Deeply researched, respectfully told stories of Japan's most infamous crimes. Each episode reconstructs what happened, how, and why — the people, the timeline, and the psychology behind the case.
Black Files: Political Killings — A Century of Violence Against the Public Sphere
Japan likes to think of itself as a country where politics is settled by argument, not by blood. These three cases say otherwise.
Tonight's Black Files spans nearly a hundred years, from a military police cell in 1923 to a train station sidewalk in 2022. Each time, someone decided that a person's place in public life made them a target.
We begin in September 1923, days after the Great Kanto Earthquake, with martial law in force. Military police took the anarchist Sakae Osugi, the feminist writer Ito Noe, and Osugi's six-year-old nephew into custody. None of them came out alive. The officer convicted of the killings, Lieutenant Masahiko Amakasu, was released after about three years.
Then October 1960. Socialist Party chairman Inejiro Asanuma is speaking at a televised debate in Hibiya Public Hall when a seventeen-year-old ultranationalist rushes the stage with a short sword. A photographer caught the moment, and that image won a Pulitzer Prize.
Finally, July 2022 in Nara. Former prime minister Shinzo Abe is giving a campaign speech when a man fires a gun he built himself. His grievance wasn't really with Abe's politics. It was with a church he blamed for ruining his family.
Three killings, three very different motives, and one question running through all of them: what happens to a country when someone decides that a bullet or a blade will settle what an argument couldn't?
In this compilation:
• Episode 92: Amakasu Incident
• Episode 111: Assassination of Inejiro Asanuma
• Episode 10: Assassination of Shinzo Abe
6 Nov 2026
Episode 127: Kawasaki Hostel Fire
Just after midnight, in the old industrial quarter of Kawasaki City, a fire broke out in a wooden building that most people in Japan would never visit and had never heard of. The building was a kan'i shukuhakusho — a "simple lodging house" — the cheapest and most marginal form of shelter in the country. Inside, nearly ninety people were sleeping, most of them elderly men on welfare, placed there by the city because they had nowhere else to go.
The fire jumped to the building next door, through a shared wall. Within an hour, eleven people were dead.
Japan's fire investigators spent nine months examining the ruins. In February 2016, the Kawasaki City Fire Bureau published its conclusion: the fire had been deliberately set.
No one has ever been arrested. No suspect has ever been publicly named. And more than a decade later, the question of who killed eleven sleeping welfare recipients in Kawasaki on the night of May 17th, 2015 — and why — has never been answered.
This is the story of the Kawasaki hostel fire.
Kawasaki Hostel Fire · 2015-05-17 · Hinode-cho, Kawasaki-ku, Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan
5 Nov 2026
Episode 126: Murder of Rina Shimabukuro
A Thursday evening in late April. Warm Okinawan air, the kind that settles in after a long day at work. The kind of night when the streets of a mid-sized island city feel safe, familiar — the kind where you think nothing of going for the walk you've taken a hundred times before.
Rina Shimabukuro was twenty years old. She left her apartment in Uruma City that night — April 28th, 2016 — the way she always did. For a walk after work. She never came home.
What happened to her triggered a murder conviction, a protest of more than 65,000 people, and a diplomatic crisis that reached the desk of two governments. The man who killed her was an American — a former Marine, a base contractor, a man who had lived in Okinawa for years, walked its streets, adopted its language, and married one of its people. This is the murder of Rina Shimabukuro.
Murder of Rina Shimabukuro · 2016-04-28 · Uruma City, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan
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