He Kidnapped, Killed, Raped, and Ate Little Girls

The horrific story of the pedophile cannibal killer of Japan.

Trigger Warning: This article has graphic descriptions of murder, mutilation, necrophilia, and cannibalism of young children that may cause distress. This may be difficult for some readers.

One of the safest countries in the world, Japan is known for its low crime rate, safe neighborhoods, and close-knit communities that watch over each other. Guns are virtually absent and murder and other violent crimes are very low with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reporting Japan’s rate of intentional homicide being the second-lowest in the world at 0.3, compared with 5.4 for the United States.

But despite that, Japan has some very unusual and brutal crimes that shock and confuse both Japanese people and the world. One such criminal is Tsutomu Miyazaki, a man from Saitama Japan who abducted four girls ranging from age 4 to 7 and brutally murdered them, sexually assaulted their corpses, and even consumed some of their body parts and drank their blood which earned him the name Little Girl Murderer.

He was also an avid fan of horror and violent Japanese manga so the media often referred to him as the Otaku killer. Otaku is the Japanese word for nerd or geek.

Why was Miyazaki obsessed with little girls? Why did he sexually assault their corpses? Was his love for anime and horror an influence in his killings? Was he suffering from mental illness, and if so how extreme was it that he decided to drink the blood and eat the flesh of his victims? How was he caught and what happened to him? Find out the life and crimes of Tsutomu Miyazaki and why this man and his crimes shocked a nation and the world.

The Crime

“’Would you like to go somewhere where it’s cool?’ he asked the little girl.

She agreed, and taking his hand, climbed into his car.”

Mari

In the Japanese prefecture of Saitama, on August 22, 1988, a four-year-old girl named Mari left her home and headed to her friend’s house. But after she didn’t report back in the evening, her father called the police and reported her missing. One man knew where she was.

On August 22nd, the day after his 26th birthday, Tsutomu Miyazaki, who lived in the area close to Mari was driving his car when he spotted the little girl. “Would you like to go somewhere where it’s cool?” he asked Mari, who agreed and taking his hand, climbed into his car.

In Japan, children are always taught to respect and obey elders and in the 80s and 90s, kidnappings and crime, in general, were very low in Saitama so it was no wonder Miyazaki was able to lead the young Mari into his car and drive her to a remote location and park under a bridge.

He then walked with her to a patch of forested area and watched her play for 30 minutes before putting his hands around her neck and strangling her. When she stopped moving, he undressed her and sexually assaulted her corpse. He took off her clothes and brought them home as a souvenir leaving her body in the field.

A few days after Mari disappeared, Mari’s family received a postcard with a message: There are devils about.

A massive search took place with 50,000 posters of Mari’s image being hung in train stations and bus stops across Japan. Police questioned people in the neighborhood and two boys and a housewife reported seeing Mari with a stranger; they described a pudgy man in his late thirties with curly hair.

Mari’s family started getting strange phone calls that would ring for up to 20 minutes. When the family answered, the person on the other end would hang up or heavy breathing could be heard.

Despite the efforts, after weeks without any leads, the case went cold. There was no body, no more witnesses, and nothing that could link anyone to the disappearance. Serial killers usually get bolder and more extreme in the way they murder as they progress and Miyazaki was no different.

Masami

Six weeks after Mari’s disappearance, on October 3, 1988, Miyazaki spotted Masami Yoshizawa, a seven-year-old first-grader, walking down the street. He was able to coerce her into his car, drive to the hills near the location of his first murder, and strangled her to death. Then he stripped her and sexually abused the corpse.

He once again took the clothes and left her remains less than 100 meters (around 300 feet) from Mari’s remains. The police were quick to link the missing girls as both Mari and Masami lived in a similar vicinity but there were still no leads or bodies found so Masami was also listed as a missing person.

Masami’s family also reported getting strange crank calls where the caller would repeatedly call but never say a word.

Erika

On December 12, 1988, Erika Namba was returning from a friend’s house when Miyazaki lured her into his sedan. She was crying by the time he pulled into the parking area. He told Erika to undress in the back seat, then began to photograph her. He strangled Erika as he had Mari and Masami, then tied her legs and arms, wrapped her in a sheet, and put her in the trunk. This time though, instead of taking her clothes as a souvenir, he disposed of them.

While he was driving to dispose of Erika’s body, his car slipped and got stuck. So he quickly grabbed the body out of the trunk and ran into the woods to dump it. When he returned with just the sheet, two men were standing by his car apparently worried about the abandoned car. They helped him push the car out of the hole where it was stuck and Miyazaki sped off.

Erika’s family also received strange phone calls and a postcard that had the words: Erika. Cold. Cough. Throat. Rest. Death.

Because of the car troubles, Miyazaki wasn’t able to properly dispose of Erika’s body. A few days after her death, her clothes and body were found. The two men also reported the incident of seeing Miyazaki and described his car but couldn’t remember the make so there was still no identification of the car or Miyazaki.

What was confirmed though was that all three girls who lived relatively close to each other were being kidnapped, and killed. Although police had only found Erika’s body, they were pretty certain that the other missing girls were most likely dead as well. The police set up a special unit and began combing the area for the other two girl’s remains.

While police were searching for the girls and a serial killer, Miyazaki had gone back and retrieved Mari’s body, cut off the hands and feet, hung them in his closet, and burned the rest of her body in his furnace.

He then sent the burnt remains, Mari’s baby teeth, and photo’s of the clothes Mari was wearing when she disappeared in a box with a note that read: Mari. Bones. Cremated. Investigate. Proof.

The ashes were turned over to the legal division of the Tokyo Dental University for examination, where Dr. Kazuo Suzuki concluded they probably did not belong to Mari. Because the examiner reported that the remains may not be Mari, Miyazaki had to set the record straight.

The Japanese newspaper Asahi Shinbun received a letter and polaroid photo of Mari. The letter was signed with a fake name Yuko Imada, which is a women’s name but is also a wordplay which can also mean I’ll tell you now in Japanese. The letter was a confession that read,

“I put the cardboard box with Mari’s remains in it in front of her home. I did everything. From the start of the Mari incident to the finish. I saw the police press conference where they said the remains were not Mari’s. On camera, her mother said the report gave her new hope that Mari might still be alive. I knew then that I had to write this confession so Mari’s mother would not continue to hope in vain. I say again: the remains are Mari’s.”

After a further medical examination of the remains, they were confirmed to be that of Mari. However, her hands and feet were missing. At Mari’s funeral, her father urged the killer, “Her hands and feet didn’t seem to be with the remains. When she gets to heaven, she won’t be able to walk or eat. Please return the rest of her remains.”

Although the police were not able to identify the killer by the writing, the photograph, the postcard paper and the box that was sent was a starting point for the police and a hint at who the culprit might be.

Ayako

Despite the close call with Erika, Miyazaki was getting bolder and more determined to find another target. On June 1, 1989, he once again got a young girl playing at her Elementary school to come with him. He was taking pictures of her and taking off her panties when some people saw what was happening and chased him off.

Unfortunately, that did not deter Miyazaki, as a few days later he found 5-year-old Ayako playing alone in a park. He approached with his camera and asked her to pose for him. He took her to his car and gave her some gum to keep her calm and happy.

According to Miyazaki’s confession, the young girl commented on his deformed hands. Miyazaki had been born with a physical defect that caused his hand joints to fuse together and limit his hand movement.

Enraged, Miyazaki pulled on a pair of vinyl gloves. “Here’s what happens to kids who say things like that,” he said and then started strangling her. “She kicked and kicked, but went limp in four or five minutes,” he confessed. To make sure she was dead, he taped her mouth and tied her hands with vinyl rope, then wrapped the body in a sheet and put it in the trunk of the car.

Instead of disposing of her like he had the other three girls, this time he decided to bring the body home. He brought her body to his home, stripped her clothes, wiped her with a towel, spread her legs, and taped her vagina open. He then went on to film the body while he masturbated.

He then used a knife and saw to cut off her head, hands, and feet. He dumped the torso near a public toilet at a cemetery then roasted Ayako’s hands which he proceeded to eat and drank some of her blood.

He kept some bones and her head in his home until later scattering them in the woods. He also burned her hair, clothes, and the blood-stained plastic bags he had used to transport her.

Ayako’s mother had reported her missing on June 6th and a week later, Ayako’s torso was found. Using blood type, chest size, and stomach contents, police were able to confirm the body belonged to Ayako.

Despite the sighting of Miyazaki and his car by the two men earlier and the clues from the package he had sent the victim’s families, Miyazaki was still able to escape detection and police were nowhere close to identifying their serial killer.

Luckily, despite the police still having no leads, Miyazaki’s hunger for new victims was his downfall. On July 23, 1989, Miyazaki came upon two sisters playing outside. He convinced the younger sister to accompany him to the river where he could take pictures of her. The older sister, however, ran home and told her father who came running to save his younger daughter.

The father ended up finding the young daughter naked while Miyazaki was taking pictures between her legs. He approached, knocked Miyazaki down but Miyazaki was able to escape to his car. Luckily, the police had been called and were waiting for him by his car.

The Killer

“I felt all alone. And whenever I saw a little girl playing on her own, it was almost like seeing myself.”

Tsutomu Miyazaki was born in Tokyo on August 21, 1962. He was born prematurely weighing only 2.2kg or 4.8 lbs with a birth defect that caused the joints of his hands to fuse together. The deformation was a major point of bullying he received when he was a child. His classmates and teacher all said he was a quiet and lonely child who had trouble making friends.

Despite his detachment from others, he was a smart student and was the first student from his junior high school to pass the entrance exams to an elite high school. And though he was a good student, in high school he started losing interest in studies and instead opted to sit alone and draw comics.

Originally he had planned to major in English and become a teacher but as his marks fell and his interest in school dropped, he was no longer able to attend the university his school was affiliated with and so he ended up taking a photo technician course at junior college.

Miyazaki’s father was a quite wealthy and prominent businessman who owned a printing business and the local newspaper. Through his father’s connections, he was able to find work at a printing plant.

It seems that Miyazaki did not get along well with his family. Both his mother and father seemed to be too busy to pay him much attention. He admitted to police, “If I tried to talk to my parents about my problems, they’d just brush me off. I even thought about suicide.”

Even Miyazaki’s two younger sisters, Setsuko and Haruko, didn’t like him. Miyazaki was a troubled child and there was an instance when his youngest sister yelled at him for peeking at her naked body while she was in the bath. Angered by her, he burst in and smashed her head against the bathtub.

He also beat his mother once when she suggested he stopped reading comics and watching movies and do something more productive.

His violent tendencies also included cruelty to animals. “I’ve killed cats. Threw one in the river. Did another in with boiling water.” He also strangled his own dog to death with a strand of wire.

Miyazaki seemed to only get along with his grandfather who ended up passing away in May of 1988 a few months before Miyazaki took his first human life. According to a specialist Mr. Serizawa,

his grandfather had been his only warm adult relationship, and the death marked the breaking of Miyazaki’s last bonds with society. Miyazaki later said that he even ate some of his grandfather’s cremated bones. He wanted to reincarnate his grandfather and believed that this reincarnation would not be complete if any of his grandfather’s body remained.

Along with friction with his sister and mother, Miyazaki avoided women his own age. “His penis is no thicker than a pencil and no longer than a toothpick,” a high-school classmate remarked. His premature birth, hand defect, and other physical and mental abnormalities caused Miyazaki to act out in strange ways.

At college, he took cameras to the tennis courts to take crotch shots of female players. He also soon tired of adult pornography. In Japan, both magazine and video pornography blackout or blur pubic hair. “They black out the most important part,” Miyazaki complained. So he turned to child porn, which shows everything since obscenity laws ban the showing of pubic hair, not sex organs.

After Miyazaki’s arrest, police searched his home to find 6,000 videotapes of kiddy porn, gruesome horror movies, and anime. His collection also included videos and photos of his victims.

After information on Miyazaki was released there was a lot of debate about horror movies, violence in anime, and pornography with many people vilifying anime and manga culture.

Dubbed the Otaku Killer, many single men who are obsessed with manga, anime, video games, and pornography were looked at in a negative light. Japanese society was attacking anime entertainment and youth culture and blaming it for the rise of Miyazaki much like hip hop and heavy metal was blamed for the deterioration of society in North America.

Arrest and Sentencing

Originally, Miyazaki was apprehended on the charge of forcing a minor to commit indecent acts when he was caught photographing the younger sister. However, once he was in police custody and interrogated, Miyazaki confessed to murdering Ayako.

Then as police probed further, other confessions followed including the murder of Erika Namba and Mari Konno. Both Mari and Erika’s videos were found in the collection at Miyazaki’s home.

After a preliminary psychological test by psychiatrists concluded that Miyazaki showed no immediately apparent disorders, he finally confessed to killing Masami as well. Masami’s remains were found in the forest as well as the chewed bones of Mari’s hands and feet.

Miyazaki’s trial started in March 1990 and his trial lasted 7 years. In Japanese law, if someone is determined to have no mental competence, they can’t be punished and if they have a diminished mental capacity, their sentence can be lowered.

The defense team claimed that Miyazaki had only a limited sense of responsibility for his crimes and that he was unable to choose between right and wrong. “We want to build enough of a case for the judge to sentence Miyazaki to life in prison,” said his lawyer. However, the first report found Miyazaki capable of taking responsibility for his actions.

The defense asked for a second evaluation which the Judge agreed to. He had two more evaluations conducted which concluded that he suffered from schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder. During the trial, Miyazaki was drawing pictures of a Rat-man who he claimed was the real murderer.

However, despite the evaluations, he was still sentenced to death by hanging. “The atrocious murder of four girls to satisfy his sexual desire leaves no room for leniency,” Chief Justice Tokiyasu Fujita.

Miyazaki’s legal team appealed to have his sentence be changed to life in prison but the upper courts and Supreme court upheld his death sentence.

Miyazaki reportedly said: “This has to be wrong. I’ll be proved innocent someday.” In his letter, while on death row he also wrote things like, “This is silly. That judge will be sorry. He must be an idiot,” and about the victims, “There’s nothing much to say about them. I’m happy to think I did a good deed.”

He also demanded his collection of videos and his car be returned to him and that he be given a lethal injection like in America as opposed to hanging. He wrote,

“Under the current execution method [in Japan], death row inmates have to suffer great fear at the time of their execution, and therefore won’t have a chance to feel regret for what they’ve done. For this reason, we should switch to lethal injections of the kind used in the United States.”

During the trial, Miyazaki’s father refused to hire a lawyer for his son. “It wouldn’t be fair to the victims,” he said. After the trial, his father shut down his newspaper business and went into hiding. In an interview, he said, “I didn’t pay more attention to the feelings of my son.”

After his arrest, Miyazaki had written a furious letter to his father, blaming him for everything. And to his mother, “I’ve caused you much heartache. Don’t forget to change the oil in my car, or it will get so you can’t drive it.”

His father committed suicide soon after Miyazaki’s guilty verdict. After spending years in prison reading his beloved manga and watching anime and movies all day awaiting his execution, Miyazaki was hanged at the Tokyo Detention House in 2008.

Since Miyazaki was executed and while alive was suffering from mental illness and delusions, we may never know what caused a mild-mannered man to become such a vile and grotesque killer.

His issues with his parents, the disability of his hands, the bullying and resentment from classmates, all may have combined to create an awful and miserable childhood for Miyazaki. Despite his academic success and ambition, he somehow failed to escape the sadness and abuse he suffered as a young child and adult.

Add the obsession with video games, pornography, and horror films, his secluded life with little human interaction might have increased his mental illness and added to his delusions and a strange fascination with little girls.

And although the crimes he committed against the four innocent children were quite atrocious and extremely morbid, luckily he was caught before he could get his misshapen hands on any other children.

Compared to some of the other strange hikikomori murderers that have plagued Japan, his victim count may be lower but his style of murder is beyond belief. And although justice was served and Miyazaki has gone, the legacy of his bizarre killings continues to fascinate the people of Japan and the world.

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