Yoshio Kodaira was arrested in Tokyo on August 20, 1946, three days after the body of a 17-year-old girl was found in the Shiba district of the city. He was a laundry worker at a United States Army facility, a former navy petty officer, and a man who had already served eight years in prison for a killing in 1932. Over the following weeks he confessed to a run of killings of young women that went back to May 1945, before Japan's surrender. Prosecutors indicted him on ten counts. At trial he denied three, and the court acquitted him of those and convicted him of the other seven. He was sentenced to death, the sentence became final in November 1948, and he was hanged at Miyagi Prison in Sendai on October 5, 1949.
The case is remembered in Japan for the way it fed on hunger. In the months around the end of the war, Tokyo ran short of almost everything, and city dwellers crowded trains to the countryside to buy rice and vegetables from farmers. Kodaira approached women in those crowds and in the streets, offering to take them to a farmer who would sell food cheaply or to an employer who needed workers. In a 2021 Bunshun Online series on the case, the journalist who wrote it placed it with a 1971 case as the two best-known sex crimes of postwar Showa Japan, and noted that newspapers at the time compared the two.
The setting matters to the story. The 1945 harvest failed, partly because of typhoon damage, and the food shortage reached its worst point in 1946, according to the Bunshun Online series. A history of the postwar years quoted there records that on November 2 and 3, 1945 alone, a million Tokyo residents went out to the neighboring prefectures to buy food. An Asahi Shimbun reporter who rode a so-called "white rice train" from Akita to Ueno in the summer of 1946 found police with pistols ordering passengers off at Yamagata and confiscating rice, and reported that nine in ten passengers were breaking the rationing rules.
Work was as scarce as food. The same series cites a Ministry of Health and Welfare figure from November 1945 showing 4.13 million workers released from wartime conscripted labor as factories closed, and an Asahi report of September 1946 that only about 50 of 1,029 graduates at Waseda University's ceremony had confirmed jobs. Against that background, the writer argued, a stranger's promise of rice or a job carried great weight. Kodaira himself later told investigators that after the war food was what moved women most, and that he had used that.
Kodaira was born on January 28, 1905, in the town of Nikko in Kamitsuga District, Tochigi Prefecture. He was the sixth child and third son. His family had once run one of the leading merchant inns in their village, which lay in the mountains on the route to the Ashio copper mine, but his father's heavy drinking, gambling and spending drained the family's property and the business declined.
He did poorly at school. He finished 21st of 23 pupils, according to the Bunshun Online series, and a psychiatric report prepared for his trial summarized his elementary school records: a conduct grade of third out of four levels in every one of his six years, and teachers' comments about inattention, fighting and violence toward classmates. In the fifth grade he was made to stand as a punishment after chasing friends with a stick. The same report recorded what it described as a family history of psychiatric illness, especially among his father's relatives and his own siblings, and said his father was usually mild but often violent when drunk. Kodaira told the examiners that he had been violent since elementary school and that he had carried a dagger until recently.
As a young man he moved between jobs: an apprentice at a steel company in Tokyo, a clerk in a food shop, and a worker at the Furukawa refinery at the Ashio copper mine. A 2020 Bunshun Online series by a nonfiction writer who later visited the places in the case says he spent about two years working in Tokyo before returning home to a job with Furukawa Electric, and that during that period he caused no particular trouble.
In 1923, at 18, Kodaira volunteered for the Imperial Japanese Navy. He trained at the Yokosuka barracks as an engine room hand and served on battleships and submarines, including on overseas voyages. He took part as a member of a naval landing force in the Shandong Expedition of 1927 and the Jinan Incident of 1928 in China. In 1929 he received the Order of the Rising Sun, eighth class, and left the navy as a petty officer third class in the engine branch.
The Bunshun Online writers both drew on what Kodaira later told police and psychiatric examiners about those years. In his police statement he described acts of violence against civilians while serving in China, which he said he had committed against five or six people. The 2021 series treats these accounts as a record of wartime brutality and suggests that violence backed by military power was one factor in his later crimes. These are his own statements; no court tried him for anything he did in China.
After the navy he went back to work at the metal works. He fathered a child with a young woman who was a relative, which caused trouble in the family. In January 1932 he married, through an arranged introduction, the niece of a supervisor at the works. Within less than six months his wife's family learned of the earlier child, and she went back to her parents. He asked her repeatedly to return, and she refused. He had also lost his job at the works the month before.
At about 2 a.m. on July 2, 1932, he broke into her parents' home in Higashi-Ashi village in Kamitsuga District, now part of the city of Kanuma, with an iron bar. The Asahi Shimbun reported the next day that eight people had been struck, including his wife, her parents, her brothers and sister, a 9-year-old grandchild and a guest staying the night, and that neighbors who ran to the house restrained him. The Asahi described his wife's father, a Shinto priest, as gravely injured. Later accounts state that the father died: the Mainichi Shimbun reported in August 1946 that Kodaira had killed him, and the 2020 series says he was convicted of murder for the killing and held at Kosuge Prison.
He was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment; the 2021 series, citing the indictment, the 1948 appeal judgment and the psychiatric report, gives the date of the appeal court sentence as February 1933. Two amnesties marking national celebrations shortened the term, and he was released on parole in September 1940, a little more than eight years after the attack.
After his release Kodaira worked as a boiler operator at several factories. Around the outbreak of the Pacific War he went to Saipan as a construction worker on an airfield. In August 1943 he became a boiler operator at a navy clothing and provisions depot in Tokyo, which made uniforms and housed young women brought in from the provinces to sew them.
In February 1944 he married again, without telling his new wife about his criminal record, according to the 2020 series. Their son was born in February 1945. As the air raids on Tokyo grew heavier, he sent his wife and son to her home region of Toyama and stayed on at the depot. The psychiatric report described the marriage as a good one and said he was unusually affectionate toward his children. His wife, in a statement recorded during the preliminary investigation and later published in a magazine, said he had been kind to her, that she had trusted him during their long separations, and that she could not believe the crimes when they were reported.
The first of the killings in the series came on May 25, 1945, at the navy depot in Shinagawa, Tokyo, where he worked. The Asahi Shimbun reported in September 1946 that the victim was a 20-year-old student who had been staying at the depot dormitory and had just come back from hospital. Her body was found on July 4, 1945. The military police investigated, but no one was charged. According to the 2020 series, suspicion fell on other men, and Kodaira took the chance to leave the depot and disappear.
The case went unsolved until after his arrest. When the Shiba deaths were reported in August 1946, a professor of forensic medicine at Keio University told the investigation headquarters that he had once performed an autopsy on a similar body, and that tip led police to reexamine the depot case. Kodaira confessed to it. In the memoir he wrote in custody, as summarized by the Mainichi Shimbun, he said the first woman he killed, at the depot, was someone he knew.
On June 22, 1945, about a month after the depot killing, Kodaira approached a 30-year-old woman in Tochigi, according to the 2020 series. The Yomiuri Shimbun reported in September 1946 that she was a married woman whose husband had been called up for military service, and that she had been moving from her parents' home in Saitama Prefecture to the town of Imaichi, now part of Nikko. Kodaira told her he knew a farmer who would sell rice cheaply, and she went with him into the countryside near Tochigi, where he killed her. Nikko police, the Yomiuri said, came to suspect Kodaira because he traveled often on the line to Nikko at that time, and he confessed to her killing.
On July 12, 1945, a 22-year-old woman from Yokohama went to Shibuya in Tokyo to buy a train ticket so she could visit the place where her brother had been evacuated, and she was not seen again. The Asahi Shimbun raised the possibility in September 1946 that Kodaira was responsible, and the 2021 Bunshun Online series says he confessed to her killing as well.
Three days later, on July 15, a 21-year-old woman from Oji Ward in northern Tokyo left home in the morning to buy potatoes in the countryside of Saitama Prefecture and disappeared. By Kodaira's later statement, he met her in Ikebukuro, told her he had money and asked whether she could take him to a seller, and she agreed to go with him. He killed her near Kiyose, a village in western Tokyo.
On September 28, 1945, another 21-year-old woman from Oji Ward, who worked in the accounts department of a publishing company, went to meet a senior colleague at a Tokyo railway station. The colleague arrived about 15 minutes late, and she was gone. Kodaira said he had approached her while she waited and persuaded her that he knew a good place to buy goods, and he took her to Kiyose. The remains of both Oji Ward women were found in Kiyose in October 1945, and their deaths went unsolved for a year. The Yomiuri reported Kodaira's confession to both killings on September 30, 1946. Police officers, the series records, were struck by how persuasive his approach had been.
In December 1945, a 19-year-old Tokyo woman who had gone to visit her sister in Nikko was strangled. Kodaira later confessed to her killing, and the court found it proven. The same month a 17-year-old schoolgirl in Nikko went missing, and her body was found the following month. The Asahi Shimbun reported in 1946 that Kodaira was suspected in her death too, but her case was later found to be unrelated to him.
In March 1946 Kodaira answered a newspaper advertisement and began work at a United States Army laundry in the Shiba Takanawa area of Tokyo. He was living near Shibuya.
On June 13, 1946, a schoolgirl was found dead in Takanawa, Shiba. She had been strangled. She was first thought to be 15 or 16, and was later identified as a 14-year-old second-year pupil from Edogawa Ward. Her death went unsolved at first. A detective who worked on identifying her later linked her case to the Shiba killings, and the closeness of Kodaira's workplace to the place where she was found was one of the points that drew investigators to him. Kodaira confessed to her killing during interrogation, as the Asahi Shimbun reported on August 30, 1946, but he retracted the confession at trial, and the court acquitted him on that count.
Around July 10, 1946, Kodaira met a 17-year-old girl in Shinagawa. She told him she was looking for work, and he hinted that he could find her a job. They exchanged addresses. On August 4 he called at her family's home, met her parents and won their trust by saying he would arrange a test for a job. On the morning of August 6 she left her mother's home in Meguro to go to the test and did not return. Kodaira killed her in Shiba that day. When her mother asked him about her, he said they had not met. She was the third daughter of a referee in professional sumo.
On the morning of August 17, 1946, a young woman was found dead in Shiba, and police found a second woman's remains nearby. The Atago police station and the Metropolitan Police Department's First Investigation Division opened an inquiry. Investigators estimated that the first woman had been dead about ten days and the second about a month, and they treated the two deaths as separate cases. Neither woman could be named at first. The next morning the Asahi, Mainichi and Yomiuri newspapers all reported the discovery.
On August 18 police searched the surrounding area for evidence. Families with missing daughters began to come forward. The head of the First Investigation Division later wrote that eight people reported or asked about missing persons on that single day. On August 20 the first body was identified as that of the missing 17-year-old. The two police accounts of the identification differ: the division head's version and the account of the investigation section chief, who wrote that ten mothers came to the Atago station, that two of them identified her, and that her name was 99th on a list of about 300 young women.
Around noon the same day, August 20, 1946, he was arrested at his home. The Asahi Shimbun reported that he confessed after questioning. It gave his age as 42 and described him as a laundry worker from Tochigi Prefecture with one earlier murder conviction. The skeletal remains found nearby were not identified, and at trial Kodaira denied that death; he was acquitted on that count.
A different version of how he was traced appears in the memoir of a detective who led the investigation, as summarized in the 2020 series. In that account, police followed Kodaira's movements to a former lover who had evacuated from Tokyo to Tochigi and whom he had visited several times to buy food. At one farmhouse in the area he had traded a watch for rice, and the watch proved to belong to one of the murdered women, which the memoir presents as the evidence that brought his confession.
The case grew in the newspapers through the late summer and autumn of 1946. On August 30 the Asahi Shimbun reported that he had confessed to the Takanawa schoolgirl's killing. The same paper reported that he was suspected in two deaths in the Nikko area. Through September the Asahi and the Yomiuri reported new confessions one after another, often under headlines numbering the victims. The Bunshun Online writer, reading those pages in 2021, questioned whether the Asahi's coverage had gone beyond ordinary interest in a crime and turned it into entertainment.
On September 5 the Yomiuri ran an editorial on the "lessons" of the case. It said that the frivolity of young people was widely seen as a problem and urged parents to keep their daughters under strict guidance, for example by enforcing curfews. The 2021 series reads the editorial as a reflection of the common sense of its time.
The counts in the press did not agree. The Asahi reported 12 victims on October 2; the Yomiuri said on October 6 that he had confessed to eight so far. On October 3 the Asahi reported that Kodaira had told a correspondent of the Associated Press that he could not bear his conscience and was ready to die. Asked whether he had killed eleven people, he was reported to have held up his fingers to show that only the number he had admitted was correct.
The same day the Mainichi Shimbun printed excerpts from a handwritten account, about 30 sheets long, that Kodaira had written in custody. In it he said that from around May 1945 he had attacked about 30 women besides the ten he was accused of killing, luring them with offers of black-market goods or cheap food. He wrote that he did not kill those women mainly because they did what he said and because he feared being seen, and that he killed ten because they resisted. He closed by saying that he had no words of apology for the victims' families and could only pray for the dead. None of the claims about other women was tested in court.
Interrogation ended on October 25. A section chief in the Metropolitan Police Department's criminal investigation division told the Asahi that ten cases were backed by firm corroborating evidence.
Kodaira was indicted on December 27 on ten counts of murder, with other charges. Under the old Code of Criminal Procedure a preliminary examination would normally have come next, but it was skipped and the case went straight to the Tokyo District Court; the 2021 series attributes this to his firm confessions and to the evidence being judged sound.
The first hearing took place on March 3, 1947. About 350 spectator tickets were gone before the session began, the Asahi reported. Kodaira came into court in a dark suit and a navy overcoat with a deep woven hat over his head, which he removed to sit bareheaded. He answered the presiding judge's questions calmly. At later hearings he withdrew three of his confessions: to the death of the unidentified woman whose remains were found in Shiba, to the death of the schoolgirl found in Takanawa, and to a death in the war-damaged basement of a department store annex in Shibuya.
Before the verdict Kodaira was examined by a psychiatrist, a professor at Tokyo University who directed Matsuzawa Hospital, whose report was published in a journal in January 1950. It set out the crimes, then the family history, and placed Kodaira's intelligence in the lower part of the normal range. It described him as emotionally volatile and prone to violence over small matters, with a strong sex drive, a streak of cruelty and a weakened moral sense. He did not drink, had no hobbies and spent much of his income on paid sex, the examiner wrote. Coworkers had given him a nickname built on his surname that mocked his womanizing.
Tests recorded in the report found explosive anger: he was usually polite and mild, but when angered he lost control and often could not remember afterward what he had said. He showed little remorse and forgot his crimes quickly. He told the examiner that after the first killings he had felt remorse and fled, that after repeating them he became indifferent, and that he might have gone on if he had not been caught. In his statement to police he described himself as having a human face and the heart of a beast.
The examiner's conclusion was that his drives and emotional volatility were strong but not so severe that he could not control them. He was found responsible for his actions and described as a rare type of congenital personality disorder. The report stopped short of a finding of sadism, saying only that it could not be ruled out.
On June 18 the trial court found him guilty on seven counts and sentenced him to death. It acquitted him on the three counts he had denied at trial, numbered six, eight and ten in the prosecution's list. His defense lawyers, who wanted the whole case reexamined, appealed. On February 27, 1948, the Tokyo High Court also sentenced him to death. On November 16, 1948, the Supreme Court dismissed his final appeal, and the sentence became final.
Kodaira was held at Miyagi Prison in Sendai. On October 5, 1949, he woke at 6 a.m. and ate breakfast. He told the prison chaplain that he was fortunate to die on so calm a day. At 9:30 the warden told him in the prison chapel that the sentence would be carried out. He ate a bun, praising it, smoked a cigarette and bowed his head as the chaplain read a sutra. He prayed for his victims. He wrote a two-page letter to his wife asking her to raise their children well. He was hanged at 9:50 a.m., and his death was confirmed at 10:02. The 2021 series gives his age at death as 45.
The Yomiuri Shimbun reported the execution on October 6 in two columns, with a photograph of Kodaira walking across a bridge to the execution ground, which the series describes as an unprecedented scoop. A 1956 book on the death penalty carried a secondhand account, from a young man who had corresponded with Kodaira and heard it from people connected with the prison, that he called out the names of his victims and asked their forgiveness as the noose was placed. It is a secondhand account.
Several of the details that struck people at the time concerned how ordinary he seemed. He stood 158 centimeters tall, small even for men of his generation, and the 2021 series suggests that his slight build and gentle manner lowered women's guard. A news photograph of him with detectives carried a caption saying he looked like an ordinary man. The psychiatric examiner described him as generally sociable and pleasant to deal with.
When the writer of the 2020 series visited the mountain village where Kodaira grew up, more than 70 years after the crimes, he found the family house still standing and occupied by relatives. A nephew he met there would not talk about the case. An older resident near the Tochigi site of the second killing remembered meeting Kodaira as a child and described him as a handsome, friendly man. The writer concluded that the crimes still weighed on the local community.
How many women Kodaira killed is not settled. The courts found seven killings proven and acquitted him on three. In custody he had confessed to all ten counts, and his written account spoke of ten killings, but at trial he denied three, and the acquittals stand. Newspapers in 1946 gave different totals at different times, including 12 in the Asahi and eight in the Yomiuri, and the AP interview had him rejecting a figure of eleven.
His claim to have attacked some 30 other women came from his own written account and was not examined in court. The 2020 series says that beyond the crimes that came to light Kodaira was said to have more than 30 other offenses, and that the author believed some cases Kodaira denied, and which were never charged, may also have been his. Those cases were not tried, and they are not his in law.
Some early reports were wrong. In 1946 the Asahi linked him to the death of a 17-year-old schoolgirl in Nikko, a case later found to be unrelated. The 2021 series also says that a Mainichi report of his earlier record, published on August 21, 1946, contained many errors, and it corrects the date of his first sentence from that report using the indictment and the 1948 appeal judgment.
The 1932 attack is reported in different terms. The Asahi report written the next day described his wife's father as gravely injured and counted eight people struck. Later accounts state that the father died and that Kodaira was convicted of murder; the 2020 series speaks of six other family members seriously injured.
His age is also given in different ways. Born in January 1905, he was described by the Asahi as 42 at his arrest in August 1946, and the 2021 series gives his age at execution as 45.
The crimes spanned a little more than a year either side of the surrender, a period the 2021 series describes as one of severe disorder. Newspapers, magazines and books returned to the case for decades, among them a 1949 book based on the trial record, the memoirs of police investigators, and the published psychiatric report.
The British novelist David Peace based his 2007 novel Tokyo Year Zero, published by Faber and Faber, on the case. In a 2008 interview published in the Italian university journal Altre Modernità, Peace said he first learned of it from a paragraph in the historian Edward Seidensticker's book Tokyo Rising describing two killings in Shiba Park in 1946. Peace's interviewer described the book as based on the true story of the case.
January 28, 1905: Yoshio Kodaira is born in Nikko town, Kamitsuga District, Tochigi Prefecture.
1923: At 18 he volunteers for the navy and trains at Yokosuka.
1927 to 1928: Serves with a naval landing force in the Shandong Expedition and the Jinan Incident in China.
1929: Receives the Order of the Rising Sun, eighth class, and leaves the navy as a petty officer third class.
January 1932: Marries for the first time; within six months his wife returns to her family.
July 2, 1932: Attacks his wife's family at their home in Higashi-Ashi village, Tochigi Prefecture, with an iron bar; her father is killed, by later accounts, and others are injured.
February 1933: Sentenced on appeal to 15 years' imprisonment.
September 1940: Released on parole after two amnesties shorten his term.
August 1943: Begins work as a boiler operator at a navy clothing and provisions depot in Tokyo.
February 1944: Marries again.
February 1945: His son is born.
May 25, 1945: A 20-year-old woman staying at the depot dormitory in Shinagawa, Tokyo, is killed; her body is found on July 4.
June 22, 1945: A 30-year-old woman is killed near Tochigi.
July 12, 1945: A 22-year-old Yokohama woman disappears after going to Shibuya.
July 15, 1945: A 21-year-old woman from Oji Ward disappears; she is killed near Kiyose.
September 28, 1945: A second 21-year-old woman from Oji Ward disappears; she is killed near Kiyose.
October 1945: The remains of both Oji Ward women are found in Kiyose.
December 1945: A 19-year-old Tokyo woman is strangled in Nikko.
March 1946: Kodaira starts work at a United States Army laundry in Takanawa, Shiba.
June 13, 1946: A 14-year-old schoolgirl is found dead in Takanawa (he is later acquitted of her death).
August 6, 1946: A 17-year-old girl he had promised a job is killed in Shiba.
August 17, 1946: Her body and the remains of a second woman are found in Shiba.
August 20, 1946: The girl is identified; Kodaira is arrested at his home and confesses.
August 30, 1946: The Asahi Shimbun reports his confession to the Takanawa killing.
September 30, 1946: The Yomiuri reports his confession to the two Kiyose killings.
October 3, 1946: The Mainichi prints excerpts from his written account; the Asahi reports his interview with an AP correspondent.
October 25, 1946: Interrogation ends.
December 27: Indicted on ten counts of murder, with other charges.
March 3, 1947: Trial opens in the Tokyo District Court.
June 18: Convicted on seven counts, acquitted on three, and sentenced to death.
February 27, 1948: The Tokyo High Court upholds the death sentence.
November 16, 1948: The Supreme Court dismisses his appeal; the sentence is final.
October 5, 1949: Hanged at Miyagi Prison, Sendai, at 9:50 a.m.
January 1950: The psychiatric report on him is published.
2007: David Peace publishes Tokyo Year Zero, a novel based on the case.