For the first time in three years, Japan has carried out the execution of a man who has been on death-row since his sentencing for capital punishment back in 2020.

Takahiro Shiraishi murdered nine people – mainly young women between the ages of 15 and 26 – during a 2017 horrifying spree that earned him the the tag of the “Twitter killer”.

The then 30-year-old lured his victims to his apartment after gaining acquaintance with then through the social media platform – now known as X.

They were mostly suicidal individuals who Shiraishi had promised to help “ease their pain” but in reality he killed them all by strangulation, before proceeding to dismember them.

The murders came to light in the October of that year when police found body parts in a flat in the Japanese city of Zama, near the capital Tokyo, when they were searching for one of the victims.

The nine dismembered bodies were discovered in coolers and tool boxes when officers visited his flat, which was dubbed by media outlets as a “house of horrors”.

Hundreds of people showed up at his verdict hearing in December 2020 despite there only being 16 seats available in the public gallery.

Such was the reaction to the case it prompted a change by Twitter, which amended its rules to state users should not “promote or encourage suicide or self-harm”.

His execution by hanging came less than a year after the world’s longest-serving death-row inmate Iwao Hakamada was acquitted in the country amid growing calls for the abolition of the ultimate measure.

Japan is one of the few developed nations to retain capital punishment; indeed they and the United States are the only two members of the Group of Seven industrialised economies to retain the death penalty.

Grisly discovery

The gruesome serial killings were uncovered by chance on Halloween night 2017, when police found dismembered body parts in Shiraishi’s flat while they were searching for a missing 23-year-old woman, who turned out to be one of the victims.

After she had gone missing, her brother accessed her Twitter account and alerted police to a suspicious handle, leading them to the killer’s residence.

Tricked into meeting

It later transpired that the female victims had all expressed a desire to take their own lives on Twitter and Shiraishi had told them he could help them die, and in some cases claimed he would kill himself alongside them.

His Twitter profile at that time contained the sentence: “I want to help people who are really in pain; please DM [direct message] me anytime.”

Horrific end

Once at his flat, the twisted killer would first of all rape the women, before strangling them and finally dismembering them all and storing their body parts in cool boxes.

The one man who he murdered was understood to be a friend of one of the victims and had been seeking her whereabouts; so Shiraishi silenced him in the only way he knew.

None of the names of those murdered were revealed to protect their privacy.

No remorse shown

Whilst prosecutors sought the death penalty for Shiraishi, his lawyers argued for the lesser charge of “murder with consent”, claiming his victims had given their permission to be killed and also called for an assessment of his mental state.

However, in a remarkable turn of events at the trial, Shiraishi disputed his own defence team’s version and said he had killed WITHOUT the victims’ consent.

Judge had no doubts

Judge Naokuni Yano, who delivered the verdict, called the crimes “cunning and cruel” and found the defendant “fully responsible” for his actions.

“None of the nine victims consented to be killed, including silent consent; it is extremely grave that the lives of nine young people were taken away and the dignity of the victims was trampled upon.”

Execution “had to happen”

The order for Shiraishi’s execution came from Japan’s Justice Minister, Keisuke Suzuki, who said the killer acted “for the genuinely selfish reason of satisfying his own sexual and financial desires”.

He added that Shiraishi’s crimes included: “robbery, rape, murder, the destruction of a corpse and abandonment of a corpse” and therefore after “much careful consideration, I ordered the execution.”

Serious crime meets serious punishment

The last execution was in 2022 when Tomohiro Kato was hanged for a 2008 attack in which he rammed a rented two-tonne truck into a crowd in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, before getting out and going on a stabbing spree, following which seven people lost their lives.

The highest-profile executions of recent times were those of Shoko Asahara, together with 12 former members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, back in 2018. Aum Shinrikyo orchestrated the 1995 sarin gas attacks on Tokyo’s subway system, killing 14 people and making thousands more seriously ill.

Too ill to attend “freedom” verdict

Iwao Hakamada had been the world’s longest-serving death-row inmate until he was freed last year after 56 years, whilst awaiting his own execution. A retrial had unearthed that police had falsified and planted evidence against him over the murders of his boss, wife and two children back in the sixties.

He was an 88-year-old when the sentence was overturned, but the years taken away from him sadly (and almost inevitably) affected his mental health, meaning he was unable to attend the court to receive the decision in person.

Japanese still massively in favour of law

Nevertheless, there remains an overwhelming public support for the practice of capital punishment, demonstrated in a 2024 Japanese government survey  from which 83% of 1,800 respondents indicated that they saw the death penalty as “unavoidable”.

Still many awaiting their fatal punishment

There are still over 100 prisoners awaiting their death sentences to be carried out and although the law stipulates that executions must be carried out within six months of a final verdict – after appeals are exhausted – in reality most inmates are left in solitary confinement for years, even decades, uncertain if it will actually be undertaken.