Japan, even more than most countries, has a bloody history, rife with brutality and murder—and serial killers. But the one person who stands alone as the country’s most active serial killer in the twentieth century and beyond is Yoshio Kodaira. Kodaira was born in 1905. Although not a great deal is known about his childhood, at school he was combative, lazy, and uncaring. He frequently fought with his schoolmates, perhaps in part when other kids made fun of him because of his bad stutter, and he received poor grades on his schoolwork. Indeed, in his grammar school he was ranked near the bottom of the class and was lucky to graduate.
Predictably, he didn’t go to high school, instead becoming an apprentice in a metalworks factory. After leaving that job, Kodaira drifted aimlessly through a series of other low-paying, blue-collar jobs, and he also fathered a child. Unable to handle the responsibility of fatherhood, he took off, ending up, at age eighteen, in the Imperial Japanese Navy.
It was a perfect opportunity for a budding serial killer. The Japanese armies were engaged in a brutal and sadistic war against mainland China in those days. Japanese soldiers raped and murdered Chinese citizens en masse. As Kodaira said of an assault on one family that he took part in: “Four or five comrades and I entered a Chinese home and locked him in the closet. We stole the jewelry and raped the women. We even bayoneted a pregnant woman and pulled out the fetus from her stomach. I also engaged in those depraved actions.”
While aware that the actions were depraved, at least on an intellectual level, the experience surely didn’t stop Kodaira from continuing his life in the same vein.
Killer on the Loose
When he left the navy in 1932 after a nine-year stint, he charmed a young woman into marrying him, much to the displeasure of the woman’s family and particularly her father, a Shinto priest. As the family and father predicted, the marriage was hardly made in heaven, and one day it climaxed in a physical fight between Kodaira and his in-laws. The result was that Kodaira killed his bride’s father with an iron bar and injured half a dozen other relatives.
He was arrested and tried for these crimes and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. But when World War II started, Kodaira and other prisoners were given amnesty so they could aid in the war effort. Kodaira, because of his navy experience, was given a job as a civilian at a navy facility where young women worked under him, something like allowing the fox to guard the henhouse. Kodaira became a Peeping Tom, spying on the young women as they bathed after work. Eventually, he started to murder them. His homicidal activities were hardly noticed because Japanese authorities were too busy trying to defend against Allied air attacks.
His first discovered murder was on May 25, 1945. The victim was nineteen-year-old Miyazaki Mitsuko, whom he had raped and strangled. He hid her corpse behind an air-raid shelter. During the rest of the year, even after Japan surrendered to the Allies in August, he killed six more women ranging in age from nineteen to thirty-two at the navy facility, finishing out 1945 with the murder of nineteen-year-old Baba Hiroko on December 30.
Postwar Murders
After 1945 Kodaira took a six-month break from killing, then started in again by raping and strangling a fifteen-year-old girl. Of course his wartime service was over, and with it the ever-ready supply of employees as victims. His compulsions demanded a fresh supply, and he devised a way to get them— at the time, postwar Japan was rife with black market activity, much of it in Tokyo. He simply trolled the area where the illegal activities took place and waited for a likely victim to come along, with the reasoning that, if the girl was involved in the black market, she wasn’t likely to be missed if she disappeared. In early July 1946, Kodaira met seventeen-year-old Midorikawa Ryuko. They seemed to have something of a relationship going—he even visited her parents—but by early August, Midorikawa had vanished and so had Kodaira.
Around the same time, another young woman, Shinokawa Tatsue, had also disappeared. Tatsue was found murdered near Zojoji Temple in Tokyo, and the Ryuko girl was found in the temple itself.
Police investigated, and Tatsue’s parents told police they had last seen their daughter when she went to see a man for a job interview. The name of the man? Yoshio Kodaira.
Police tracked Kodaira down, and he spoke with them freely, admitting not only the murder of the two recent females but also all of the others as well as thirty rapes. Kodaira seemed to have no interest in living, and on October 5, 1949, Japanese authorities obliged him: He was hanged.