(upbeat music)
So on Ninja Ninja Japan, I
don’t generally talk about things
where people die, because the feeling of
the show is supposed to be very flippant.
Like I make fun of whatever
I’m talking about, I give advice
to criminals and stuff, so I
don’t tend to talk about murder,
but that doesn’t mean murder
doesn’t have an inch of pen.
See me be on the other hand, this
is where I talk about whatever I want,
it’s experimental, I do
weird things, that’s great.
There have been two
murder cases recently in
Japan, and I thought
they were very interesting
and getting into the details
of these have been kind
of fun, so I thought it’d
be worth talking about.
In 2021 in November, at midnight, a
man made a call to emergency services.
And he said, there is a centipede in the
room, and someone isn’t serious condition.
And what he meant was, in Japan,
there are centipedes in their poisonous,
so if you actually get bit by one,
most of the time is not gonna kill you,
but there are people who have
reactions to any sort of venom,
so like people who are
allergic to bees and whatnot,
it can kill you, so this is
stronger than most other things.
So this guy was saying, I
have a friend in the room,
he’s in bad shape, he
was bitten by a centipede.
Paramedics arrive, there are two men
in the room, one who’s in cardiac arrest,
and then the other one who was the caller,
who claimed to be Diesuke Numba’s brother.
He had both health insurance cards, and
he showed them to the ambulance group.
Now health insurance cards in
Japan, they’re just a blue card,
they just have information on
them, they don’t have a picture.
So it’s not like a driver’s
license, it is sort of
identification, but it’s not
quite the same identification
as like a driver’s license or something
else, because it has no picture on it.
So it’s very hard to
connect this to people.
They took the patient to the
hospital, and then they called his family.
Pretty reasonable thing to do.
So the family shows up, the mother comes in
and they want them to check
on their son who it has died.
And the mother says,
immediately, this is not Diesuke.
So there’s already now a
significant suspicion in the case.
Numba had taken a
600 million yen insurance
policy out on himself
a few months before.
The victim, his name was Ando, and they
had met through religious solicitations.
So this Ando guy came to his house
and said, like, come join our religion.
There’s actually a lot of
sort of small cults in Japan,
so there’s actually kind
of thing happens fairly
regularly where they come
and they come to your house
and they say like, “Hey, just come
out and hang out, have a good time.
” It doesn’t mean much.
And then they find out you
want to paint everything white.
There is a group in Japan, and they
believe that the solution to every problem
would be to paint every surface,
including all of nature white.
So if you paint all the trees
white, they’re not going to die.
Everything will improve afterwards.
So that was one of those ones that’s
been on the fringe as far as I’m concerned.
They were hanging out.
They became friends.
The articles I read refer to them
as brothers and they’re not brothers.
So I think they were
brothers in the religious sense,
but not brothers in
the actual familial sense.
So this guy came up with a plan.
I’m going to take an
insurance plan out on
myself, and then I’m
going to have myself die,
and then I’m going to
collect the insurance plan.
Well, wait a minute, that doesn’t work.
I’m going to need something
else to happen here.
There was a lot of other
things that were also suspicious.
So this Ando guy, when they do the autopsy,
they find like he’s full of liquor.
He didn’t drink.
The police think that while Ando wasn’t
conscious, he was injected with vodka.
So it seems like they had had
some sort of drink or something else.
He’d put sleeping pills into the drink.
The guy’d fallen asleep
while he was unconscious.
He injected him with
vodka, which is why he was
essentially, his blood
alcohol level was so high.
The death was unrelated
to a centipede bite.
So there’s another sort of
question that actually didn’t
answer was, was there a
centipede in the room at all?
So did the actual, did
the guy actually get bitten?
Did he go through all the steps?
So he wanted to make it
look like this was an accident.
Like a centipede had bit this guy.
He had a negative reaction and he died.
He’d clearly hadn’t done the research.
And this actually comes up in the
court case that comes up very soon.
Because first of all, you
would want a centipede there.
You would want a centipede bite.
You would want to make
sure that the reaction looked
like an actual centipede bite
for this plan to go through.
You also would need to make sure
that they don’t immediately identify
it’s not your body if
it’s your insurance plan.
The reason he wanted it to be a
centipede bite was because for some reason,
the insurance would go
from 550 million yen to 630
million yen if it was a
death by centipede or wasp.
So there was some claws in there.
If it was like a bug bite that
kills you, you get more money.
Pay out from the insurance.
This plan was sloppy.
We can actually say this pretty fairly
because the judge actually
called it a sloppy plan.
Number was found,
the guy I actually did it.
So we’ll go back to my other point.
He wanted to make it look like the guy
had been bitten by a centipede and died.
So he injected him with vodka.
Anyone who’s watched CSI,
which I watched like 13 seasons
of that, you would know that
injecting someone with vodka
isn’t going to show up
as like death by centipede.
Having a bunch of sleeping pills in
your system is also very suspicious.
Doesn’t imply death by centipede.
What he would need to do was go and find
out what does death by centipede look like,
what does it do to your
body and try to recreate that?
The sleeping pills actually
would have been fine.
‘Cause you say, oh, well, he
has a lot of trouble sleeping.
He took some sleeping pills.
He went to sleep and
then the centipede bit him.
You could get away with that.
Injecting him with vodka is
not going to have any effect
like you would actually want if you
wanted to mimic a centipede bite.
The police did a search of his computer.
It was found to have a search
history of identity switch, life
insurance, autopsy, sleeping
pills, double murder, untraceable,
wasp, death, insurance
payout, alcohol, lethal dose.
So I don’t know if those were exactly
in order, but when the police searched,
they actually just found
like essentially a grocery list
of if I want to fake a merch, if I want
to murder someone and make it look
like something else,
here’s the laundry list.
Here’s the list.
It’s the difference between
a laundry list and grocery list.
I shouldn’t have said that.
Now my brain just went to that.
But his search history
was essentially a list
of all the things you would
need to search for to try to
fake death by something else
after you’ve murdered someone.
The suspiciously close
timeline of getting an insurance
policy also would have tricked
the alarm bells across the board.
This guy clearly did not
come up with a good plan.
He bought the insurance plan.
He didn’t have any plan to change the face.
So I’ve seen the movie face off.
It’s a pretty old movie.
But like that’s the thing.
Once the body goes into the hospital,
they’re going to get someone
to come in and identify the body.
Like let’s not just ignore
it, like you can throw his
wallet away so there’s
no like picture ID and stuff.
They’re gonna get a family
member to come in and say,
yes, that’s my son or
no, that’s not my son.
So if you’re going to do it, if you’re
gonna try to pretend that you just died,
you’re gonna need your mom, or
your husband or wife, your partner,
or someone in your family, to
come in and vouch that this body
that is not you is you for
this plan to even move forward.
But if your mom comes in and
immediately goes, well, that’s not my son,
then you’ve already hit
your sort of first roadblock.
And that actually shows
like how sloppy this plan was.
I do enjoy that the judge called it sloppy,
and that’s why that phrase
is kind of stuck in my head.
He was assigned to 30 years in prison.
He wasn’t given life
because he wouldn’t have
received the payout
because the plan was so poor.
So essentially his sentence was
brought down from life in prison
to 30 years because he was
so bad at planning a murder.
And he was never gonna get the money.
Japanese legal system
is different philosophically
from the ones in
the West, that I know.
I don’t know much about the
UK, but I know America from TV,
and I know the Canadian one from
living in Canada for a very long time.
They would never pay like emotional damage.
So you see all these cases
where it’s like this happened
and it caused my first thought
was the McDonald’s burn.
So the lady put the cup of
McDonald’s coffee in between her legs
and she drove away
and spilled it on herself.
She got third degree, like super bad burns.
And then she sued McDonald’s.
Now the suit in Japan would have been
for the injury, and barely anything else.
The suit in America,
millions and millions dollars
for the emotional damage that was done
because you were burned and now you don’t feel
safe going to a McDonald’s
or something like that.
So that’s one of the
differences between the court’s
illegal systems is that if
you sue someone in Japan,
you can get your money,
you can get the base funds,
you can maybe get a little bit more
for the trouble you went through.
But at the end of the day,
that’s all you’re gonna get.
So the payouts in Japanese
court are much, much
smaller than they would
be in other countries.
So it’s something to be aware of.
And that sort of helps
with understanding
this punishment of
30 years instead of life.
Because he’s like, he
wasn’t gonna get any money.
He wasn’t gonna get any
of the stuff he was gonna do.
He wasn’t gonna be successful.
30 years in prison for
the murder itself, that’s it.
But as I’ve sat on Ninja
Ninja’s Japan when we do
almost any crime story, planning
is the most important part.
And this guy was clearly
just not a good platter.
That’s not the only murder
that’s happened in Japan.
There was a girl, she’s about 17 years old.
She takes a picture and a
ramen shop and she posts it online.
One of the girls in the picture
who’s like 2021 at the time,
she’s angry that this other girl
posted a picture of her that’s online.
I saw the picture, it’s
not particularly offensive.
It’s just her slurping noodles
and some guys around her.
You know, flash in the
peace sign and being goofy.
Basically just being young
adults and having a good time.
She was very angry about this.
And she said this was an unauthorized
picture that she had posted online.
So she started contacting this
girl, essentially threatening her,
trying to bully her, trying to get
her to come and give her 100,000 yen.
So she demanded 100,000 yen
compensation for the picture.
She tried to get her to transfer the
money electronically, but that failed.
A lot of things have like a limit.
So I wouldn’t be able to
from my phone transfer,
let’s say more than
50,000 yen at a time.
So they ended up meeting
at a roadside station
that were three girls
together and the victim.
There was a 20 year old, a
19 year old, and a 16 year old.
The 20 year old is the leader.
She’s actually known as
kind of a local gang leader,
or she at least has
influence in these circles.
They put the 17 year old
into a car and they drove
her to a remote area
with a suspension bridge.
They get her out on the
suspension bridge and then
they start taking videos
over her with her phone.
And they get her to get down and do
the kneeling bow as a, say, I’m sorry.
This is a very Japanese thing.
You get down on your
knees and you do a bow.
You say I’m sorry.
She’s crying.
She’s terrified.
They make her take off her clothes.
They get her to balance
on the suspension bridge.
So she’s basically
sitting on the edge of the
suspension bridge with
her legs on the outside.
There is no indication that
she was pushed, but suspension
bridges, I mean, they’re
essentially just ropes.
So she’s balancing on that, precariously.
And then she falls.
She falls to her death.
And then they throw the phone after her.
And I think this was an
attempt for them to try
to get rid of the evidence
that they had filmed
of them making her strip
down her clothes, making
her get down and do the
bowings to say I’m sorry.
Then they disappear.
Now it turns out there’s a
whole other side to this story.
So you got detectives.
The detectives, you know,
they got a decompress.
We’ve all seen the movies with detectives.
There’s cop bars.
And so cops in Japan aren’t that different.
They all have cop bars.
There’s a lot of bars in Japan.
So there’s going to be a
lot of people going to bars.
There’s going to be bars
close to a police station.
A lot of cops go to that bar.
A lot of bars in Japan, they hire
young attractive women to flirt, talk to.
This is a very normal thing in Japan.
So there’s a bar that’s
very popular with the police.
And there’s a detective that goes there.
And he starts to drink with
a young 20 year old woman.
He starts having a good time with them.
And they get intimate.
And this is married man, has a family.
But this 20 year old is offering
him a whole level of excitement.
Maybe he doesn’t know in his life.
Now, the fact that there’s a
bunch of cops go to this bar.
And this guy is getting very, very
personal with this 20 year old girl.
So it’s clearly struck
a chord with someone.
Like someone was like, “Ah,
something’s a little off here.
” So someone videoed him
drinking with the young girl.
Now that itself, she’s 20.
That’s legal drinking age.
There’s not actually a problem there.
But it’s suspicious in one of the
cops is like something’s off here.
So I’m going to film it.
Now, this 20 year old, it’s not by
accident that I’m talking about it.
This is the girl, this girl from the bar
is the girl who committed this murder.
Now, how it works in
Japan is the first division
of Japanese police,
investigates murders.
The second division
investigates financial crimes.
This case, this murder
case, was assigned to
the second division,
the financial crimes,
with the detective in
charge being the detective
who just happened
to be hanging out with
this random girl at the random
bar where the police hung out.
So that was very suspicious already.
It’s actually weird that they even got this
far before someone actually said something.
It makes me think that Hokkaido,
this all happened in Hokkaido.
Hokkaido being its own
individual island and being so small.
It makes me think it might actually
have its own sort of internal set of rules,
and it’s sort of like the police
protect the police and stuff.
So the second division,
which investigates financial
crime, was taking care of in
charge of this murder case.
Now, what is actually happening
here is, is the guy covering it up?
Well, he’s not really able to cover up.
They found the smashed phone, and it
has video of the girl being stripped and
being forced to
apologize, and it seems like
they threw it off to try
to destroy the phone.
So there’s too much
evidence to actually deny it.
But putting this detective who has a personal
relationship with the 20 year old girl
in charge of the case means
it’s now at risk at court.
So in court, it could all
be thrown out because
this guy essentially
has tainted the case.
This girl might get off because
she helped this cop get off.
And it’s very, very weird sort of situation
because every single step of the case,
every single step of this thing is like
you would go like, how is this not noticed?
How is this not become an issue right away?
How is that guy who
doesn’t investigate murders?
How has he even put in charge of a murder?
He does financial crime.
Why has this happened?
Why didn’t no one asked why this happened?
So I think there was a lot of
cops keeping their mouth shut.
But then there was at least
one who was like, uh, this is
already just him drinking
with his girls already a lot.
And then the murder comes out.
Now it’s all blown up.
This case is ongoing right now.
So I’m actually trying to keep track
of this to see where it actually ends up.
If the policeman actually
gets in trouble, if the
girl actually gets arrested
and gets in trouble,
if she actually gets punished for her crime
or if this whole case just gets thrown out
because she had an intimate
relationship with a police officer.
But then it also means
that that police officer
probably went out of his way
to get that case assigned to him.
So he’s clearly he should go to jail too.
I actually think he
should be punished almost
to the same degree as
the girl who murdered
because he’s trying to cover
up the murder and get her off it.
I keep using the phrase
get off and I gotta stop that.
[MUSIC]
[MUSIC]