5 cases from Japan
Convicted: Fusako Shigenobu
On May 28, 2022, a 76-year-old woman in a black hat and gray suit walked out of a Tokyo prison and let her daughter drape a Palestinian keffiyeh around her shoulders. Cameras clicked. Supporters waved Palestinian flags. And Fusako Shigenobu, the woman Western media had dubbed 'the Empress of Terror,' blinked into the daylight after two decades behind bars. For thirty years before her arrest, she had been one of the world's most wanted fugitives: the founder of the Japanese Red Army, a group linked to bombings, hijackings, and one of the deadliest airport massacres in history. On May 30, 1972, three JRA militants opened fire with automatic weapons at Lod Airport near Tel Aviv, killing 26 people and wounding approximately 80 more in a crowded arrival hall. Shigenobu was never charged for that attack. Born in postwar Tokyo to a disgraced ultranationalist father, she transformed herself from a Kikkoman soy sauce office worker into a global revolutionary, building an armed network from the refugee camps of Beirut while raising a stateless daughter in the shadows. This is the story of how she got there, what she built, and what remains unanswered.
Convicted: Miyuki Ishikawa
Miyuki Ishikawa was a Japanese midwife and real estate agent turned serial killer. During the American occupation of Japan, she and several accomplices were involved in the deaths of dozens of infants. These horrific events, known as the Kotobuki San'in incident, marked one of the most devastating crime sprees in post-war Japan.
Convicted: Doris Marie Payne
She was 86 years old, wearing an electronic ankle monitor from her previous arrest, and she was shoplifting $86 worth of merchandise from a Walmart near Atlanta. That is the last chapter, so far, in the seven-decade criminal career of Doris Marie Payne, a woman who once walked out of a Monte Carlo Cartier boutique with a half-million-dollar diamond hidden in the seam of her girdle. Born in the coal-scarred poverty of Slab Fork, West Virginia, in 1930, Payne became the most prolific jewel thief in American history: over $2 million stolen, 32 aliases, nine passports, ten Social Security numbers, and an FBI file reportedly six feet long. She wore designer clothes into the finest jewelry stores in Paris, Rome, Geneva, and Tokyo, charmed the clerks with a smile, and walked out richer. Judges called her "the Terminator." Interpol tracked her for decades. She expressed no remorse, ever. Now approaching 95, she lives as a free woman in Atlanta. A documentary about her life won an Audience Award at Tribeca. Halle Berry is reportedly attached to play her in a biopic. And through it all, Doris Payne has remained exactly what she always was: the best-dressed thief in the room.
Convicted: Masumi Hayashi (林 眞須美)
On a sweltering July evening in 1998, residents of a quiet Wakayama neighborhood lined up to ladle curry from a communal pot at their summer festival. Within hours, sixty-seven of them were fighting for their lives. Four never recovered: a local council president, his vice president, a ten-year-old boy, and a sixteen-year-old girl. Investigators would eventually determine the pot contained at least 130 grams of arsenic trioxide — enough poison to kill more than one hundred people. The suspect was a thirty-seven-year-old mother of four who had been seen loitering near the curry pots, alone, for over forty minutes. Before her arrest, a photograph captured her in her garden, smiling, hosing down a crowd of reporters. That image would follow her everywhere. Masumi Hayashi was convicted of mass murder and sentenced to death on purely circumstantial evidence: no confession, no confirmed motive, no direct physical evidence. She has maintained her innocence ever since. Now sixty-three years old and still on death row, her case raises a question that haunts Japanese legal scholars: what if the evidence was never enough?
Convicted: Sada Abe (阿部 定, Abe Sada)
When Tokyo police finally cornered their fugitive at a Shinagawa inn on May 20, 1936, they didn't believe she was who she claimed to be. The woman in the kimono was too calm, too composed, nothing like the monster the nation's newspapers had conjured over two days of breathless coverage. Then she reached into the folds of her robe and produced the severed genitalia of Kichizō Ishida, wrapped in a magazine cover, and the officers had no more questions about her identity. Sada Abe had strangled her lover to death in the small hours of May 18, carved her name into his arm in blood, and spent the subsequent forty-eight hours shopping, attending a cinema, and writing farewell letters at a series of Tokyo inns. She had planned, with characteristic precision, to kill herself one week later. Her arrest photograph, published across Japan's major newspapers, showed a woman who appeared almost serene. The nation could not look away. The case became known as the 'Abe Sada panic,' flooded police switchboards with thousands of false sightings, and inspired satirists to compare it to a military coup that had shaken the government just months before. Here was a life shaped by assault, exploitation, and a system that offered women like her no protection and no language for what had been done to them — and here, finally, was the story they couldn't stop reading.
