Serial Murderers In Japan (1882-2017): A Narrative Analysis

Abstract

A retrospective narrative analysis of 61 serial murder-ers (a few, belonging to health care profession, such as physicians, midwives and paramedic) in Japan was attempted. Materials available in the online databases including Wikipedia entries on individual criminals were studied. Among the studied total of 61 serial murderers covering the time span from 1882 to 2017, 59 were convicted and 2 were non-convicted. All five categories of Deitz typology of serial murderers were represented among the convicted sample. These include, psychopathic sex-ual sadists (e.g: Ryuun Daimai, Yoshio Kodaira, Genzo Kurita, Kiyoshi Okubo, Takahiro Shiraishi), crime spree killers (e.g: Kanae Kijima, Chisako Kakehi), custodial killers (e.g: Shige Sakakura, Miyuki Ishikawa and Hayato Imai), psychotic, religious-cult killers (e.g: Sachiko Eto, Shoko Asahara and his 12 collaborators) and organized crime functionaries (e.g: Satoru Nomu-ra). Tomomasa Nakagawa, personal doctor of the Aum Shinrikyo Buddhist religious-cult leader Shoko Asakara, may hold a record for a scientist on death row to publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal.Limitations of this study include, (1) omission of the methods of killing used by the murderers from analysis (2) total reliance on media reports for information, in preference to voluminous records of Japanese court cases. Despite these limitations, details presented in this analysis of 59 convicted and 2 non-convicted se-rial murderers in 45 court cases held in Japan may be useful for comparative studies in forensic science and law enforcement.