In the Tokyo of 1945 and 1946, where radio reporters asked people what they were eating and children said the happiest thing that had happened to them was a ration of rice or bread, a middle-aged man approached young women at railroad stations and offered to take them to a farmer who had food, or who needed workers. At Shibuya Station on July 12, 1945, it was a twenty-two-year-old woman. He led her into the woods, and when she pulled a small knife on him he took it from her, sat astride her and strangled her, and left with her wallet and her watch. Three days later, at Ikebukuro, a twenty-one-year-old went with him to a thicket and was raped and strangled, and he took sixty yen and her wooden sandals. Her skeleton was found in November. The man was Yoshio Kodaira.
He was born on January 28, 1905, in Nikko, Tochigi Prefecture, the sixth of eight children in a family that ran a merchants' inn until his father's drinking, gambling and spending bankrupted it. All five of his father's siblings were mentally ill. He picked up a stammer from a friend as a boy and did poorly at school, where his first-grade report said there was no day without a fight and his sixth-grade report called him rude and violent. After a spell as a live-in shop boy in Ginza and an apprenticeship at a Furukawa Electric smelter, he joined the navy in 1923.
In 1928 he was sent to China with the naval landing force in the Jinan Incident, guarded the Nisshinbo factory, and by his own account bayoneted six Chinese soldiers there, for which he received the Order of the Rising Sun, eighth class. Stationed at Dagu, he broke into houses with other soldiers and raped women, and in at least one case cut open a pregnant woman's belly with a sword. He left the navy in 1929 as a petty officer third class. Back at the smelter he married the plant manager's niece, and when she learned he had fathered a child with another woman and went home to her family in July 1932, he attacked the house with an iron bar, killed his father-in-law and injured six others. He was sentenced to fifteen years and released on parole in 1940 after two amnesties. He married again in 1944, and in May 1945, three months after his son was born, he left his wife and child with her family in Toyama and went alone to Tokyo.
On May 25, 1945, he broke into the women's dormitory at the navy clothing depot where he worked and raped and killed a twenty-one-year-old member of the women's corps; while the military police suspected another man, he quit and left. In June, at Shin-Tochigi Station, he promised a thirty-one-year-old woman an introduction to a farmer, raped her three times in the woods, strangled her and took seventy yen and her watch. On September 28, at Tokyo Station, he took a twenty-one-year-old to a mountain village and killed her for three hundred yen and the crepe dress she had brought to barter for food. On December 29, at Asakusa, he lured another twenty-one-year-old to a mountain village in Tochigi and strangled her for her wallet and rucksack. After the fifth killing, it was established, he committed necrophilia with the body.
On June 18, 1946, he offered a job to a seventeen-year-old girl, exchanged addresses with her and on August 4 called at her home and met her mother. On August 6 he took her behind a park, assaulted her and killed her. She was the daughter of the sumo referee Shikimori Isaburo, who later became the twenty-fourth Kimura Shonosuke. Her body was found on August 17, her parents gave the police his name, and he was arrested on August 20, 1946. He was forty-one. Questioned, he talked about the rapes with evident pleasure. He said he had approached forty women, and that the thirty he had not killed had mostly done what he told them.
He was indicted on ten counts of rape, murder, robbery and theft. He admitted seven killings and denied three: a seventeen-year-old strangled in the basement of a Shibuya department store annex in November 1945, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl killed in a truck lot near the American barracks where he worked as a laborer in June 1946, and an unidentified girl of seventeen or eighteen found in July 1946. The Tokyo court acquitted him on those three for lack of evidence and convicted him of the seven, and sentenced him to death. His lawyer, at his own request, was Shotaro Miyake, a former vice-minister of justice. He hid his face under a deep wicker hat throughout, and his successful request that the court ban photography and reporting at the verdict is often cited as the start of Japan's restrictions on cameras in courtrooms. "I know many men who did crueler things than I did in the war," he told the court, "but I don't think anyone but me did such terrible things in peacetime. It was not the act of a human being at all." The Supreme Court rejected his final appeal in November 1948; the date is given as both November 16 and November 26.
On death row his wife visited and wept as she blamed herself, and through her and the prison chaplain his manner changed. He was hanged at Miyagi Prison in Sendai on October 5, 1949. "I am fortunate to be able to die on such a calm and peaceful day," he told the chaplain. He left a note asking that those who had cared for him be thanked, and a farewell poem. Other deaths of women around Tokyo and Tochigi in those years, at Lake Chuzenji, near Nikko and at Matsudo, were suspected to be his but never charged. A similar case of women lured to the woods with job offers in 1947 was called the Second Kodaira Case.