Japanese Serial Killer Is Executed

Asia Pacific|Japan Hangs Man Convicted in Serial Killings of Nine People

Japan’s justice minister announced the execution on Friday of a man convicted in the serial killings of nine people, whose mutilated and decomposing body parts were found in his home outside Tokyo eight years ago.

Takahiro Shiraishi, 34, was hanged at the Tokyo Detention House for the murders of eight women and a man in a two-month killing spree in 2017. The police arrested him after finding the heads and other body parts of his victims in coolers, which had been filled with cat litter to mask the odor. The discovery horrified Japan, which has low crime rates.

The justice minister, Keisuke Suzuki, said he had signed the execution order on Monday but did not witness the hanging on Friday morning, which was announced after it was finished. He said it was Japan’s first execution in almost three years.

“This represented an unimaginably mortifying incident for both the victims and their bereaved families,” Mr. Suzuki told reporters. “In light of this, I issued the order to carry out the death penalty after careful consideration.”

Mr. Shiraishi was executed almost four and a half years after his sentencing, which the minister said was less than half the time a condemned prisoner typically spends on death row.

A Tokyo court handed down the sentence in 2020 after finding Mr. Shiraishi guilty of murdering the victims, who were between 15 and 26 years of age and included high school and university students. The court also found him guilty of sexually assaulting some of the victims before their deaths.

Police uncovered the gruesome remains in Mr. Shiraishi’s townhouse in the city of Zama during a search for one of the victims, a woman who had gone missing after seeking a suicide partner online.

Mr. Shiraishi’s lawyer, Akira Omori, said he had met with his client just three days before the execution. He said they had an uneventful conversation about life in the detention center.

“It’s so sudden that I can’t immediately come up with a comment,” Mr. Omori told Japan’s public broadcaster NHK.

There are currently 105 people on death row in Japan. While the U.N. Human Rights Committee and other international groups have called on the nation to abandon the death penalty, opinion polls show that a majority of Japanese still support its use.

Kiuko Notoya contributed reporting from Tokyo.