On September 6, 1985, a letter reached the chief of the Takada police station in Nara Prefecture. It had been posted somewhere near Sakai, and the characters had been drawn against a ruler so the handwriting could not be traced. The writer named the sushi restaurant where he had eaten with a young woman before he killed her, described where he had begun cutting her body apart, and dared the police to catch him. He signed it The Monster with 22 Faces, an echo of the Monster with 21 Faces, the name used by the extortionists in the Glico Morinaga case, which was then the most notorious unsolved crime in Japan.
The Nara police had been working the case since June 17, when the dismembered body of a nineteen-year-old woman was found beside a farm road in Miyoshi, in the town of Koryo. When they traced her last day, they learned she had been seen at that restaurant in Naniwa-ku, Osaka, with a middle-aged man, and the state of her body matched what the letter described. They concluded the letter had come from the killer. Not long afterward the man learned that a Nara investigator had been asking questions at his regular snack bar. He went to Tokyo, and from there he sent a second letter, this one under his own name, insisting he had nothing to do with the killing and enclosing a used bullet-train ticket from Shin-Osaka to Tokyo dated the day the first letter was postmarked. The police kept both letters, and on the envelope of the first was a single fingerprint. It would be ten years before anyone matched it to a name.
The young woman lived in the dormitory of a facility for people with intellectual disabilities in Tondabayashi and worked at a dry cleaner in the city. On April 16, 1985, at about five in the afternoon, she left the dormitory and did not come back. Where she spent the next two months is not known. On June 16 a man met her near the Tsutenkaku tower in Osaka, took her for sushi at about two o'clock, and brought her back to his condominium in Nishinari-ku. When she asked him for ten thousand yen in pocket money he sat astride her and strangled her with his hands, at about three o'clock. Then he spread carpet and vinyl sheeting over the floor, cut her body apart with a saw and a kitchen knife, packed the pieces in cardboard boxes, and drove them out of the city in a rental car. She was found the next evening at about half past six.
The man was Yasutoshi Kamata. He was born on July 10, 1940, in Ozu, in Ehime Prefecture, the son of an innkeeper, and as a young man he married locally and supplied disposable chopsticks to inns. Japanese newspapers reported at his arrest that he had moved to Nishinari-ku with his two children after his wife died, about fifteen years before the killings began; some later English-language accounts say instead that he left after discovering she had been unfaithful. In Osaka he lived by selling stolen goods at bargain prices to women who worked in bars and restaurants. Those women generally liked him. He was mild and friendly and a smooth talker. People who knew him well described another side: he got angry about money when he drank, he was strong and flared up without warning, and he had a habit of going for the throat.
She was not his first victim. A forty-six-year-old woman from Higashisumiyoshi-ku, married with three children, had left home on May 14, 1985, and was working under an assumed name at a standing bar in Nishinari-ku. Kamata came in as a customer in late May and invited her out to eat. Back at his condominium he told her she was drinking too much, she answered back, and he strangled her. He cut her apart and left her in woodland outside Kobe, and nobody connected her disappearance to anything else for a decade. Over the years he moved through about twenty apartments and condominiums, but the first three killings took place in the same condominium in the Shotenka district of Nishinari-ku and the last two in the same apartment in Ebisu-nishi, in Naniwa-ku.
At about half past five on the afternoon of January 22, 1987, a nine-year-old girl was walking home from her abacus class in Sumiyoshi-ku. She was in the third grade at Sumie Elementary School. Kamata stopped her, asked the way to the Sumiyoshi Grand Shrine, and gave her two hundred yen. He took her to his home intending to sexually assault her. She cried and screamed, and afraid of being found out, he strangled her at about six o'clock.
He left her body in the mountains north of the city. Then the telephone calls began, five of them, four to her school and one to her home, demanding thirty million yen. On May 4, 1987, at about two in the afternoon, her remains were found in a cypress forest on the northeast slope of Mount Tendai, in Toyono, some three hundred meters in from a forest road barely wide enough for one car. She was the only one of his victims he did not dismember. He later told investigators she was small enough to fit in a box.
When Kamata next went to prison, it was for theft. He was sentenced in October 1989 and again in August 1991, and he was not released until March 1993. He used the same forest road that ran past the girl's body when he drove loads of clothing north toward Fukuchiyama, along National Route 423, and within months of his release it became a dumping ground again.
Around July 24, 1993, a forty-five-year-old woman who worked at a snack bar and lived in Tengachaya-higashi, in Nishinari-ku, asked him for money at his apartment. He strangled her, cut her apart with a saw, and left her in the hills of Kami-Todoromi, outside Minoh. In late March 1994 it was a thirty-eight-year-old restaurant worker from Chuo-ku, a regular customer for the cheap clothing he sold. She too asked him for money, and he strangled her, dismembered her, and left her on a cypress-covered slope beside Prefectural Route 4, in the same hills.
Her remains were found first, on April 3, 1994. The next day Minoh police officers searching the surrounding woods found a skeleton about 150 meters to the north. Dental records identified it on July 24 as the snack bar worker; the restaurant worker was not identified until November 4. The two sites lay about three kilometers down the forest road from the place where the schoolgirl had been found seven years earlier. Investigators now had two women cut apart in the same way, head, torso, arms and legs, roughly six pieces each, and no suspect.
The case broke on a theft. On February 23, 1995, Kamata stole boxes of clothing from a warehouse in Chuo-ku. He was arrested in April, denied it, and was charged anyway. Once he was in custody, detectives began to look at him more closely, and the details accumulated. He knew the neighborhood around the sushi restaurant in Naniwa-ku. The mileage on a car he had rented at the time of the 1985 killing matched the distance to the farm road in Koryo. He appeared to have known both of the Minoh women through his business. And the nineteen-year-old in Nara had been cut apart the same way as the two women in Minoh. The Osaka police compared his fingerprints with the print on the 1985 envelope, and they matched. On May 10, 1995, the Osaka and Nara police set up a joint investigation headquarters at the Minoh station.
Under questioning he admitted killing and dismembering the young woman from Tondabayashi, and on May 12 he was arrested again, this time for murder. He went on to admit the schoolgirl and the two women from Minoh, and then a fifth killing that no one had linked to the others. On May 29 police found the housewife's remains in woodland off National Route 175 in Hirano-cho, in Nishi-ku, Kobe; on August 16 her teeth identified her. On June 12 the National Police Agency designated the series Wide-Area Important Case No. 122. The Osaka police had already ranked it alongside the Glico Morinaga extortions as their most important investigation. Between May and September they arrested him over and over, one victim at a time, and the final charges, for the schoolgirl, were filed in October. In custody he admitted everything except the ransom calls.
He took it all back in court. At the opening of his theft trial on October 25, 1995, he said he knew nothing about it. When the murder trial opened before Judge Toshio Shima in the Osaka District Court on March 13, 1996, he denied every charge and called the indictment in the schoolgirl's case nonsense. His defense was that acquaintances had done the killings and he had only helped get rid of the bodies, and that the police had beaten and threatened him into confessing.
The ransom calls became a separate battle. The Osaka police forensic laboratory had compared a recording of the caller with Kamata's voice and concluded they were very similar. At the defense's request, Matsumi Suzuki, director of the Japan Acoustic Research Institute, ran his own voiceprint analysis, and in 1998 he reported that only about ten of 121 points matched, which in his view meant the caller was someone else. He said so on the stand. Prosecutors answered that he had compared different sounds against each other and that his findings could not be trusted.
Kamata's two theft sentences complicated the case. Under Article 45 of the Penal Code, crimes committed before a final conviction cannot be combined with crimes committed after it, so prosecutors divided the case in two: the three killings before 1989, along with the ransom demand, and the two killings after 1993, along with the warehouse theft. On January 8, 1999, they asked for a death sentence in each, calling the crimes cruel and cold and arguing that his antisocial character was beyond correction. The trial closed on February 4, at its forty-fourth session.
On March 24, 1999, Judge Nobuyuki Yokota did something unusual for a capital case in Japan: he read the sentence before the reasons. Kamata was convicted of all five murders and sentenced to death in both cases. He was acquitted of the ransom demand. He had never confessed to it, the court said, the kidnapping had been widely reported by the time the calls were made, and a copycat could not be ruled out; neither voiceprint analysis was objective enough to rely on. The schoolgirl's father said afterward a death sentence was only natural.
Both sides appealed, Kamata against the convictions and prosecutors against the ransom acquittal. When the Osaka High Court took up the case before Judge Hiroshi Fukushima on October 3, 2000, he argued that acquaintances had carried out four of the killings and denied any part in the fifth or in the kidnapping. On March 27, 2001, the court convicted him of the ransom demand as well. A copycat, it reasoned, would hardly have made repeated calls in the middle of a public investigation, with the line likely being traced; the caller shared turns of phrase with Kamata, and the voiceprint evidence supported the conclusion. It set aside the first death sentence on that ground and imposed it again, and upheld the second. In the Supreme Court his lawyers argued once more that he had accomplices and that his confession had been beaten out of him. On July 8, 2005, the Second Petty Bench under Judge Hiroshi Fukuda rejected the appeal, and both death sentences became final.
On death row he answered surveys sent to condemned prisoners by opponents of capital punishment. In August 2008 he wrote that the state forbade murder and then carried it out itself, and that the police and prosecutors had written their statements with the intention of making him the culprit, and no judge would listen when he said they were false. In 2011 he wrote that high blood pressure had taken the use of his right hand and that he could barely manage a pen with his left. In 2015 he wrote that his dementia was getting worse and that the hardest thing was no longer being able to write.
Justice Minister Mitsuhide Iwaki signed the order, and on March 25, 2016, Kamata was hanged at the Osaka Detention House, at seventy-five. Junko Yoshida, the convicted ringleader of the Kurume insurance murders, was hanged in Fukuoka the same morning. Amnesty International Japan protested in particular that a man of his age had been executed. Of the five people he was convicted of killing, the first was found ten years after her death, and only because he told the police where to look.
July 10, 1940: born in Ozu, in Ehime Prefecture.
April 16, 1985: a nineteen-year-old woman leaves her dormitory in Tondabayashi and does not come back.
Late May 1985: he strangles a forty-six-year-old woman from Higashisumiyoshi-ku at his condominium and leaves her remains in woodland outside Kobe.
June 16, 1985: he strangles the nineteen-year-old at his condominium in Nishinari-ku and dismembers her body.
June 17, 1985: her body is found beside a farm road in Koryo, in Nara Prefecture.
September 6, 1985: a taunting letter signed The Monster with 22 Faces reaches the chief of the Takada police station.
January 22, 1987: he strangles a nine-year-old girl walking home from her abacus class in Sumiyoshi-ku; ransom calls follow.
May 4, 1987: her remains are found on the slope of Mount Tendai, in Toyono.
October 1989: sentenced for theft, and again in August 1991; he is released in March 1993.
Around July 24, 1993: he strangles a forty-five-year-old snack bar worker and leaves her in the hills outside Minoh.
Late March 1994: he strangles a thirty-eight-year-old restaurant worker and leaves her beside Prefectural Route 4 in the same hills.
April 3, 1994: the restaurant worker's remains are found; the next day a skeleton, later identified as the snack bar worker, is found nearby.
February 23, 1995: he steals boxes of clothing from a warehouse in Chuo-ku and is arrested in April.
May 10, 1995: after his fingerprints match the print on the 1985 envelope, the Osaka and Nara police set up a joint investigation headquarters.
May 12, 1995: arrested for murder.
May 29, 1995: police find the remains of the forty-six-year-old woman in woodland off National Route 175 in Kobe.
March 13, 1996: his murder trial opens in the Osaka District Court, and he denies every charge.
March 24, 1999: convicted of all five murders and sentenced to death in both cases, but acquitted of the ransom demand.
March 27, 2001: the Osaka High Court convicts him of the ransom demand as well and upholds death.
July 8, 2005: the Supreme Court rejects his appeal and both death sentences become final.
March 25, 2016: hanged at the Osaka Detention House, at seventy-five.