021. He was moved to the Tokyo Detention House. Before that, in the Tachikawa detention center, he had met a number of writers. Ono visited him 11 times, and Shiraishi asked whether a magazine could run an advertisement for a wife, since after the sentence became final only family could visit. Shibui, who first met him on April 2, 2019, said he answered questions about the crimes with the word "paid," meaning he wanted money to talk. He told Shibui that no one from his family wrote or visited. A later report said that on death row he had no one to exchange letters with.
Japan does not announce execution dates in advance, and prisoners are usually told only hours beforehand. On the morning of June 27, 2025, Shiraishi, 34, was hanged at the Tokyo Detention House, four and a half years after his sentence became final. It was the first execution in Japan since July 2022 and the first under Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba. His attorney told reporters he was so stunned he could not think of a response.
Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki said he had signed the order after careful consideration. He described the motive as "extremely selfish," driven by sexual and financial gratification, and said the crimes had "caused great shock and unrest to society." "It is not appropriate to abolish the death penalty while these violent crimes are still being committed," he said. He said 105 people remained on death row. The father of one victim told NHK that he would rather have seen Shiraishi "spend his life reflecting on the crimes he committed, than simply losing it through death penalty."
The execution came at a sensitive moment. In September 2024 a court in Shizuoka had acquitted Iwao Hakamada, who had spent decades on death row for a 1966 murder and was described as the world's longest-serving death row prisoner. A panel of legislators, academics and former law enforcement officials convened under pressure from the Japan Federation of Bar Associations told the government in November 2024 that the system "must not continue in its present form," and recommended an official review and greater transparency. Lawsuits challenging same-day notice of executions and the legality of hanging were before the courts when Shiraishi was hanged.
Amnesty International called the hanging "the latest callous attack on the right to life in Japan" and urged a moratorium. Abolitionist researchers at The Death Penalty Project argued that the government had chosen to resume executions rather than learn from Hakamada's case. Public opinion stood firmly on the other side: in a government survey released in 2025, 83.1 percent of respondents said the death penalty was unavoidable, most citing the feelings of victims' families. The case showed that those families do not speak with one voice. Several asked the Tachikawa court for death, and at least one father later said he would have preferred a life spent in reflection.
Why he did it remains unclear. The criminal psychologist Takayuki Harada of the University of Tsukuba argued that Shiraishi's manipulation and lack of guilt fit the profile of a psychopath, but noted that he had no record of childhood violence or delinquency, only a minor arrest before 2017. Harada reviewed the trial record and found no serious family problems in evidence. Another academic, Kenji Abe, suggested that something in his early family life lay behind the crimes, an idea Harada dismissed as speculation. The defense complained that the psychiatrist never interviewed his mother or sister.
Sources differ on small points. Reports describe the man as A's boyfriend or as an acquaintance; Shiraishi testified that C was courting A. The age range is given as 15 to 26 or 15 to 25. The number of trial hearings is reported as 23 or 24. Reports put the police entry into the apartment on October 30 or 31, 2017. Abe wrote that Shiraishi's mother left with his sister when he was 20; his mother's statement placed the separation after he had moved out.
Some of what Shiraishi said cannot be checked. In jail he claimed he would have killed again if he had not been caught. He told one writer he had felt nothing for most of the victims, and told the court he felt deep regret for four. Shibui, who covered the trial from start to finish, concluded that how Shiraishi chose whom to kill, whom to spare and whom to apologize to remains unknown.
October 9, 1990: Takahiro Shiraishi born; the family later settles in Zama.
Middle and high school: refuses school in his third year of middle school; runs away from home three times before graduating from high school.
After high school: works in a supermarket bakery section and moves out; his parents later separate.
February 2017: arrested for referring a woman to prostitution; suspended sentence in May.
August 2017: moves into the loft apartment in Zama; meets A and C on August 15.
About August 22 to late October 2017: nine people killed; C on or about August 29; H on October 18.
October 21, 2017: the Hachioji woman's family loses contact with her.
October 31, 2017: Shiraishi arrested after police find the remains of nine people.
November 2017: all nine victims identified; rearrested for murder on November 20.
September 30, 2020: lay-judge trial opens at the Tachikawa branch.
November 26, 2020: prosecutors seek death.
December 15, 2020: sentenced to death.
January 2021: appeal withdrawn; sentence final.
September 2024: Iwao Hakamada acquitted in Shizuoka.
June 27, 2025: Shiraishi hanged at the Tokyo Detention House, aged 34.