Between August 1988 and June 1989, four small girls disappeared from their neighborhoods in Saitama Prefecture and Tokyo. Mari Konno was 4, Masami Yoshizawa was 7, Erika Namba was 4 and Ayako Nomoto was 5. Each was taken away in a car and strangled, the Supreme Court of Japan later recorded. The man responsible sent the remains of the first girl to her family, then wrote letters to the Asahi Shimbun and to the family under the name of a woman who did not exist.
He was Tsutomu Miyazaki, a 26-year-old photo technician who lived with his family in the hills of western Tokyo. He was caught in July 1989 not by the large investigation hunting the killer, but by the father of a 6-year-old girl in a park in Hachioji. Under questioning he confessed. His trial lasted seven years, during which psychiatrists reached sharply different conclusions about his mind. The Tokyo District Court found him criminally responsible and sentenced him to death in April 1997. The Supreme Court upheld the sentence in January 2006, and he was hanged at the Tokyo Detention House on June 17, 2008, at 45.
The case also changed a word. Police found thousands of videotapes in his room, and the press called him the "otaku murderer." Writers and scholars have since described how that coverage attached the image of a child killer to fans of anime and manga for years afterward.
Reliable reporting says relatively little about Miyazaki's early life.
He lived with his family in western Tokyo. A Fuji TV news team that retraced his routes in 2017 described him as living in the Okutama area of Tokyo, while the girls he took lived across the prefectural line in Saitama. His father ran a printing business, according to Bunshun Online. At the time of his arrest he worked as a photo technician, and he had a disfiguring birth defect for which he was bullied as a child, Japan Today reported in 2008. The Spanish scholar Jorge Rodríguez Cruz, in a 2023 study of the otaku stereotype, writes that he was bullied at school over his deformed hands, and that press coverage in 1989 dwelt instead on his parents' supposed inattention and on the death of his grandfather.
Miyazaki was very attached to that grandfather, who died three months before the first killing, according to the writers Takaaki Yagisawa and Mizuho Takagi in a 2024 book excerpted by Bunshun Online. A man living near the family home told them he had never expected Miyazaki to do such a thing, but that he had been a slightly odd child who, unlike his sisters, never greeted the neighbors.
Investigators who met him after his arrest were struck by how ordinary he seemed. A police sergeant present at the arrest described a normal young man who spoke softly and talked readily, according to Bunshun Online's 2019 account of the interrogation recordings. Yasuhiro Ohmine, the detective who questioned him, recalled a quiet, ordinary young man with untidy hair and a pale face.
Mari Konno was 4 and lived with her parents in a large housing complex in Iruma, Saitama Prefecture. On August 22, 1988, she was taken from a footbridge in front of one of the complex's buildings, Yagisawa and Takagi write. She was the first of the four girls.
According to their account, Miyazaki drove her along National Route 16 toward the hills and killed her in a forest. The Fuji TV team reported that the disappearance of a 4-year-old in August 1988 produced no leads despite a public search.
For months her family did not know what had happened to her. In February 1989, a cardboard box was left at the entrance of the family's home. It held bone fragments, photographs of the clothes Mari had been wearing, and a slip of paper with a few words on it. Miyazaki had taken her remains from where he had left them, burned them at his own home and kept the bones, Yagisawa and Takagi write. When the press reported that the teeth in the box did not belong to her, he sent a letter claiming responsibility.
Masami Yoshizawa was 7 and lived in Hanno, Saitama Prefecture, farther up into the hills. She disappeared in October 1988, two months after Mari, according to the timeline published in Bungeishunju in 2019 and the Fuji TV team's account. She was the oldest of the four girls.
Erika Namba was 4 and lived in Kawagoe, Saitama Prefecture. She disappeared in December 1988. By then, the Fuji TV team wrote, three girls had vanished in Saitama in succession, and the press had begun to speak of a serial abductor. Several days after she disappeared, her body was found in a wooded mountain area of Saitama.
Ayako Nomoto was 5 and lived in a housing complex in Koto Ward, Tokyo. She disappeared in June 1989. Several days later her body, dismembered, was found in a cemetery in Hanno, the Fuji TV team reported. She was the last of the four girls, and the only one taken in Tokyo.
The four girls' names were published by the Mainichi Shimbun, as relayed by Anime News Network at the time of Miyazaki's execution in 2008. Many Japanese outlets now refer to them only by age and town, and some, such as Bungeishunju in 2019, have used pseudonyms. Little has been reported about who the girls were beyond their ages, their neighborhoods and the dates they were taken. Their families have rarely spoken in the English-language press.
What set the case apart in Japan was what Miyazaki did after the killings. In February 1989, after the box was left at the Konno home, the Tokyo head office of the Asahi Shimbun received a declaration of responsibility for Mari's death, and later a confession letter. Both were signed with the name Imada Yuko. Media coverage intensified after the letters, the Fuji TV team wrote. Japanese writers have since called the case a "theater-style crime" (gekijo-gata hanzai), a crime staged in part for public attention.
The letters gave a return address in Tokorozawa, Saitama. Under questioning, Miyazaki said he had been preoccupied with making the culprit look like someone from Saitama, and that he had wanted the killer to appear to be a woman, according to the Fuji TV team, which heard the interrogation recordings. The wording of the letters led commentators of the time to speculate about the writer's profile, Bunshun Online's 2019 account notes.
He also took care not to be traced. The Fuji TV team reported that he avoided expressways when he took the girls and when he moved their bodies, because cameras and toll records might expose him, and used ordinary roads instead.
The killings were investigated by police in Saitama and Tokyo. For about ten months after the first disappearance, the investigation did not reach Miyazaki, Yagisawa and Takagi write. One reason, the Fuji TV team reported, was that the car he drove did not match the type witnesses had described; that discrepancy was later put down to a witness's mistake.
A former investigator told the Fuji TV team that at first he had not thought Miyazaki was the culprit at all. "If he had not been caught then, there would probably have been a fifth and a sixth case," he said.
In July 1989, in a park in Hachioji, in western Tokyo, Miyazaki came upon two sisters, aged 9 and 6. He took the younger girl from the park to a forest path nearby. Her father found him there, photographing her, and Miyazaki was arrested in the act on a charge of indecent assault (kyosei waisetsu), according to Yagisawa and Takagi and the Fuji TV team. Anime News Network, relying on the Mainichi Shimbun, gives the date as July 23, 1989. Amnesty International Japan, in its report on mental health and the death penalty, also describes his July 1989 arrest as an arrest for an indecent act against a girl.
He was later convicted over this abduction and assault as well as the four killings, according to a 2008 report credited to the Associated Press and Kyodo and printed by the Otago Daily Times. The girl survived. Her name was not reported.
The arrest was for a single assault. Nothing yet tied him to the four girls. On August 9, 1989, Yasuhiro Ohmine, a detective of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's First Investigation Division who later became its deputy director, questioned him at Hachioji Police Station. Writing in Bungeishunju in 2019 with the journalist Shinichiro Akaishi, Ohmine called the breakthrough a lucky accident, using a Japanese proverb about something unexpected coming out of a gourd. He described moving the desk aside and seating Miyazaki with his back to the wall, a standard technique to put pressure on a suspect. The article's title calls it the moment Miyazaki broke.
Under questioning by the First Investigation Division, Miyazaki confessed to the killing of the girl from Koto Ward, the Fuji TV team reported, and his confessions then brought the other cases to light. After detailed inquiries, investigators became convinced he was the man they had been looking for. Later that year, the Japan Times reported, he admitted kidnapping and killing all four girls.
In 2017 Fuji TV obtained recordings of about two weeks of his interrogation and broadcast them for the first time on October 7 of that year. The journalist Hideki Yasunaga's 2019 book on the recordings, as summarized by Bunshun Online, covers 14 days of questioning. In them Miyazaki chatted with the detectives, at times joked about his poor sense of direction, at times cautiously tested what they wanted, and admitted his crimes. Of the girl he had killed, he said he thought she was pitiable. The detectives did not see in him the obsessive the press was describing, and nothing in the interrogation suggested the abnormality he would display in court, Bunshun Online's reviewer wrote. The Fuji TV team said that after hearing the tapes they wondered whether the public had been deceived.
When police searched his room they found thousands of videotapes. Anime News Network, citing the Mainichi, gave the count as 5,763; Bunshun Online and Fuji TV describe nearly 6,000 or about 6,000. They included recordings of anime, horror films and pornography. The Japan Times reported in 2008 that the case prompted calls for tighter limits on violent pornographic videos.
Photographs of the room, with tapes and magazines stacked to the ceiling, became the image of the case. They were not entirely what they seemed. The weekly magazine reporter Toshiyuki Kobayashi later wrote that a television cameraman had placed an erotic manga on top of a pile of magazines before filming, to get a more striking shot, and that the room contained fewer sensational items than the press had expected, Bunshun Online reported.
The word otaku had been used as a label for obsessive fans of anime and manga since 1983, when the essayist Akio Nakamori published a series of columns under the title "Otaku no kenkyu" ("Research on otaku") in the magazine Manga Burikko, after a visit to the Comic Market fan convention. Rodríguez Cruz writes that Nakamori presented these fans as strange and outside normality, and the Japan Times describes his otaku as socially inept people obsessed with manga and anime. The word became widely known in 1989, the Japan Times wrote.
The Miyazaki case changed that. The mass media called him the "otaku murderer," the Japan Times wrote in 2018, and the label tarnished the image of otaku for decades. Rodríguez Cruz cites an August 1989 Asahi Shimbun headline asking whether his companions were anime and videos, and the German researcher Björn-Ole Kamm's analysis of Asahi, Yomiuri and Mainichi articles from 1990 and 1991, which found the words otaku, lolicon, mania and anime used again and again. At a Comic Market convention (Comiket 36), one reporter announced to the crowd that there were "100,000 Miyazaki Tsutomus" there, a phrase both Rodríguez Cruz and Bunshun Online record.
Kaichiro Morikawa, an associate professor at Meiji University, told the Japan Times that before Miyazaki, perpetrators of similar crimes had usually been described as delinquents or as people from troubled homes. After him, television talk shows began to call outwardly ordinary suspects otaku, which he said imprinted the idea that "these people are would-be criminals." "In retrospect, the Heisei Era began with the worst possible introduction for the term otaku," Morikawa said.
Bunshun Online's 2019 retrospective, written by the commentator urbansea, quotes the psychiatrist Osamu Nakata as saying at the time that, with the video boom, there were a good many young people who had lost touch with reality and were potential criminals of the Miyazaki type. The writer calls the comment typical of the prejudice of those years: video fans were said to be unable to tell fiction from reality, collectors to treat people as things, and anime fans to be immature adults. A women's weekly ran a headline warning that children not raised on breast milk would become "Miyazakis," which the writer describes as close to mass hysteria. The writer's own interpretation is that when an act is beyond understanding, people find comfort in blaming something abnormal and separating it from themselves.
Manga artists responded. In 1992 a group of creators founded a society to protect freedom of expression in manga, Rodríguez Cruz writes. In the 2000s the psychiatrist Tamaki Saito argued that psychiatry had wrongly pathologized otaku, and that their sexuality was directed more toward possession than toward perversion. Saito also observed, as Rodríguez Cruz reports, that there had been very few sex crimes among otaku and no child murders by an otaku since Miyazaki.
Over the Heisei era otaku culture became a major force in Japanese culture and consumer spending, and the word became known around the world, Bunshun Online notes, while the old stereotype still resurfaces in debates over regulating expression. Yasunaga's reading of the interrogation tapes adds a further twist. While detained, Miyazaki bought large numbers of the books written about him, and the reviewer suggests he may have been aware of the image the media had built and may have come to play it.
Miyazaki's family were never accused of anything. After his arrest, the family home received anonymous postcards and letters with threats, and harassing telephone calls continued, Bunshun Online reported in 2019. One of his sisters quit her job at once and asked to call off her planned marriage; another left nursing school. His father, who ran the printing business, died by suicide after arranging to sell the family's land to pay compensation to the victims' families, according to the same account. In October 1989 his father gave an interview to the monthly Bungeishunju, which Bunshun Online lists among its sources.
Writers in Japan have treated the family's experience as an early example of what happens to the relatives of those accused of terrible crimes. Bunshun Online places it alongside later cases, among them the suicide of the brother of the man who carried out the 2008 Akihabara attack.
Miyazaki's trial opened in the Tokyo District Court in March 1990, the Japan Times reported. He did not dispute that he had killed the girls. The central question was his mind.
In court he behaved in ways that observers found strange. He drew pictures and symbols, said that a "Rat Man" (nezumi ningen) had appeared to him and that he had been afraid of being attacked by it, and said that the events felt as if they had happened in a dream, the Fuji TV team and Bunshun Online reported. He also made claims about rituals for his dead grandfather and about what he had done with the bodies. Some of those claims contradicted what he had told detectives. During the interrogation, according to Yasunaga's book as summarized by Bunshun Online, he had flatly denied one of the acts he described in court, and investigators said they were taken aback by the difference.
The court ordered repeated psychiatric examinations. Amnesty International Japan wrote in its report on mental health and the death penalty that he was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder or schizophrenia. The writer Ryuzo Saki, quoted by the Mainichi in 2008 as reported by J-CAST News, noted that there had been three differing psychiatric opinions at trial. The Fuji TV team describes two lengthy evaluations, and says the court accepted a finding of personality disorder.
On April 14, 1997, the Tokyo District Court sentenced Miyazaki to death. Amnesty International Japan summarizes the ruling this way: the court acknowledged the psychiatric diagnoses but found that he had understood the seriousness and consequences of what he was doing, and that he bore criminal responsibility. The Fuji TV team wrote that the court found a personality disorder and accepted full criminal responsibility. Japan Today, reporting in 2008, said the court found him aware of his actions and accountable.
He was convicted of the kidnapping and murder of the four girls and of the abduction and sexual assault of the girl in Hachioji. The Amnesty report records that he showed no sign of remorse.
The Tokyo High Court upheld the death sentence on June 28, 2001, according to Amnesty International Japan. During the appeal the Tokyo Detention House told the High Court in writing that Miyazaki had been given psychiatric medication continuously since 1996, and that from 1999 he had also been given antipsychotic drugs prescribed for schizophrenia, according to a 2008 written question in the House of Representatives.
On January 17, 2006, the Third Petty Bench of the Supreme Court dismissed his final appeal. Presiding Justice Tokiyasu Fujita said Miyazaki had killed the girls to satisfy his sexual desire and his wish to possess videotapes of their bodies, a motive he called "selfish and cruel," and found no room to spare him the death penalty, the Japan Times reported. In each of the four killings, the court found, he had driven the girl away in his car and strangled her. The defense then asked the court to correct its judgment, and when the court rejected that request in February 2006, the death sentence became final, the Fuji TV team wrote.
Miyazaki spent the next two years and four months on death row at the Tokyo Detention House. He continued to receive psychiatric care. Amnesty International Japan says he had been treated for more than ten years, and, citing the Center for Prisoners' Rights, that he was given drugs used to treat schizophrenia.
He wrote to the outside world. In a 2006 letter to the editor of the magazine Soso he criticized hanging as a method and described his fear of it, and in a 2007 letter he wrote that at his execution he would be consumed by fear of death and unable to think about remorse or apology, according to a 2023 book of death-row prisoners' last words excerpted by Bunshun Online. The same book says his one pleasure in his cell was watching anime videos, Studio Ghibli films among them. (Hayao Miyazaki, the Ghibli director, is no relation, Anime News Network noted.)
His lawyer, Maiko Tagusari, obtained his medical records from the detention house and asked an expert to examine his mental condition, she wrote in 2008. She had been preparing a request for a retrial for several months. On May 30, 2008, she wrote to Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama asking that Miyazaki not be executed, citing his mental health and the planned retrial request. She was worried, because executions had been carried out about every two months since Hatoyama took office.
Early on Tuesday, June 17, 2008, Miyazaki was hanged at the Tokyo Detention House. He was 45. Two other men were executed the same day: Shinji Mutsuda, for a murder and robbery of two men, and Yoshio Yamasaki, 73, in Osaka, for killing two people for insurance money. Tagusari, who wrote that neither she nor her client had been told in advance, was in Taiwan taking part in an anti-death-penalty campaign when it happened.
Hatoyama announced the executions at a morning briefing after they had been carried out. "I ordered their executions because the cases were of indescribable cruelty," he said, according to the report printed by the Otago Daily Times. "We are pursuing executions in order to achieve justice and firmly protect the rule of law." The three hangings brought to 13 the number carried out in six months under Hatoyama, who denied that his ministry was deliberately speeding them up. Japan had executed only one prisoner in 2005. After the three executions there were 102 people on death row, and Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said there was no need to change the policy, while acknowledging that the world was watching. Amnesty International Japan protested.
The timing drew comment. J-CAST News reported that Miyazaki was executed two years and four months after his sentence became final, against an average of about eight years over the previous decade. It came nine days after the Akihabara attack of June 8, 2008, and some commentators, among them the journalist Akihiro Otani on TBS, suggested a link. The ministry declined to say whether there was one. The Asahi reported that Hatoyama called the shorter interval a coincidence. The Yomiuri noted that it was unusual to execute a prisoner whose side had told the minister in writing that a retrial request was in preparation. Tagusari's office issued a statement saying it strongly protested.
Yasuhiro Ohmine, the detective who had questioned Miyazaki in 1989, told the Yomiuri that the long wait from confession to execution had been hard, and that the outcome might give the victims' families a sense that the matter was settled, J-CAST reported.
On June 18, 2008, Nobuto Hosaka, a member of the House of Representatives, submitted a written question to the government about the execution. He noted that the ministry had gone ahead because no retrial request had actually been filed, and asked whether such notices could lead the ministry to bring an execution forward. He asked whether Miyazaki's psychiatric treatment had continued up to the day of his death, who had assessed his fitness to be executed, and whether the minister had considered his mental state himself. A ministry official had declined to describe Miyazaki's recent treatment, citing privacy. Amnesty International Japan later used the case in its report on mental illness and the death penalty in Japan, based on research carried out in 2009.
Miyazaki was executed on June 17, 2008. The case remains a subject of Japanese books and broadcasts: Fuji TV's 2017 special on the interrogation recordings, Yasunaga's 2019 book, and books by Yagisawa and Takagi excerpted in 2024.
Proven by final judgment: the abduction and murder of Mari Konno, Masami Yoshizawa, Erika Namba and Ayako Nomoto, and the abduction and sexual assault of the girl in Hachioji. The courts at every level found him criminally responsible.
His mental state: psychiatrists who examined him for the court disagreed, and Amnesty International Japan and his lawyer maintained that he was mentally ill. The courts rejected the argument that his responsibility was reduced. Some commentators, among them the writer Ryuzo Saki as quoted in the Mainichi, believed he feigned illness. The Fuji TV team and Bunshun Online's reviewer of Yasunaga's book both suggest that the man heard on the 1989 interrogation recordings was very different from the one seen in court; no court ruled on what that difference meant.
What he said about the remains: several 2008 reports, including the Japan Times and the report printed by the Otago Daily Times, repeated claims, many of them Miyazaki's own statements in court, about things he did with the girls' bodies. According to Yasunaga's book, he denied one of them outright during his interrogation.
His last words: a 2023 compilation of death-row prisoners' last words, excerpted by Bunshun Online, reports that while being led to the execution chamber he complained that he had not finished a video he was watching. The account is unconfirmed, and no official record of his last words has been reported.
The "otaku" label: the media label is commentary, not a finding of any court. The Japan Times and the scholars cited describe it as a stereotype that the coverage of 1989 created and spread.
Dates: sources give the date the death sentence became final as February 1 (Bunshun Online, 2023) or February 2, 2006 (other accounts). The Fuji TV team says only February 2006.
1983: Akio Nakamori uses "otaku" for obsessive manga and anime fans in Manga Burikko.
1988: Miyazaki's grandfather dies, three months before the first killing.
August 22, 1988: Mari Konno, 4, is taken from a footbridge in a housing complex in Iruma, Saitama.
October 1988: Masami Yoshizawa, 7, disappears in Hanno, Saitama.
December 1988: Erika Namba, 4, disappears in Kawagoe, Saitama; her body is found days later in the Saitama mountains.
February 1989: a box with Mari Konno's remains is left at her family's home; letters signed "Imada Yuko" reach the Asahi Shimbun.
June 1989: Ayako Nomoto, 5, disappears in Koto Ward, Tokyo; her body is found days later in a cemetery in Hanno.
July 23, 1989: Miyazaki is arrested in Hachioji for indecent assault after a girl's father finds him.
August 9, 1989: questioned by detective Yasuhiro Ohmine at Hachioji Police Station; he confesses to the Koto Ward killing and then the others.
August 1989: the Asahi Shimbun asks whether his companions were anime and videos; the "otaku murderer" label spreads.
October 1989: his father gives an interview to Bungeishunju.
March 1990: trial opens in the Tokyo District Court.
1992: manga creators found a society to protect freedom of expression in manga.
1996: the detention house begins giving him psychiatric medication continuously.
April 14, 1997: Tokyo District Court finds him responsible and sentences him to death.
1999: antipsychotic medication added.
June 28, 2001: Tokyo High Court upholds the death sentence.
January 17, 2006: Supreme Court, Third Petty Bench, dismisses his appeal.
February 2006: the death sentence becomes final.
May 30, 2008: his lawyer asks the justice minister not to execute him.
June 8, 2008: the Akihabara attack.
June 17, 2008: Miyazaki is hanged at the Tokyo Detention House, at 45, with two other prisoners.
June 18, 2008: Nobuto Hosaka submits a written question to the government on the execution.
October 7, 2017: Fuji TV broadcasts his interrogation recordings.
November 24, 2018: the Japan Times describes the case as the worst possible introduction of the word otaku to the Heisei era.
2019: Hideki Yasunaga's book on the interrogation is published; Ohmine's account appears in Bungeishunju.