Episode 2: Tokyo Subway Sarin Attack
It's 8 o'clock in the morning in Tokyo. The trains are packed the way Tokyo trains always are during rush hour — shoulder to shoulder, silent, nobody making eye contact. Office workers, students, government clerks, station attendants just doing their jobs. And then, on five separate trains rolling toward the center of the city, people start collapsing. Their vision goes dark. They can't breathe. Some fall to the floor, convulsing. Others stumble onto platforms and lie there, unable to move, not understanding what is happening to them. By the time anyone figures out it's a nerve agent, more than five thousand people have been poisoned. Thirteen will die. And the men responsible are already in getaway cars, speeding away from stations where subway workers are trying to pick up leaking bags of liquid with their bare hands — not knowing what those bags contain. This is the story of the Tokyo subway sarin attack. March 20, 1995. The day a doomsday cult brought chemical warfare to the morning commute. Tokyo Subway Sarin Attack · 1995-03-20 · Tokyo Metro, Hibiya / Chiyoda / Marunouchi lines, Tokyo, Japan
Episode 3: Kobe Child Murders (Sakakibara Case)
On the morning of May 27, 1997, teachers and students arriving at Tomogaoka Junior High School in Kobe found something waiting for them at the school gate. Something that would stop an entire nation cold. There, placed with apparent deliberateness, was the severed head of an eleven-year-old boy. Stuffed in his mouth was a handwritten note, signed with a name no one recognized: "Seito Sakakibara." The note promised that this was only the beginning. Japan had not seen anything like it. The person who left that note — who had committed these crimes — was not a shadowed adult with a long criminal history. He was a fourteen-year-old junior high school student. He attended the very school whose gate he had chosen for this display. This is the Kobe child murders. And decades later, it remains one of the most disturbing cases in modern Japanese history. Kobe Child Murders (Sakakibara Case) · 1997-02-10 to 1997-05-27 · Suma Ward, Kobe, Japan
Episode 1: Akihabara Massacre
Noon, on a bright Sunday in the middle of Tokyo. The most famous electronics district in the world has just closed its main street to traffic, the way it does every weekend, so that thousands of people can walk down the middle of the road in the sun. It's supposed to be the safest kind of crowd there is. In about three minutes, seven of those people will be dead. And here's the part that stays with you: the man who killed them had been typing out his plan, in public, on his phone, for anyone to read — right up until twenty minutes before he did it. Nobody stopped him. This is the story of the Akihabara Massacre. Akihabara Massacre · 2008-06-08 · Akihabara, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan