Kiyoshi Okubo killed eight girls and young women in Gunma Prefecture, northwest of Tokyo, in the spring of 1971. He was 36, unemployed and newly paroled after a prison term for earlier attacks on women. With money from his parents he bought a new car, and over about six weeks he drove the roads of the prefecture, stopping young women and offering them rides. He presented himself as a painter or a teacher. By his own later account he spoke to more than a hundred women. The eight he killed were between 16 and 21 years old, and four of them were 17 or younger.
He was caught in May 1971 after the brother of one of the missing women found her bicycle and saw a man wiping it down. He was tried at the Maebashi District Court, admitted all the charges, and was sentenced to death on February 22, 1973. He did not appeal. He was hanged at the Tokyo Detention House on January 22, 1976, at the age of 41.
The case was one of the most widely reported crimes in Japan in the early 1970s. It later became the subject of books, a prison memoir published under his name, and a 1983 television drama in which the comedian Beat Takeshi played him.
Okubo was born in 1935 in Yawata, then a village and now part of the city of Takasaki, in Gunma Prefecture. He was the third son among eight children. His father was a locomotive engineer for Japanese National Railways. According to a 2026 Bunshun Online account drawn from a nonfiction collection on crimes of Japan's high-growth era, his mother favored him over his older brother, indulged him, and called him by a pet name, "Boku-chan," that she was still using when he was arrested at 36. The same account describes his parents' influence as central to his story.
The Bunshun account says his mother repeatedly excused his behavior toward girls from his childhood onward, dismissing complaints as children's play. After junior high school he helped on the family farm. In 1954 he enrolled in the evening course of a commercial high school in Takasaki but rarely attended, did not pay fees, and was expelled after six months. He worked for a time as a live-in employee of an electrical shop in Itabashi, Tokyo, and lost the job after being caught peeping into the women's side of a public bathhouse. He later opened a radio repair and sales shop in his home village. According to the same account, he stole parts from a competing shop several times; his father paid for the losses, a settlement was reached, and he was not prosecuted.
Okubo's criminal record began in 1955, when he was 20. On July 12 of that year, posing as a university student, he attacked a 17-year-old girl in Isesaki. He was arrested and, as a first offender, received a sentence of one year and six months, suspended for three years. On December 26 of the same year he offered a ride to another 17-year-old girl at a bus stop in Maebashi and attacked her. The suspended term was added to the new sentence, and he was sent to Matsumoto Prison in Nagano Prefecture to serve three years and six months. Bunshun Online's account says his mother's response to the first arrest was to blame women rather than her son.
About five months after his release, in April 1960, he met a 20-year-old university student in a coffee shop in Takasaki, attacked her; the matter was settled privately.
In May 1962, at 27, he married a 21-year-old woman from Shibukawa after a year of dating. They had a son and a daughter, and in 1965 he turned his home into a milk delivery business. In June 1965 he caught a boy trying to steal empty milk bottles, went to the home of the boy's brother, threatened him and took money from him. He was convicted of extortion and attempted extortion and given a one-year sentence, suspended for three years. His wife learned of his earlier record during that trial, according to the Bunshun account.
His business declined. In December 1966, in Annaka, he took a 16-year-old high school student into his car and attacked her. In February 1967 he picked up a 20-year-old junior college student he already knew at a bus stop in Takasaki, attacked her. She reported him, and he was arrested. He was sentenced to four years and six months and sent to Fuchu Prison, near Tokyo. A 2016 article in Kodansha's Gendai Business by the writer Masataka Kondo also records that he had been held at Fuchu since 1967 after repeated sex offenses. While he was in prison, his wife and children moved to her parents' home in Shibukawa and did not return to him.
Okubo was released on parole in March 1971. He told his parents he wanted to start a business in interior goods, and they gave him the money to buy a new car, a Mazda rotary coupe. In the car he kept props meant to make him look like an artist or an educated man: a beret, a Russian-style peasant blouse, a novel by Yutaka Haniya, technical books on electrical engineering and paintbrushes. He posed as a painter or a high school teacher, and sometimes as a writer.
According to his later statements, as reported by Bunshun Online, he drove an average of about 170 kilometers a day around the prefecture. In about a month and a half before his arrest he approached roughly 150 women, 127 of them confirmed by investigators. About 30 got into his car. The Gendai Business article gives the figures as 127 women approached and 35 who rode with him. Many of the women he killed had met him several times before. The Bunshun account says he came across as an articulate man with an impressive car and something to talk about, and that this lowered their guard.
The cultural critic Yukio Akatsuka, quoted by Kondo, compared the case with the Kodaira case of 1945 and 1946, another series of killings of young women in Japan. He argued that in provincial cities, which felt the changes of the high-growth years later than Tokyo, young women saw a gap between the modern lives shown in the media and their own, and could be drawn by the promise of that newer life. Kondo connects the case with the arrival of mass car ownership in rural Japan.
The Bunshun Online account names all eight victims and gives their ages and the dates of their deaths. They were, in order:
Miyako Tsuda, 17, a third-year high school student from Tano district. Okubo approached her in the waiting room of Takasaki Station on March 25, 1971. On the evening of March 31 he saw her again at a bus stop in front of Shinmachi Station on the Takasaki Line and invited her for another drive. According to the account built from his statements, when she learned that his name, age and story about a studio were false, she told him her brother was a prosecutor and demanded that they go to the police. He strangled her that night.
Mieko Oikawa, 17, a waitress. He had met her twice before. On April 6, at about 6:10 p.m., he picked her up at Kita-Takasaki Station. Later that night, after she told him that the police would come, he killed her in Takasaki.
Chieko Ida, 19, a temporary employee of the Gunma prefectural government. On April 17, at about 6 p.m., he met her in Maebashi. It was their fifth meeting. With her he had used a false name, Watanabe Yaichi (渡辺哉一), and claimed to be a 29-year-old junior high school teacher. She had made inquiries of her own, and that evening she told him she knew his real name, that he had been in prison, that he had a wife and child, and that he was not a teacher. He killed her that night, at about 11:30 p.m., in Takasaki.
Seiko Kawabata, 17, a high school student from Isesaki, was killed on April 18.
Akemi Sato, 16, a high school student from Maebashi, was killed on April 27.
Kazuyo Kawaho, 18, of Isesaki, who worked for the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation, the forerunner of NTT, was killed on May 3.
Reiko Takemura, 21, an office worker from Fujioka, was killed on May 9.
Naoko Takanohashi, 21, a homemaker from Maebashi, was killed on May 10.
All eight were strangled and buried in Gunma Prefecture, the Bunshun account says. According to Okubo's own statements as reported there, five of the eight had told him that a relative was a police officer or a prosecutor, and two others knew he had just come out of prison. That account treats these remarks as the immediate trigger for the killings. The Gendai Business article puts it more generally: women who threatened to report him were killed.
The Bunshun account describes Okubo's capture as a matter of chance, and it turned on the persistence of Reiko Takemura's brother. At about 1:30 a.m. on May 10, 1971, a man telephoned the Fujioka police station to say that his sister had gone out the previous evening and had not come home. The police found no record of an accident and searched for about two hours without finding her.
Her brother kept looking. At about 6:30 a.m. he found her bicycle left in a parking lot in Fujioka. He waited nearby. At about 9:30 a.m., according to the Bunshun account, a man drove up in a Mazda, put on gloves and began wiping the bicycle, apparently to remove fingerprints. When the brother asked whether the bicycle was his, the man noticed the name of the brother's family company on his jacket, said something vague about waiting for someone, and drove off in a hurry. The brother wrote down the number plate and reported it to the police.
At 10:20 a.m. the prefectural police traffic division confirmed that the car was registered to Kiyoshi Okubo. Officers went to his home, but he was not there, and his parents gave unclear answers. The Gunma police mounted a search with about 150 officers in 70 cars at 18 locations around the prefecture. Naoko Takanohashi was killed on May 10, the same day the search began.
According to the Bunshun account, it was a civilian search party, not the police, that found him: at about 6:30 p.m. on the 13th they located him in Maebashi and handed him over to the Maebashi police station. The Gendai Business article gives his arrest date as May 14, 1971. The 1983 television drama about the case showed the missing woman's brother organizing a private search team and dozens of cars chasing Okubo's Mazda until he was handed to the police, a scene Kondo reads as a sign of the new age of mass car ownership.
Okubo did not confess quickly. The Gendai Business article, drawing on a 1982 nonfiction book about the case by Akira Tsukuba, says he gave false statements and resisted confessing. His parents, his father as well as his mother, visited him during the interrogation. Kondo writes that the book does not support the idea that this meeting made him start talking. Instead, Okubo's resistance centered on his older brother, from whom he was estranged; he reportedly said he would not confess until his brother was dead.
He did confess in the end. Following his confession, the bodies of all eight victims were recovered, the Gendai Business article says.
Okubo was indicted on charges that included murder and abandonment of corpses, together with other charges. His trial opened at the Maebashi District Court on October 25, 1971. He admitted all the charges and told the court he had nothing to say.
Kondo writes that Okubo said almost nothing about his motive during the trial, and the account by the journalist Keiko Horikawa says the same.
On February 22, 1973, the Maebashi District Court sentenced him to death. He did not file an appeal within the time allowed, and the death sentence became final.
After the sentence Okubo was moved to the Tokyo Detention House. In October 1973 a book was published under his name, "Ketsubetsu no Sho: Shikeishu Okubo Kiyoshi Gokuchu Shuki" (roughly, "A Chapter of Farewell: The Prison Notes of Death Row Prisoner Kiyoshi Okubo"). The Bunshun account says that in it he wrote that people did not understand how badly he himself had been wronged, and it reads the memoir as the work of a man who saw himself as a victim.
The journalist Keiko Horikawa, in a book about the Buddhist priest Fuso Watanabe, a volunteer prison chaplain for more than 50 years, describes Okubo's time at the detention house. An excerpt of the Chinese edition was published by the Taiwanese news site The News Lens in 2016. Horikawa writes that Okubo spent about three years in a single cell there, exercising, reading and writing notes. Guards repeatedly urged him to accept religious counseling, and he refused, saying he did not believe in religion. His parents, his brother and his sister were still alive. He had long been estranged from his brother, but his sister wrote to him and sent him clothes until the end.
Okubo was hanged at the Tokyo Detention House on the morning of January 22, 1976, a very cold day. He was 41. The Bunshun account notes that the execution came two years and ten months after the death sentence became final, which it describes as unusually fast compared with ordinary death row cases.
The two accounts of his last morning differ. The Bunshun account says that when guards came to his cell, he collapsed and had to be taken to the execution room by force, and that when the director of the detention house said goodbye and he was asked for last words, he only shook his head.
Horikawa's account, based on the chaplain Watanabe's recollection, gives a different picture. Watanabe heard shortly before the execution that Okubo would be put to death without any chaplain present. Because he believed that no execution should take place without a religious figure there, for the sake of the prison staff as well as the condemned, he drove to the detention house in his robes. Shortly before the execution an officer asked Okubo whether a priest could be present at the end. After hesitating, Okubo agreed that Watanabe could chant sutras nearby. Watanabe told Horikawa that magazine reports of Okubo collapsing and being dragged to the gallows were not true: he was calm, his hands were steady as he smoked a last cigarette, and he did not resist.
Both the victims' families and Okubo's family lived in the same area of Gunma, and both were changed by the case. Horikawa describes how the press treated the community. Reporters, she writes, implied that local young women had been careless in accepting rides, nicknamed the roads Okubo had driven "Okubo Road," and competed there to see who could get women into their own cars. Sightseers came to photograph the places connected with the crimes and disrupted daily life.
Okubo's family had been well off and locally prominent. After the crimes his elderly parents sold their home and moved into a care home, but, Horikawa writes, they were asked to leave once their identity became known and had to keep moving. When news of the execution spread, local people demanded that his remains not be brought back, and overnight the family grave was vandalized, its headstones broken. Watanabe called this a plain crime, whether or not anyone reported it.
Okubo's ashes were kept at Watanabe's temple in Mita, Tokyo. Months after the execution his sister came to say that the family could find no cemetery that would take them. With the family's consent, Watanabe kept the ashes in the main hall of his temple. In the spring of 1986, about ten years after the execution, he arranged for them to be interred in a shared grave for Tokyo Detention House prisoners at Zoshigaya Cemetery in Tokyo, which was also easier for the family to visit from Gunma.
Reporters also pursued his parents for years. A veteran weekly-magazine reporter, writing in Nikkan Gendai in 2026, recalled that he and a younger colleague tracked the couple down at a hot spring in Gunma, approached them after their bath, and were sent away with a sharp rebuke.
On August 29, 1983, the TBS network broadcast a single-episode drama, "Showa Yonjurokunen, Okubo Kiyoshi no Hanzai" ("Showa 46: The Crimes of Kiyoshi Okubo"), with the comedian Beat Takeshi as Okubo. It was based on Akira Tsukuba's nonfiction book "Showa Yonjurokunen, Gunma no Haru: Okubo Kiyoshi no Hanzai" (Soshisha, 1982). The producer was Yasuo Yagi, who conceived the drama after reading the book, and the script was written by Shunsaku Ikehata. According to Kondo, some at TBS doubted that a comedian could carry the part, and others objected to a drama centered on a sex offender; Yagi argued that a comedy star would draw viewers to a grim subject. The drama recorded a 34.0 percent audience rating.
The drama changed the victim's name and built its climax around a scene in which a detective persuades Okubo's mother to urge her son to confess. Kondo points out that the real visit included his father and that Okubo's resistance in Tsukuba's book had more to do with his brother than his mother, and that the drama's details should not be treated as a record of events.
The case has continued to be cited in Japan as a reference point. In a 2003 review of Hideo Yokoyama's novel "Climber's High," which is set in Gunma, the nonfiction writer Shinobu Yoshioka opened by recalling the Okubo case, in which eight women from Maebashi and Takasaki were lured into a car and killed, as part of the prefecture's background.
The arrest date. The Bunshun account says a civilian search party found Okubo in Maebashi on the evening of the 13th and handed him to the police. The Gendai Business article gives May 14, 1971, as the date of his arrest.
The car. The Bunshun and Gendai Business accounts describe his car as a new Mazda rotary coupe, and the plate reported by Takemura's brother was traced to a Mazda. The excerpt of Horikawa's book, as published in Chinese translation, calls it a Lotus sports car. The Japanese reports describe a Mazda.
The number of women approached. Bunshun Online gives about 150 women approached, 127 confirmed, and about 30 who got into the car; the Gendai Business article gives 127 and 35.
His last morning. The Bunshun account says he collapsed and had to be taken to the gallows by force; the chaplain Watanabe, through Horikawa, says he was calm and did not resist, and specifically rejected the magazine reports of a collapse.
1935: Kiyoshi Okubo is born in Yawata village, now part of Takasaki, Gunma Prefecture.
1954: Enrolls in the evening course of a commercial high school in Takasaki; expelled after six months.
July 12, 1955: Attacks a 17-year-old girl in Isesaki; receives a suspended sentence.
December 26, 1955: Attacks another 17-year-old girl in Maebashi; sentenced to three years and six months and sent to Matsumoto Prison.
May 1962: Marries.
1965: Convicted of extortion and attempted extortion; suspended sentence.
December 1966 and February 1967: Attacks a 16-year-old in Annaka and a 20-year-old student in Maebashi; sentenced to four years and six months; sent to Fuchu Prison.
March 1971: Paroled; buys a new Mazda rotary coupe with money from his parents.
March 31, 1971: Miyako Tsuda, 17, is killed.
April 6, 1971: Mieko Oikawa, 17, is killed.
April 17, 1971: Chieko Ida, 19, is killed.
April 18, 1971: Seiko Kawabata, 17, is killed.
April 27, 1971: Akemi Sato, 16, is killed.
May 3, 1971: Kazuyo Kawaho, 18, is killed.
May 9, 1971: Reiko Takemura, 21, is killed.
May 10, 1971: Takemura's brother finds her bicycle in Fujioka and reports the Mazda's number plate; Naoko Takanohashi, 21, is killed the same day.
May 13 or 14, 1971: Found by a civilian search party in Maebashi and handed to the police (Bunshun: the 13th; Gendai Business: arrested May 14).
October 25, 1971: Trial opens at the Maebashi District Court; he admits all charges.
February 22, 1973: Sentenced to death; no appeal is filed, and the sentence becomes final.
October 1973: A prison memoir is published under his name.
January 22, 1976: Hanged at the Tokyo Detention House, aged 41.
August 29, 1983: TBS broadcasts the drama "Showa 46: The Crimes of Kiyoshi Okubo," starring Beat Takeshi.
Spring 1986: His ashes are interred in a shared grave for Tokyo Detention House prisoners at Zoshigaya Cemetery.