True Crime Cases in Japan

Japan holds a particular place in the true-crime record: a country with low reported violence where the cases that do surface tend to stay in public memory for decades. The cases I have mapped here are drawn from across the country, from Tokyo to Nara, and I have researched each one by hand from the available record.

Several of them are widely known. The crimes of Tsutomu Miyazaki, called the Otaku Killer, fed a national debate in the late 1980s about media and isolation, and the murder of Junko Furuta remains one of the most distressing cases in the country's history. Others mark public tragedy on a larger scale, including the Akihabara attack in central Tokyo and the Sagamihara care home killings.

More recent entries reach into political life, among them the 2022 shooting of former prime minister Shinzo Abe in Nara. Together these cases trace how violence has been recorded and remembered in Japan rather than any single pattern. You can open each one on the map below to read what I have documented.