North Kanto Young Girl Serial Kidnapping and Murder Case

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DarkMindsDigest

11 min readJan 18, 2024

The North Kanto Young Girl Serial Kidnapping and Murder Case (北関東連続幼女誘拐殺人事件, Kita-Kantou Renzoku Youjo Yuukai Satsujin Jiken) is a serial kidnapping and murder case that has been going on since 1979 in Japan’s Tochigi and Gunma prefectures.

Ashikaga murder case

Mami Matsuda went missing from a pachinko parlor on May 12, 1990. Her body was found at the Watarase river nearby. She was four years old. This disturbing incident occurred in the city of Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan.

After investigation, a year later, the police arrested Toshikazu Sugaya and convicted for the murder based on DNA evidence.

Serial murders?

In 2007, Kiyoshi Shimizu, an investigative journalist, was allowed to investigate the case that went cold. He had won many awards for his previous reports. He discovered that DNA testing was not precise and he started looking at cases where offenders were convisted based on DNA evidence. When he came across the Ashikaga case, he repeated the DNA test and found that the result was negative and he was innocent. After this revelation, Sugaya was released in May 2009, after only seventeen years of imprisonment.

Unfortunately by the time Kiyoshi Shimizu started investigating the case the statute of limitations had passed, which means the perpetrator of the crime could no longer be brought to justice. But Kiyoshi Shimizu kept investigating and found four other cases which are similar to the Ashikaga case. The cases occurred between 1979–1996 along with Mami Matsuda case.

A series of murders of young girls occurred around Ashikaga city from 1979 to 2005. Toshikazu Sugaya was arrested and indicted on the 1990 case.

1979 murder of Maya Fukushima

On 3 August 1979, five-year-old Maya Fukushima went missing while playing at a shrine near to her house in Ashikaga. Her body was found naked in a rucksack six days later abandoned next to the Watarase river

1984 murder of Yumi Hasebe

On 17 November 1984, five-year-old Yumi Hasebe went missing from a pachinko parlor. Her body was found on 8 March 1986 in a field 1.7 kilometers away from her home.

1987 murder of Tomoko Oosawa

On 15 September 1987, eight-year-old Tomoko Oosawa left her house in Ota and went missing. Her body was found on 27 November 1988 abandoned by the Tone River.

1990 murder of Mami Matsuda

1996 kidnapping of Yukari Yokoyama

On 7 July 1996, four-year-old Yukari Yokoyama went missing from a pachinko parlor. As the girl was never found, this is treated as a disappearance case.

Shimizu used the following reasons to conclude this as a serial murder case:

All cases involved young girls between ages 4 and 8
In three cases, the victim vanished from a pachinko parlor
In three cases, the body was found next to a river (the Watarase River in two)
Four cases happened on a Friday, weekend, or holiday

With further investigation, Kiyoshi Shimizu was able to track down the real perpetrator. When Shimizu confronted him, the perpetrator was nervous and after some questioning he finally admitted that he was the one who committed the murders. A DNA test was conducted and it revealed a 100% match, which confirmed that he was the murderer.

But why was the culprit not convicted?

The Miscarriage of Justice and Coverups

All these cases have been called as the “The North Kanto Serial Young girl kidnapping and Murder case”.

None of these crimes had a suspect except for the case of Mami Matsuda. The statute of limitations was still active for the case of Yukari Yokoyama. So the case had been given extensive media coverage and the Japanese Diet talked about it multiple times. The then prime minister, Naoto Kan, motivated the police to solve the case. Despite the knowledge of the serial cases, the police never arrested anyone in relation to the case. Mami Matsuda’s mom informed that the police stopped investigating her daughter’s case due to the expiration of statute of limitations.

Shimizu discovered many coverups while investigating the case.

That the events in the confession by Sugaya were impossible (there would not have been enough time to carry out the crime, and the victim’s mother stated that her daughter could not have fit into the bicycle’s basket like the confession stated)
That two eyewitness reports regarding the culprit and the kidnapped girl (which contradicted Sugaya’s confession) had not been presented in court (the descriptions of the culprit were later found to match security camera footage of the culprit in other cases)
That there were serious issues with the DNA testing methods, with how much data were taken (no tests were done to determine the DNA of the victim or her parents) as well as contamination
That the alleged child porn that the police claimed to have found in Sugaya’s apartment did not exist (the VHS tapes seized by the police were found to be of movies including one of Indiana Jones, and of porn featuring women with large breasts).

Toshikazu Sugaya

After the murder of Mami Matsuda, the police knocked on the door of Toshikazu Sugaya, who was then 45 years old. He was a divorced school bus driver, who live a lonely life with no friends. They took him to the police station and interrogated him for 13 hours, and kicked Sugaya in his shins and shouted at him, hence forcing him to admit tearfully to killing two other girls. He was convicted of one murder and sentenced to life in prison.

After release, now 63, Sugaya has written three books, one titled “Falsely convicted”, and tours the country giving talks about his experience.

“I tell people not to believe the police,” said Mr. Sugaya, “Look what they did to me.” During the years he had been in prison, he had met other convicts who had also been victims of miscarried justice, forced to false confessions.

“I want to go back to my quiet life of before” said Sugaya. “But when I think that others have suffered the same treatment as me, I want to work to help them.”

Before this turning point in life, Sugaya was a shy man who avoided conversations and rarely spoke. His marriage had lasted only for three months after which he divided his time between living with his parents and spending weekends alone at his small rented home.

Secretly the police had been following Sugaya for a year prior to his arrest. A witness had told him that Sugaya had been at the pachink game parlor about the same time as four year old victim, Mami Matsuda. In 1991, after his initial confession and subsequent arrest, Mr. Sugaya said he spent weeks concocting increasingly complex stories about how he murdered Mami and two other girls who had been killed in the 1980s. Mr. Sugaya, who said he had never really met any of the girls, said that at the time he was actually afraid that the police would discover he was lying and would start shouting at him again, a prospect he said paralyzed him with fear.

The police now admit that they had previously missed these evident discrepancies between Sugaya’s fabricated story of how he killed the girls and the actual evidence gathered. Sugaya siad he had took the girl away on his bicycle; a witness reported seeing a man lead the girl away on his bicycle. Sugaya had also failed to identfy the sites where the bodies had been buried.

Mid trial Sugaya tried to claim his innocence but even Sugaya’s defense attorney ignored him, and everyone assumed that his initial confession was correct. Legal experts say that this shows how Japan courts and prosecutors place immense importance on confessions.

Mr. Sugaya said the question he is now asked the most is why he confessed so quickly to crimes he did not commit. Describing himself as insecure and “excessively spineless,” he said his willpower just seemed to collapse after what he said were hours of police officers screaming at him so loudly that his ears still ring 19 years later. He said he finally confessed to all three killings just so the ordeal would end.

“We’ve had cases of false confessions before, but never one where the evidence was this clear-cut,” said Akira Kitani, a former judge who now teaches law at Hosei University in Tokyo.

The police said they were under pressure to solve the case hence the mistakes. Mr. Kitani said Mr. Sugaya’s release has prompted broader moves to hold retrials in several similar cases, including one involving a 1967 robbery-murder in which two men were imprisoned based solely on confessions that they later recanted.

“Before, I was famous for being a criminal,” Mr. Sugaya said a few moments later. “Now I’m famous for being innocent”.

He said the toughest part of his experience has been coming to terms with what he lost while in prison. In particular, he said, he was never able to meet his parents again. His father, a medicine salesman, died two weeks after the arrest, apparently of shock, Mr. Sugaya said. His mother refused to visit him in prison, and once told the police that she wished they would execute him so he could be “sent home in a box.” She died three years ago, before her son was exonerated. “I wish I could explain to her what really happened,” Mr. Sugaya said, his voice breaking the only time during a two-hour interview that touched on many painful topics

The security camera footage of the culprit exists from the 1996 case, and eyewitnesses from Mami Matsuda case have reported that he strongly resembles the man they saw.

In 2010 and 2011, Shimizu reported to the police, all the evidence gathered and that the perpetrator had been found, after the new DNA tests revealed a perfect match. There were also footage of him talking to girls and making them sit on his lap. Despite all the information needed to arrest the perpetrator, the police took no action. The reason provided by the police for not arresting the perpetrator was that his DNA did not match with the DNA of the culprit found in the Ashikaga case.

Shimizu professes that the DNA testing methods used in the Ashikaga case were flawed, and that arresting the perpetrator would require the prosecutor’s office to acknowledge this. However, the same testing methods were also used in the Iizuka case, in which the alleged culprit was executed in 2008 despite requests for new DNA tests and a retrial, and acknowledging that the testing methods were flawed would lead to a massive scandal around that case.

When the mother of Mami Matsuda was informed by the police that they were no longer investigating the case of her daughter due to the expiration of statute of limitations, she requested the police to return the belongings of her daughter. But they refused to return the shirt with semen stains on it. When asked for the reason, they refused to give a direct answer as to why, and Shimizu suspects that this might be due to the fear of others having the DNA of the real perpetrator, tested using modern technology, proving that their methods of DNA testing was wrong.

Criminal Justice system of Japan

Japan’s conviction rate as of 2001 was above 99.8%, which is considerably greater than that of modern totalitarian governments. Experts claim that Japan’s very high conviction rate is mostly due to the nation’s low prosecution rate and unique conviction rate calculation methodology. They claim that few cases are prosecuted by Japanese prosecutors and that only those that are likely to result in convictions are pursued. About thirty percent of cases are resolved by summary trials, according to Chuo University professor Ryo Ogiso, who reports that prosecutors defer prosecution in sixty percent of cases they receive.

In a summary trial, cases with fines of one million yen or less are reviewed based solely on information provided by the public prosecutor, and if the suspect does not protest, the matter is closed without a formal trial. Japan has a high conviction rate because of its low prosecution rate, which results in only around 8% of cases being actually prosecuted. Hakuoh University professor Keiichi Muraoka claims that the overwhelming concern that prosecutors will lose and damage their reputation is the reason behind Japan’s 60% prosecution suspension.

Critics have termed Japan’s criminal court system “hostage justice” (Japanese: 溺質司法, Hitojichi shihō) because detainees are forced to answer questions without the right to an attorney or to remain silent and are kept in detention for up to 23 days. Japan’s legal system has the potential to increase the number of false confessions and erroneous convictions in order to reach the high confession rate. The purpose of detention is not limited to making sure suspects show up for court. Due to the right to a fair trial, the right to physical freedom, and the right to remain silent, many judicial procedures also contravene Japan’s Constitution. The ban against torture, according to critics, is broken by lengthy detention and forced admissions during interrogations. Some claim that because there is no presumption of innocence, psychological torture is not prohibited, and in certain situations, access to counsel during interrogations is lacking, international human rights are violated. The most recent changes to the criminal justice system, which were put into place in the 2000s, mainly failed to address these problems.

Eric B. Rasmusen of Indiana University and J. Mark Ramseyer of Harvard Law School investigate if the charge is indeed justified. They looked at two options in their study, “Why Is the Japanese Conviction Rate So High?” One is that judges who are subject to central bureaucracy face pressure to find a defendant guilty in order to secure a high conviction rate. Another theory is that Japan’s underfunded, understaffed prosecutors only prosecute the most blatantly guilty defendants and do not file indictments in cases they are not confident they can win because the non-jury system under the inquisition system has a predictable verdict on guilt.

The fact that prosecutors in Japan have a lot of latitude in deciding whether to pursue charges or not after considering a variety of criteria is most likely the cause of the country’s high conviction rate. Because of the specifics of the crime or accused, the prosecutors may choose, for example, not to prosecute someone even when there is enough evidence to prevail at trial. “Where prosecution is deemed unnecessary owing to the character, age, environment, the gravity of the offense, circumstances or situation after the offense, the prosecution need not be instituted,” reads Article 248 of the Japanese Code of Criminal Procedure. As a result, Japanese prosecutors have a great deal of discretion when deciding whether to file charges or not.

Many human rights organizations have claimed that the high conviction rate results from the widespread use of forced confessions, even those made by innocent people, as the only basis for conviction. Given that individuals detained without charge or trial may spend up to 23 days in custody, confessions are frequently elicited following protracted police interrogations. This may take weeks at a time, during which the suspect remains in custody and is unable to communicate with relatives or a lawyer. Researchers have also found that Japanese judges confront biased incentives to convict and risk punishment from a personnel office if they rule in a way that the office finds objectionable.

The criminal justice system in Japan has to change in order to avoid such miscarriages of justice in future. Though it is devastating to know that the victims and their families will never recieve the justice they deserve while the perpetrator roams freely.