Yukio Yamaji killed three people in a life of 25 years. The first was his mother, whom he beat to death in their apartment in Yamaguchi City in July 2000, a few weeks before his 17th birthday. Because he was a minor, the case went to a family court, which sent him to a juvenile training school for about three years. In November 2005, two years after his provisional release, he ambushed two sisters in an apartment building in Osaka's Naniwa Ward, raped them, stabbed them to death and set their apartment on fire. He told the police that he had never forgotten the feeling of killing his mother and wanted to feel it again.
The Osaka District Court sentenced him to death in December 2006. He refused to ask for leniency, withdrew the appeal his lawyers had filed, and was hanged in July 2009. The case drew wide attention in Japan, both for what it said about the release of young offenders and for a dispute in court over whether he had a developmental disorder that the juvenile system had seen and the trial court rejected.
Yamaji was born on August 21, 1983, according to the nonfiction writer Ikko Ono, who reconstructed his life from court records, letters and interviews for a book on Japanese serial killers. Ono places his birth in Yamaguchi City; another writer, Yoshiteru Ogawa, gives Shimonoseki. The trial judgment says only that he was born in Yamaguchi Prefecture.
He was an only child. Ono describes his mother as a woman who had married at 20, divorced about six years later, and then worked at a kimono shop before marrying again at 29. Her second husband, Yamaji's father, had worked at a pachinko parlor and, by Ono's account, had been a carpenter until an injury. The family of three lived in a small two-room apartment in central Yamaguchi City. The father drank heavily and was often out of work, and a former neighbor told Ono in 2005 that he was gentle when sober and violent when drunk, breaking glass and overturning furniture. The household was poor enough that it borrowed rice and miso from neighbors.
The trial court accepted the outline of this picture. Its judgment describes the father as a man who leaned toward alcohol dependence and could be violent at home, and calls Yamaji's upbringing an unfortunate one.
In January 1995, when Yamaji was in the fifth grade, his father fell ill at home with liver disease, vomiting blood, and died in hospital at 44. Yamaji later told people that his mother had been slow to call for help and that he had heard her say she was relieved at the funeral. Ono reports both claims as Yamaji's own account, given through a court reporter and the psychiatrist who treated him; they were never tested. Yamaji spoke of his father as someone important to him and of his mother as someone who was not. A court reporter recalled him saying plainly that he had hated her.
Classmates remembered him as a boy who held himself apart. One told Ono he seemed to look down on other children, avoided group games and, when teased, would knock over a desk and walk out of school. After his father died his behavior worsened; he picked on weaker children and broke school windows. In junior high he was bullied himself and, in the second term of his second year, stopped going to school.
He finished junior high in 1999 as the only member of his class with neither a job nor a school place lined up. He failed an entrance test for a live-in factory job in Kurashiki and gave up construction work because he could not keep up physically. A friend then found him a job delivering newspapers. The trial court noted that he did that work without trouble for about a year, from shortly after his 16th birthday, and Ono writes that he was praised for it and earned his own money for the first time. He spent much of it at a local toy shop, playing trading card games with younger children.
At home, the money ran short. Ono describes debt collectors at the door, the phone and electricity cut off, and a mother who told her son the family owed about 2 million yen when the real figure was closer to 5 million. Yamaji believed she was taking money from his wallet. The trial judgment records the same grievance in plainer terms: after he began working, his mother came to rely on his wages.
In April 2000 a woman of 23 began working at the toy shop. Yamaji, then 16, fell for her. Ono, who refers to her by a pseudonym, writes that she had a long-term boyfriend but appeared unsure about him, and that the two spent a night together on July 27, 2000. Around the same time she began receiving silent phone calls on her mobile phone. Yamaji became convinced the caller was his mother, who had found the woman's business card in his wallet.
On July 28 he skipped his newspaper round without notice. The next evening, July 29, he waited at home for his mother. When she came in at about 9 p.m. he asked her about the debts, and then about the calls. According to Ono's account, drawn from the case records, she told him the debts were none of his business and denied making the calls. He punched her, threw her into the next room and kicked her, then picked up a metal baseball bat. The Osaka court summarized the event in a single line: during an argument over the debt and the silent calls to the woman he was seeing, his anger exploded and he beat his mother to death with a metal bat. She was 50.
What he did next became part of the later trial. The following morning he delivered his newspapers as usual. He cleaned the floor, went to the toy shop, and had lunch with the woman from work. Ono writes that he bought her a small pouch as a present. On the evening of July 30 he wrapped his mother's body in a blanket and moved it to the entrance. At 1:10 a.m. on July 31 he called the police emergency number and said he had killed his mother. Yamaguchi Prefectural Police arrested him that day.
A lawyer, Shingo Uchiyama, met him on August 2, 2000, as the duty attorney at Yamaguchi Police Station. Yamaji told him he did not need a lawyer and did not care what happened to him. He accepted one only after a family court investigator told him the hearing could not go forward without one, and Uchiyama became his attendant, the juvenile system's counterpart of defense counsel. Uchiyama told Ono that the boy never apologized during the hearing.
On September 14, 2000, the Yamaguchi Family Court sent him to a middle-level juvenile training school for long-term corrective education of about three years. Kyodo News reported that the court found the attack had not been planned and that he could be reformed, although it said he lacked a deep sense of guilt. He served the term at a juvenile training school in Okayama.
His conduct inside was not the problem. The trial court later found that he kept the rules of daily life but refused, consistently, to show any remorse for killing his mother, and that neither the staff's guidance nor regular sessions with a psychiatrist changed that.
Because of that refusal, the school asked Dr. Junichiro Ota, director of the Okayama City Mental Health Center, to see him. Ota met Yamaji 22 times over about two years, beginning in November 2001. At the first session, he told Ono, he asked whether Yamaji felt remorse, and the answer was an immediate no.
Yamaji gave Ota three reasons for the killing: his mother's silent calls to the woman he had just begun seeing, her taking his money, and the way she had raised him. When Ota asked whether those reasons weighed the same as her death, Yamaji said they were of about equal value. Ota pointed out that killing someone ends every possibility of that person's life, and Yamaji seemed, briefly, to reconsider. In July 2002, eight months into the sessions, he told Ota that even now he thought killing his mother had been a good thing.
Ota came to believe that Yamaji probably had Asperger's syndrome, a form of pervasive developmental disorder, and that he was not refusing to reflect on what he had done so much as unable to. That opinion would be heard again, and rejected, at his murder trial.
Uchiyama kept writing to him. In July 2001 he sent copies of passages from his mother's diary and notebook, found in the apartment, to show that she had cared about him in her way; she had marked only her son's birthday and her own in her planner. Yamaji wrote back that her constant record-keeping had made him feel watched. He asked repeatedly to see his own case file, and the school refused.
His letters from 2002 and early 2003 described plans. He wanted to study on his own, earn qualifications, learn English and go abroad on a working holiday visa. In January 2003 he wrote to Uchiyama that he meant to live away from Yamaguchi City, where people knew what he had done.
Ota tried to arrange support for life outside. He told Ono that Yamaji rejected the idea of a counselor and said he did not trust anyone placed in that role. Before the release, Ota wrote a referral letter asking a medical institution to see Yamaji, but he did not address it to a particular clinic or doctor. Juvenile training schools, he said, did not then routinely connect young people with outside medical care, and he assumed someone would follow up. He told Ono he regretted it.
Yamaji turned 20 in August 2003. At a hearing on August 15, the family court extended his custody by two months and ordered five months of supervision after provisional release, citing his lack of remorse. His uncle declined to take him in. On October 14, 2003, he left the school on provisional release and entered a rehabilitation hostel in Shimonoseki. The trial judgment confirms the October 2003 release and records that his term formally ended, along with his probation, at the end of March 2004.
He went to the public employment office every day. A man who had known his father, a festival stall operator whom Ono calls Nishida, visited the hostel to place residents in jobs and found Yamaji a live-in position at a pachinko parlor. Yamaji did not mention his record at the interview. He wrote to Uchiyama that the pay was good and his coworkers friendly, and that none of them knew about his case.
In late April 2004 he visited Uchiyama's office in Yamaguchi City and spent more than half an hour reading his own statement from the 2000 case without comment. It was the last time the lawyer saw him. When Uchiyama called in late summer 2004, Yamaji said he was fine. When he called again in late 2005, the number was dead.
Ono found that Yamaji's letters had painted his life in better colors than it was. A coworker described him as quiet and unmotivated, with no close friends. Before he left his first parlor, a young man he had known in juvenile custody turned up with a gang member, beat him, and then came to his workplace; the coworker recalled two young men telling him they would expose something, and Ono concludes they were threatening to reveal the killing. Over the next nine months he took and quit jobs at two more parlors in Shimonoseki and for a time stayed with Nishida's family. The trial court found that for a year and some months after his release he lived without any criminal tendency showing.
By around February 2005, the court found, he had quit pachinko work and joined a crew of cheats, people who used illicit methods to win balls and tokens from pachinko and slot machines. The crew was based in Fukuoka and traveled. Yamaji worked as a player using a device that signaled when a machine was about to pay out. On March 13, 2005, a parlor employee in Seto, Okayama Prefecture, caught him using the device and held him for the police. He was arrested for attempted theft, kept quiet about the others and was not prosecuted. The fingerprints and palm prints taken then would later identify him.
That summer, as parlors installed sensors to detect the devices, the crew's boss rented an apartment in Osaka's Naniwa Ward as a base for trips around the Kansai region. Yamaji moved there with the crew in July, went back to Fukuoka for a time, and returned to the Osaka apartment on November 11, 2005. Ono writes that he had stopped earning, had borrowed close to 1 million yen from consumer lenders and could borrow no more.
On November 13 he told the boss he wanted to quit and was berated. He walked out and slept in a park next to the building. On November 14 he went back for his belongings and said goodbye.
Asuka Uehara, 27, and her sister Chihiro, 19, lived in a fourth-floor apartment in the same building. Neither knew Yamaji.
Asuka was the eldest of three children. Ono writes that she was born in Higashiosaka, grew up in Nara Prefecture, finished high school there and attended a fashion school in Osaka. She helped run her father's company and, from about April 2001, worked at a lounge in Osaka's Chuo Ward, where she and the owner were about to launch a bridal business. The trial court described her as a cheerful young woman who had looked after her younger siblings since childhood, carried real responsibility in her father's firm, and dreamed of starting a company of her own.
Chihiro had grown up in Nara and, after high school, looked for work as a care helper. A few days before her death she started at another lounge in Chuo Ward. She had only recently moved in with her sister. The court wrote that she had a wide circle of friends and was looking forward to her coming-of-age ceremony, which Japan holds for those who turn 20.
The trial judgment sets out what happened, largely from Yamaji's own statements, which the court found consistent and detailed. Sitting in the park on November 14, he decided that he had nothing to protect, nothing to lose and nowhere to be, and that he might as well do what he wanted. He recalled the pleasure he had felt when he killed his mother and decided to kill again. If the victim was a woman, he would rape her; if she had money, he would take it. He chose the crew's building because he knew its layout and because police inquiries there would drive the boss out, a way of getting back at him.
On November 15 he bought a paring knife at a convenience store and that night prowled the building's stairs and corridors, but found no chance and left. On the evening of November 16 he bought a hammer. At about 10 p.m. he jumped from a third-floor walkway to the wall of a neighboring company's warehouse and climbed its drainpipe, trying to reach a roof from which he could watch residents come and go. A resident saw him on the pipe. He returned to the building after midnight and waited on a stairwell landing near the elevator. By then he had decided to set a fire afterward to destroy the evidence. Ono reports that the lights in the sisters' apartment had flickered at 3 a.m. the night before and that investigators found signs the breaker panel had been tampered with; Yamaji always denied touching it, and the court made no finding on it.
Shortly after 2 a.m. Asuka stepped out of the elevator on the fourth floor. He followed her and, as she opened her door, pushed her inside and locked it. He stabbed at her heart; her raised arm deflected the blade into her cheek. He dragged her into the inner room, stabbed her again, and raped her.
He had gone back toward the entrance when he heard Chihiro's key in the lock. He waited beside the door, covered her mouth as she came in, and stabbed her in the chest. He dragged her into the inner room and raped her while cutting her face. After smoking a cigarette on the balcony, he went back and stabbed each sister through the heart. Both died at about 2:30 a.m. of blood loss from stab wounds to the heart.
He lit the carpet with Asuka's Zippo lighter, took the lighter, her coin purse with about 500 yen in it, and a 5,000-yen note from an envelope holding Chihiro's pay, locked the door behind him, and left the building by dropping from the second floor onto the neighboring property so that he would not be seen at the front entrance.
The court found that he set the fire at about 3:30 a.m.; Ono and President Online put the alarm shortly after 3 a.m. A resident saw smoke and called the fire department, and firefighters found the sisters' bodies inside. The fire burned only a small patch of floor and wall, but smoke filled other apartments, and the court found that repairs to the sisters' apartment cost about 3.35 million yen.
Yamaji washed his bloodstained clothes at a coin laundry and hid the knife and hammer in a storehouse at a Shinto shrine a few hundred meters away. He slept in a park about 200 meters from the scene. Ono writes that he stayed in Osaka because he wanted to follow the investigation in the local papers.
That morning detectives questioned the crew members on the sixth floor and asked about a man of about 170 centimeters with curly hair, glasses and a backpack. Ogawa writes that early reports floated theories about a stalker or foreign criminals. Residents had noticed a suspicious young man around the building in the days before. When police compared prints from the scene with those taken after the Okayama arrest in March, they matched.
On the night of December 4, detectives followed him as he left a public bath with a black backpack and surrounded him outside a 100-yen shop. He was formally arrested on December 5, 2005, on a street about a kilometer from the scene, on suspicion of the warehouse trespass. When an officer called his name, Ono writes, he said he would remain completely silent. He was 22, unemployed and of no fixed address.
He first admitted the trespass and denied the killings. Asuka's lighter and coin purse were in his possession, and he could not explain them. Ono and President Online date his admission to December 18. Kyodo News reported that he told investigators he could not forget the feelings he had experienced when he killed his mother, and an investigative source quoted him as saying he had wanted to see human blood. After his statements, police recovered the knife at the shrine. Osaka police obtained a warrant and re-arrested him on suspicion of murder on December 19, 2005. Photographers caught him smiling as he was taken to prosecutors.
He admitted the rapes, the killings and the robbery. He never admitted, in interrogation or at trial, that he had picked out the sisters in advance; he said anyone would have done. A police reporter who covered the case told Ono he believed the evidence pointed the other way. The court made no finding that the sisters had been singled out before that night.
Osaka prosecutors charged him with robbery-murder and robbery-rape of each sister, housebreaking, building trespass at the neighboring warehouse, carrying a knife with a blade over 6 centimeters, and arson of a non-residential building. The arson count is "non-residential" in the legal sense that the apartment's occupants were dead when he set the fire.
The trial opened at the Osaka District Court on May 1, 2006, before a panel of three professional judges presided over by Masao Namiki. It ran to 13 hearings. Yamaji did not contest the facts.
His lawyers fought on two fronts. First, they argued that the robbery counts should fail: he had gone in to kill, not to steal, and had taken only what lay in front of him, so the proper charges were murder, theft and rape. Second, they argued that he had Asperger's syndrome or another pervasive developmental disorder, which had left his ability to control his behavior severely diminished, and that his written statements did not reliably reflect his inner meaning because of a basic deficit in communication.
As the hearings went on, observers noticed him answering more and more questions with "I don't know," "I don't remember" or a refusal to answer. In court he said that if he were put in the same situation again, he would do the same thing.
The court ordered a psychiatric evaluation. The examiner, a psychiatrist with more than 30 years of practice and about 50 criminal evaluations behind him, read the case file and Yamaji's school and juvenile records, ran brain scans, EEGs and psychological tests, interviewed three of his former teachers, and met Yamaji ten times between June 21 and September 21, 2006. The first five sessions lasted one to two hours; the last five, after Yamaji turned hostile, ended within 10 or 20 minutes.
The examiner found no psychosis, mood disorder or neurosis, and no Asperger's syndrome or other developmental disorder. As a child, the report said, Yamaji had joined team games and had not been clumsy, hyperactive or inattentive, and as an adult he read people and situations well. The examiner pointed to the night before the killings, when a suspicious resident spoke to him in a corridor and he calmly met the resident's eye and said he had had a fight and was cooling off, and to a note Yamaji wrote in custody about a detective who made him laugh during a reconstruction of the crime. He also changed his manner depending on whom he was talking to, which the examiner said people with Asperger's typically do not do. The diagnosis instead was schizoid personality disorder, dissocial personality disorder and sexual sadism, in which, the examiner found, he took pleasure above all in the killing itself. His capacity to tell right from wrong and to control himself had been intact.
Dr. Ota testified at the trial that he had suspected Asperger's disorder. The court did not dismiss him but drew a distinction: Ota had been treating a boy at the school's request, not conducting a diagnostic evaluation, and he conceded on the stand that measured strictly against the standard diagnostic manuals, Yamaji would not meet the criteria. The court adopted the examiner's findings.
The sisters' father spoke at the trial. The judgment records his wish that his daughters be given back, his hopes of seeing Asuka bring him grandchildren and of watching Chihiro grow up, and his plea that the defendant understand the fear and pain his daughters had suffered. Their mother was too distressed to speak in court and submitted a written statement instead. She wrote that she still changed the bedding in Chihiro's room each season so it would be ready when her daughter came home. Their brother described a life emptied of purpose. All of them asked for the death penalty. Prosecutors asked for death.
On December 13, 2006, the court sentenced Yamaji to death.
It found the robbery charges proved: he had told investigators consistently that he planned to take money as well as kill, he had about 30,000 yen and no prospects when he left the crew, and a strong desire to kill did not cancel an intent to rob. It rejected the claim of diminished responsibility, citing his planning, his decision to put off the attack when the chance did not come, the steps he took to hide the evidence, his clear memory of events, and his ability to work and live with others.
On sentence, the court called the killings cold and cruel and the planning careful, and it found no room for mitigation in a motive it described as the wish to feel again the pleasure of killing his mother. It noted that he had made no apology, said calmly that death was the natural outcome, admitted he had kept the knife because he meant to do the same thing again, and told the court he would repeat the crime. It weighed his hard upbringing and his age, 23, and concluded that neither was enough. Ono writes that Yamaji stiffened briefly when the sentence was read and smiled slightly as he was led out.
His lawyers appealed. Uchiyama had tried to visit him at the Osaka Detention House before the verdict, on November 27, and been turned away. On December 9 he wrote telling Yamaji that he was an important person and asking him to choose to live. After the verdict Yamaji answered with a short letter. He said his position had not changed: he would withdraw the appeal. He did not know how long he had left, he wrote, but his one thought was that he should never have been born, and he meant his life as a whole, not only his crimes. He apologized for the trouble he had caused, said goodbye, and noted that he had filed a refusal of all visits and mail. Uchiyama's later letters came back marked refused.
Yamaji withdrew the appeal on May 31, 2007, and the death sentence became final. His lawyers announced it the next day, The Japan Times reported, describing him as reluctant to seek leniency.
Yamaji was hanged at the Osaka Detention House on July 28, 2009. He was 25. Two other men were executed the same day on the order of Justice Minister Eisuke Mori: Hiroshi Maeue in Osaka and Chen Detong, a Chinese national, in Tokyo. The three hangings brought Japan's total for 2009 to seven, according to AFP and Amnesty International, which protested them in an urgent action and noted that Yamaji, like Maeue, had withdrawn his appeal.
Ono visited the sisters' parents at their home in Nara Prefecture around the tenth anniversary of the killings. The mother told him she had suffered depression for three years and could not leave the house, that she and her husband had for a long time thought only of dying together, and that the daughters' ashes had never been interred because she could not bear to bury her children before herself. Her husband's health had collapsed after the killings. Asked whether the execution had brought any comfort, she said she had not thought about it at all and that knowing of it changed nothing. She had stopped taking a newspaper.
Uchiyama told Ono he wished he had stayed in closer contact, looked for Yamaji when the phone went dead, and found a way for the people who cared about him to work together. He believed the second killing could have been prevented. Ota, who agreed to talk because he felt he could not stay silent, came to the same regret about the unaddressed referral letter.
The case produced at least three books in Japanese: a study of the two killings and the isolation behind them, edited by the Kyodo News journalist Takashi Iketani and published in paperback by Shinchosha in 2013 as Shikei de Ii Desu ("The death penalty is fine," a line Yamaji used in interrogation); a book by Yoshiteru Ogawa, published by Shogakukan after the execution; and the chapter in Ono's Renzoku Satsujinhan (Serial Killers), issued in paperback by Bunshun Bunko. Ono has returned to the case in later magazine pieces, asking why the second killing was not prevented.
Proven in court: the killings, rapes and robbery of Asuka and Chihiro Uehara, the arson and the trespass, with full criminal responsibility; final since May 31, 2007.
Established by a juvenile court, not by a criminal conviction: that he beat his mother to death in July 2000. He called the police and admitted it, and the Osaka court treated it as part of his history.
Disputed: whether he had Asperger's syndrome. The juvenile school's psychiatrist suspected it; the court's examiner found no developmental disorder but three personality and sexual disorders, and the trial court agreed with the examiner. Whether he chose the sisters in advance is also unresolved: the flickering lights, the breaker panel and the attempt to climb toward their balcony point that way, but he denied it and the court made no such finding.
Not established in any source opened: his mother's full name beyond Ono's 2023 account; what, if anything, the family court record says about a diagnosis in 2000; and any official review of the juvenile system's handling of his release.
August 21, 1983: Yukio Yamaji is born in Yamaguchi Prefecture.
January 1995: his father dies of liver disease at 44.
Early 1999: he finishes junior high school and begins delivering newspapers later that year.
April 2000: he meets a 23-year-old coworker at a toy shop.
July 29, 2000: he beats his mother, 50, to death with a metal bat in Yamaguchi City.
July 31, 2000: he calls police and is arrested.
September 14, 2000: the Yamaguchi Family Court sends him to a juvenile training school (Okayama) for about three years.
November 2001 to about late 2003: Dr. Junichiro Ota sees him 22 times.
August 15, 2003: the family court extends his custody by two months and orders five months of supervision.
October 14, 2003: provisional release; he enters a rehabilitation hostel in Shimonoseki.
End of March 2004: his juvenile term and probation end.
About February 2005: he joins a pachinko cheating crew based in Fukuoka.
March 13, 2005: arrested in Seto, Okayama Prefecture, for attempted theft at a pachinko parlor; not prosecuted.
November 11, 2005: returns with the crew to an apartment in Naniwa Ward, Osaka.
November 13 to 14, 2005: quits the crew and sleeps in a nearby park.
November 15 to 16, 2005: buys a knife and a hammer; trespasses at a neighboring warehouse.
November 17, 2005, about 2 a.m. to 3:30 a.m.: kills Asuka Uehara, 27, and Chihiro Uehara, 19, and sets fire to their apartment.
December 5, 2005: arrested for trespass.
December 19, 2005: re-arrested for murder after confessing; knife recovered at a shrine.
May 1, 2006: trial opens at the Osaka District Court.
June to September 2006: court-ordered psychiatric evaluation.
December 13, 2006: sentenced to death.
After the verdict: his lawyers appeal.
May 31, 2007: he withdraws the appeal; the death sentence becomes final.
July 28, 2009: hanged at the Osaka Detention House, aged 25.