—MIYAZAWA FAMILY MURDERS—
CASE BREAKDOWN [Part 1 of 2]
INTRO
(First off, apologies for the length of this post!) This one of Japan’s largest, if not
the largest unsolved multiple homicide case. As I’ve said above, I’m more than delighted to answer any questions you might have / stoked to hear any ideas or theories.
Before I jump in, just a note. For those that are inspired to do their own digging after reading this, you might well conclude that the murders were personal in nature. That was my first assumption too. Especially given the amount of violence visited on the victims (particularly the mother and daughter). But then we must take into account that, as of 2022, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (TMPD from hereon) have put 280,000+ personnel on the case. Which is a WILD number—the population of Reno, more or less. If some kind of personal connection between the family and the killer existed, it’s almost certainly going to have come to light.
But then, if the killer did NOT know the family, why the extreme level of violence? Why the difference in violence between what befell the father and the young boy, and the mother and the daughter? And why did the killer buy a relatively expensive knife the day before the murders if he wasn’t planning to kill them? But then again, if he has a plan to kill them, he has *some* kind of reason to kill them.
To this day, you will see that the TMPD refers to this case as a Robbery / Homicide. And it’s true that he stole money from the house. I believe the equivalent for 500USD. However, he also left double that amount behind in the house, plus valuables / jewellery, so on. And if his intention was to steal money from the family, then why did he break in late at night when it’s obvious a family with young kids will be home? These are just some of the many contradictions that plague this case.
A final word on this: one of the big problems with researching it is that various inconsistencies and errors have been handed down across the years meaning that almost every single English-language publication / podcast / article has problems with them. These is particularly prevalent on Reddit and crime YouTuber videos. Now, I don't know where these errors or mistranslations originate, but they've definitely muddied the waters.
Thank you for reading!
BASIC FACTS
In the year 2000, Mikio Miyazawa (44), his wife Yasuko Miyazawa (41) and their two kids Niina (8) and Rei (6) lived in Soshigaya Park. They moved into the area in 1991 at which time it was a family housing complex with up to 200 units. The Miyazawa’s house is located right next to a public park – specifically it pushes up against a children’s play area:
Choo Choo Train Park. The house is just above the number ‘23’ to the left:
Google Maps
The Metropolitan Government of Tokyo wanted to redevelop the land around Soshigaya Park so from 1991 onwards, neighbours started to sell up. By the night of the murders, there were only three other houses in that complex that were still inhabited. One of them was inhabited by family, more on that below. One of the theories that floats around about the reason for the murders is that it was some kind of land grab conspiracy because the family wouldn’t sell. It involves a Korean Air Force man or hitman or some such. However, the fact is, all remaining residents had agreed to sell their houses. This included the Miyazawa Family.
Despite being a three-level home, which is considered large by Tokyo standards, I want to make it clear that it is not a spacious house. The ground floor consists of a garage on one side (the only room the killer never enters), and then a narrow hall with a genkan, storage, and the family PC. The middle floor contained the bathroom, the kids’ bedroom, and the living room/kitchen. And the top level is an attic space which acted as the parents’ bedroom accessible by a small ladder. Please click here for a tour of the house:
THE FAMILY
Mikio worked for Interbrand, an English advertising company. I believe I’m right in saying he worked on the campaign that popularized the word ‘WiFi’. Yasuko was a cram school teacher, essentially a home tutor. I believe she worked from home or the house next door which belonged to her sister, An. However, An lived abroad and the house was inhabited by their mother, Haruko. At the time of the murders, Haruko was at home but heard nothing due to soundproofing between the two houses. It’s also possible Yasuko made visits to students’ houses. Niina was into ballet. Rei suffered from some kind of ‘learning development’ difficulty. Beyond some vague mention of Mikio asking skateboarders at the skate park across the road to keep the noise down and Yasuko mentioning to her mother that a car was parking too close to their house, there family weren’t involved in any kind of life difficulties that might bring about their murders, however indirectly. Certainly, no link between the murderer and the family has ever even been suggested by the TMPD, let alone anything solid established elsewhere. In the biggest unsolved murders, there is usually one theory that people latch on to above any others—Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac etc. all have their suspects and some make more sense than others. This is not one of those cases. There are zero suspects. Zero credible theories (at least not credible in my opinion).
THE MURDERS
Before getting into this, a word on the timeline. The timeline has always been tricky as there are conflicting accounts -- at least there are in English translations of news articles / police press releases and so on. In a nutshell the time at which the killer enters the house is unclear. As I understand it, the family receives a phone call at 9pm or 10pm and at that this point everything was fine. We know that the killer logs on to the family computer at 1:18am. In some sources you will see it said that the killer stays in their house until as late as 10am -- meaning he left very close to when Haruko, the children's maternal grandmother, entered the house. But what we can say *
definitively* is that he left the house sometime between 1:23am (he spent 5 minutes on their computer) and 10am. To be exact, I believe Haruko's arrival at the house is 'after 10am' and the authorities were called at 10:58am.
In short, we only know for sure he was in the house between
1:18am-1:23am. That's seemingly the one reliable time-stamp.
OK, so this is the house layout. Note that the small red ‘x’ on the second floor is where the killer is believed to have broken into the house. The size of the window and the height of it means that the police feel the killer must have possessed significant upper body strength in order to be able to do this. There was, however, a fence between the back of the house and the play park. He might well have used this as leverage. There is some debate as to whether the killer did actually enter the house this way but the only other alternative was through the front door. This is a possibility raised by a Japanese magazine but I’m going to put this to one side for the time being and go with the prevailing theory that the bathroom window was indeed the intrusion point. (
Please note on the diagram that the numbers represent the order of deaths; Mikio should in fact be number 2 and Rei should be number 1).
The first victim is the son,
Rei, who is sleeping on the lower bunk of the bed. The killer strangles the little boy face-down. This is the only victim that is not stabbed. He is also the only victim which had no bloodstaining on him. And yet, one small detail here which puzzled me; the largest concentration of the killer’s footprints are found by the police in this bedroom. More broadly, I’ve never understood why the killer would attack Rei first. Clearly, Mikio is the main threat. One logical explanation is that the killer simply opened the first door he came to which was the kids’ bedroom. Even so, Rei was asleep and only six years old. Any theories pointing to this as a robbery gone wrong seem to fall apart when you take into account the fact that the intruder immediately murders a small child.
Mikio is the next victim as he comes up the stairs. He was on the ground floor, presumably working on the computer. Whether or not he was simply going to bed or whether he heard something out of place, he comes from the ground floor and clashes on the landing with the killer. He suffers many wounds, mainly in the thighs and buttocks, which could well because he actually grappled with the killer and that was the only angle the killer could attack. He also suffered stab wounds to the arms, chest, and face/head area. I think one his fingers was also partially severed. Blood loss stemming from the chest wound proved to be his cause of death.
The killer then climbed the ladder and found
Yasuko and
Niina asleep together in the attic. He set about stabbing them in the face and neck with his now-broken knife. (The police would later find bloodstains on their bed). But at some point, the killer aborted the attack in the attic and went downstairs. Thinking the killer must have left the house, Yasuko grabbed Niina and carried her down the ladder leaving behind bloody tissues on the attic floor—we assume she tried to stop her child’s bleeding. At this point, the killer emerged from the kitchen now holding a different knife. He set about stabbing them in a frenzy. Yasuko and Niina were stabbed, according to the police, ‘far beyond the point of death.’ I’ve read in certain places that Yasuko was left facially unrecognisable and that brain matter was protruding. We do know that Niina had her first and third tooth knocked out which suggests the killer beat her as well as stabbed her. We know that she was the last to die. Her cause of death was injury to her cervical spinal cord due to stabbing.
AFTER THE MURDERS
Now if all of the above wasn’t strange enough behaviour, this is where things get really quite odd. Having murdered an entire family, the killer then, seemingly, makes himself at home. He ignores the other food in the fridge and eats four ice cream cups (but uses no spoon). He chooses barley tea to drink instead of beer or cola. He then tries to patch himself up. I believe he uses a band-aid from the kitchen, the family first aid kid, even Yasuko’s sanitary pads. I’ll get on to the killer himself below but I should say here that he was, himself, suffered at least moderate injury to his hand. This likely came about when the knife broke off while attacking Mikio.
The sequence of events from here on in becomes murky except his computer usage. We know that the killer rests on the couch. I think one of the things that really gives people the creeps about this case is the apparent comfort the killer has inside the home. There is almost a nightmarish Goldilocks quality to it—someone obliterating an entire family and then calmly eating their ice cream on their couch.
Anyway, we know for sure that the killer accesses the computer at 1:18am. He was on the computer for five minutes. He created a new folder and visited the webpage of a theatre group which was favourited by Mikio. Now some sources say that the killer cut the phone line before he entered (apparently phone lines are readily accessible on most Tokyo homes as their routing is fairly homogenous and so would take less insider knowledge on how to do this than it would, say, in Los Angeles or London). But if he DID cut the phone line then I’m not sure how he could access the family’s internet bookmarked pages bar? This was, after all, the year 2000 and the connection would have been dial-up? It’s possible that he DIDN’T cut the phone line. (But we DO know that the grandmother who lived next door, Haruko, wasn’t able to get through on the phone the next morning).
After this, he went through the family’s belongings including documents on the ground floor storage unit. He pulled out the drawers, leaving one on the face of Mikio (a retired FBI profiler told me he thinks this could have been a display of ‘depersonalisation’ – however, when you look at where the body of Mikio was and where the storage unit was, it’s also possible the killer simply just dragged the drawer out and let it fall where it fell).
In any case, it does seem as he was looking for… something? Whether he knew in advance what it was he was looking for, or simply on a fishing trip, we don’t know. We do know that he took one of the drawers up to the bathroom and dumped the contents in the tub. He took Yasuko’s personal items from her handbag, Mikio’s wallet, the house keys and various documents and threw them in the toilet. Here, he either now defecated on these things or had already used the toilet and threw them in after. He also discarded a towel covered in his own blood along with his ice cream cups in this way.
As I’ve said above, the killer stole money from the house. I think I’m right in saying the equivalent of $500 (US). But he also left a significant amount behind. (Japan is, historically, mostly a cash-based society. While I think this is changing somewhat now, 22 years ago having moderate-to-high sums of money in the house would have been normal enough). There is also some confusion as to whether or not the killer took the family’s new years’ greeting cards that they’d received with him. In later years, it seems as if this might have just been a misunderstanding, however, and it was the police that the took them away.
INTO THIN AIR
There is debate as to what time the killer left the house. A second computer connection was made at 10am so for many years the public had the impression that the killer stayed the entire night. The reality is that in 2014, the TMPD revealed this second connection was most likely made by accident—Haruko entering and knocking over the mouse which triggered the connection. I should say here that the computer was a Mackintosh. If the computer does ‘wake up’ at 10am when Haruko enters to discover her family slaughtered, then this changes things. Because now maybe the killer only rests for a few minutes on the couch and does, in fact, leave the house at any point during the night—all the way up until 10am. Remember that the next morning is New Year’s Eve. The killer had to have known that, in a residential area like Setagaya, it would likely be a busy morning as people geared up for family gatherings and celebrations.
The fact remains, he could have left at any time between 1:23am and 10am. The killer left everything he had taken with him (more detail on that in Part 2) at the house. This includes his bucket hat, his scarf, his jacket, his gloves, his hip bag, and the sashimi knife he’d taken with him. He dressed in the father’s clothes, a sweatshirt and jogging bottoms (we think). Beyond clothes and the murder weapon, he left over 16,000 pieces of evidence behind including blood, excrement, saliva, shoeprints, fingerprints, and his hair. The killer then left the house and has never been heard from since. To this day, you will see the police flyers for this case all over Tokyo. On the streets of Setagaya, where the Miyazawas lived, you still see his face on the wanted posters. He wears his dark, heavy jacket and his bucket hat but his face is blank. White. No eyes. Like a ghost. But this man is real. He’s out there. And I hope to God he’s brought to justice.
Thank you all so much for reading. Tomorrow I’ll post Part 2 including more detail on the killer himself, the clues he left behind, some real oddities in the case, and the theories floating around out there.
Nic
