Tsutomu Miyazaki, the otaku killer

Tsutomu Miyazaki was a Japanese serial killer who abducted and murdered four little girls aged four to seven, and then desecrated their bodies.

This is one of the most terrible stories I have ever told. The victims were very young children, and out of respect for them I will not report the details of the abuse their bodies suffered after death.

Biography of Tsutomu Miyazaki

Tsutomu was born on 21 August 1962 in Itsukaichi, near Tokyo, premature and with a rare deformity, radioulnar synostosis, which locked his wrist joints: he could not bend his hands upwards and to turn them he had to rotate his whole forearm. Because of this disability he was shunned at school and grew up very solitary and quiet. Even so, his grades were excellent, at least until high school.

There he began to lose interest in studying and his grades dropped so much that he was not admitted to Meiji University, where he would normally have gone. So he enrolled in a course to become a photography technician.

In the mid-1980s he moved back in with his parents, sharing a room with his elder sister. The family was wealthy and prominent: it owned a local newspaper and his grandfather and great-grandfather had been town councillors. Even so, Tsutomu had no intention of taking over the family business. After his arrest he would say he felt very lonely and misunderstood by his family, who paid him no attention, and that he could not confide in anyone. The only one who gave him some support was his grandfather, and when he died in May 1988 something in Tsutomu changed forever.

This deepened his depression and, to “retain something from him”, he ate some of his grandfather’s ashes. A few weeks later he attacked his sister and then his mother, who was asking him to work more and spend less time with his videotapes.

The first murder

The first murder took place on 22 August 1988, the day after his 26th birthday, when Tsutomu abducted Mari Konno, a little girl of only 4 who was playing at a friend’s house. When he noticed she was missing, her father called the police, but nothing more would be heard of little Mari.

Tsutomu took her in his car and drove to a bridge near a wood. There he sat beside the child for half an hour, then killed her and left the body in the hills near his home, taking her clothes with him.

Weeks later he returned and took some of the remains, which he kept in his closet. The rest was burned in his furnace and ground to powder, and the ashes, together with some teeth and photos of her little clothes, were sent to Mari’s family with a postcard that read:

Mari. Bones. Cremated. Investigate. Prove.

As well as sending letters about the murders to all the families, he also made many silent phone calls to torment them.

The other murders

On 3 October of the same year he abducted Masami Yoshizawa, aged seven, offering her a lift as she walked along a country road. He took her to the same bridge where he had killed Mari and killed her, then went home with the child’s clothes.

On 12 December he abducted Erika Namba, aged four, who was walking home from a friend’s house, and took her to a car park in Naguri. After killing her he tied her hands and feet, covered her with a sheet and put her in the boot. He dumped her little clothes in a nearby wood and then left the body near the car park, where it was found three days later.

Once again he sent a postcard to the family, with words cut out of a magazine:

Erika. Cold. Cough. Throat. Rest. Death.

On 6 June 1989 he persuaded a five-year-old girl, Ayako Nomoto, to let him take her picture. Then he got her into his car and killed her. He took her home and kept her with him for two days. When the body began to decompose he dismembered it and left part of it in a cemetery and part in the nearby hills.

Two weeks later, afraid the police would find the remains, he went back for them and hid them in his closet. He also ate part of the little girl’s body.

Arrest

On 23 July 1989, in a park in Hachiōji, Tsutomu separated a little girl from her older sister and began photographing her. The girls’ father noticed and attacked him, but could not hold on to him.

Tsutomu ran off on foot, but when he came back for his car the police, alerted by the father, arrested him. In his home they found 5,763 videotapes, some containing anime and slasher films, and among them videos and photos of the victims. During his arrest and trial Tsutomu was always calm and composed, almost indifferent.

Because of his passion for manga and anime he was called the Otaku Murderer, and this triggered panic among the Japanese public, who began to fear this group of people, demonising not only comics but also horror films. Later, however, some critics pointed out that large collections of manga and videotapes were normal in the rooms of young people in Tokyo at the time, and that the information released to the press had exaggerated these aspects. His father refused to pay for a lawyer and took his own life in 1994.

The trial

The trial began on 30 March 1990 and lasted seven years, focusing on his mental health. Tsutomu often spoke nonsense and blamed “Rat Man”, an alter ego he said forced him to kill, whom he drew like a cartoon during the hearings.

Three teams of psychiatrists reached different conclusions, but the court ruled that he was aware of the seriousness of his crimes and on 14 April 1997 sentenced him to death. The sentence was upheld on appeal in 2001 and by the Supreme Court in 2006. Tsutomu described his murders as “an act of benevolence”.

On 17 June 2008 Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama signed the execution order and that same day Tsutomu Miyazaki was hanged at the Tokyo Detention House.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Tsutomu Miyazaki