Tsutomu Miyazaki was born in Itsukaichi, western Tokyo, on August 21, 1962, into a prosperous family that ran a local newspaper. He was born prematurely with fused wrist joints, so his hands could not be turned upwards, and he was bullied for it throughout school. He became isolated and hostile to his family, and after the death of the grandfather he was close to in 1988 he is said to have eaten some of his ashes.
Between August 1988 and June 1989 he killed four girls aged between four and seven: Mari Konno, Masami Yoshizawa, Erika Namba and Ayako Nomoto. He took them in his car, killed them, and interfered with the bodies, photographing and filming them and in one case drinking blood and eating a part of a hand. He kept remains at his house. Japanese reporting called him the Otaku Murderer, after the collection of tapes found in his room.
What made the case notorious in Japan was what he did afterwards. He sent the Konno family a postcard reading in cut-out characters that this was the beginning, and later left a cardboard box on their doorstep containing the girl's cremated bones, her teeth and photographs of her clothing. He wrote long letters to newspapers and to the families under the name Yuko Imada, a pun that can be read as now I will tell.
He was caught on July 23, 1989, trying to photograph a small girl at a park in Hachioji. Her father heard her and came, and Miyazaki fled on foot and returned for his car, where police were waiting. His room held nearly six thousand videotapes, mostly anime, television recordings and horror films, along with a small number of slasher videos, and the newspaper photographs of that room produced a moral panic about otaku, the obsessive collector-fans of Japanese popular culture, whose consequences for the subculture lasted a decade.
His trial began in 1990 and ran seven years. Psychiatric panels disagreed about whether he had schizophrenia or a dissociative disorder, and the court found him sane and responsible, noting that he had concealed evidence and understood what he was doing. He was sentenced to death in April 1997. The Tokyo High Court upheld it in 2001 and the Supreme Court in January 2006. He was hanged on June 17, 2008, aged forty-five. He never expressed remorse, and told the court his acts had been carried out by a rat-man he saw in dreams.