The “Niigata Girl Confinement,” “Serial Suspicious Deaths in Tottori,” “Serial Murder and Arson in Yamaguchi,” etc.: The “True Faces” of Violent Criminals as Told by Their “Houses

2024-11-18

The confinement room where the man who committed the “Niigata Shojo Jyoken Jiken” lived with the girl for nine years (all photos from “Kakume-ie”).

A house clearly reflects a person’s life, upbringing, economic power, and origins. In this sense, it can be said to be another face of a person. (From “The Killing House,” Introduction)

The room where the murderer lived until just before his arrest.

A person’s life is reflected in the house and the environment in which he or she has lived. If a crime is caused not only by the nature of the individual but also by the environment that has surrounded him or her, the house projects another image of the criminal.

Nonfiction writer and photographer Takaaki Yagisawa’s book, “Kakume-ka” (Tetsujinsha), in which he walks through the sites of 42 incidents that shook Japan in the past, covers everything from prewar incidents such as the “Abe Sada Case” to recent cases such as the “Kobe Serial Child Murder Case,” “Wakayama Poisonous Curry Case,” and “Niigata Girl Confinement Case. Yagisawa is the author of the book, “The Case of Abe Sada.

In his “Introduction” to the book, Mr. Yagisawa describes his experience of entering the house where the perpetrator of the “Gunma High School Girl Kidnapping and Murder Case” had been living until just before his arrest in July 2002.

It was a tenement house with two Japanese-style rooms and a kitchen, but the dusty rooms were littered with clothes and other items, and the rough lifestyle was evident. In the room was a family photo taken by the murderer about 10 years ago. The man looked plump, a different person from the emaciated figure he had been when he was arrested.
(omitted).
Even more than the scene of a murder where blood was spilled, the house where the murderer lived is a vivid testament to the personality of the person who committed the crime. Even if we did not meet the murderer face to face, we felt as if the murderer was standing there looking at us.

The following are some of the sites that Mr. Yagisawa walked through in the book.

The Niigata Girl Confinement Case, ’90-’00

In January 2000, a reclusive man (37 years old at the time) was arrested in Niigata after confining a girl in his home for nine years and two months. In November 1990, the man held a knife to the girl, who was 9 years old at the time and on her way home from school, threatened her, and took her away in his car. The man was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He died in Chiba Prefecture a short time after serving his sentence.

It was several months after the incident was discovered that Mr. Yagisawa visited the site of the confinement. When he interviewed the man’s mother, she let him in; she had never been upstairs where the man had held the girl for more than nine years. The man received his meals on the stairs and defecated in a plastic bag, she said.

When he went up the stairs, he found that the surface of the hallway floor was peeling. The plastic bags of excrement had been placed on the floor and had rotted away. When I opened the door, I saw a chandelier hanging from the ceiling and a semi-double bed. The victim, a young girl, continued to live a snug life only on this semi-double bed.

The man had created his own world in a room isolated from the rest of the world.

Tottori Serial Suspicious Deaths ’04-’09

A woman (35 years old at the time of her arrest in 2009) was a hostess at a snack bar in Tottori City when six men died mysterious deaths one after another. The woman was charged with two counts of robbery and murder and sentenced to death in 2005. It was in the fall of 2010 that Mr. Yagisawa visited the prefabricated tenement house where the woman lived. On the day of his visit, the landlord was in the process of tidying up the room, so he was allowed to enter with permission.

Except for a small space up to the ceiling, the entire room was filled with garbage bags, and in a bird cage in a corner of the room, a hamster was cruelly drying out. The bizarre scene had emerged because the police had put all the clutter in the room into garbage bags. This is where the woman, her children, and her mistress lived. They even had a dog and a cat. How could they live in such a place? A darkness beyond Yagisawa’s imagination was spreading in this small prefab row house.

A woman at a barbershop in the town where she grew up and often came to visit said, “Even back then, she was a colossal girl, smiling and laughing a lot. I still can’t believe it every time I see the news. However, perhaps because she was born in a different place, she did not have any friends from childhood, and on the other hand, during her high school years, she seemed to be very promiscuous, dating an older man who claimed to be a teacher.

It seems as if the woman had a lonely childhood and tried to fill the void in her heart by dating men. Somehow, this may have turned into an illicit form of love. Her time in that dump and her path to crime may have begun in her youth.

The woman choked to death on food at the Hiroshima Detention Center in January of ’23.

Yamaguchi Serial Murder and Arson Case ’13

A serial murder and arson case that occurred in a marginal village of 14 people in 8 households in the mountains of Yamaguchi Prefecture, which is also known as a modern-day “eight graves village. The murderer, a 63-year-old man at the time, returned to his home village at the age of 44 to take care of his parents. At first, he was actively involved with the villagers, planning to revitalize the village, but around the time of his parents’ death, he gradually began to cause trouble, and the village was almost cut off from the rest of the community. One day, the man killed five villagers one after another and set their houses on fire. The man was sentenced to death in August ’19 for murder and arson of a non-residential building.

As we drove toward the village from the highway interchange, we saw abandoned rice fields and the cruel sight of the collapsed village. The village where the incident took place was located further ahead, and the man’s house was near the entrance. The man’s house was covered with white walls and stood out in the village, where there were only old Japanese houses. The man’s house was covered with white walls and stood out from the crowd of only old Japanese houses in the village.

Matsuyama Hostess Murder Case, 1982

In August 1982, a 31-year-old hostess was murdered in an apartment in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture. The murderer, Kazuko Fukuda (34 at the time of the murder), had her face plasticized and remained on the run for about 15 years until she was arrested in July 1997, three weeks before the statute of limitations on prosecution expired. She was sentenced to life imprisonment and died of a stroke in March ’05. It was in 2009 that Mr. Yagisawa visited Imabari City, Ehime Prefecture, to search for the house where she had lived as a junior high school student.

He said, “I heard there was a crumbling house, a place my parents told me not to go, so I’ve never been there.”

When we asked a local man about the location of “Harmonica Yokocho,” where Fukuda used to live, he replied, “I’ve never been there. However, there were no crumbling houses in “Harmonica Alley,” which we managed to locate, just a row of covered garages. Fukuda Kazuko’s mother ran a bar in this location and had her hostess work as a prostitute.

From birth to her life as a fugitive, Kazuko Fukuda’s life was one of drifting from place to place. It is doubtful if she ever had a home to settle down in. But of all the places she lived, Imabari seemed special to her. It was here, in Imabari, that she met her eldest son once while on the run. And the people here are somehow kind to her.

The cab driver talked about Fukuda as if she were one of his own, and the woman at the okonomiyaki restaurant mourned her life as a woman, saying, “It’s sad, it’s so sad. Yagisawa has visited the hometowns of many criminals, but this was the first time he had encountered locals with this kind of feeling.

The houses where the criminals lived, the land where they grew up, and the environment in which they spent their time reveal a variety of circumstances that have been left out of the lines of the case reports.