(upbeat music)
Now, this story starts back in 2019.
And back in 2019, I followed
this story very closely.
It was not because it’s a
murder or it’s a salacious story.
It was actually the interesting part to me
was how the internet
reacted to this heinous event.
So the basic story is that back in 2019,
this girl attempts to kill her boyfriend.
She gets sentenced to attempted
murder and she goes to prison.
The internet reacted unusually
because she was attractive.
And that was the main reason.
You have someone who’s
committed a horrible act
and is getting treated very differently from
other people because they’re attractive.
The reason this is
sparked interest in me again
is because just recently,
she was released from prison.
And on Tokyo reporter,
they released a transcript
of the trial, some of the
questions and answers from 2019,
which is sort of an insight into
Japanese courts that we don’t normally get.
So I wanna go over a bit of the history of
the story, then we’ll read the transcript.
And just remember the
whole time Japanese men
on the internet are
white-niting this girl
so hard, they’re saying
that she’s innocent,
she shouldn’t be punished
because she’s too beautiful.
If she had been with me,
this wouldn’t have happened.
That was always the
part that was rolling around
in the back of my head, is that this
woman attempted to kill another human being
and they were willing to let
it go because she was cute.
And I think what made it one
of the things that made it worse
was the media was calling
her a real life yandere.
So that is the character in anime who
doesn’t show outward expressions of emotion.
She gets very jealous on the inside.
She loves very passionately.
In some anime, they would make it that
she would kill for the person she loves.
So they’ve made it already,
like she’s a character
in anime, appealing
to these anime nerds.
These guys who way, way overreacted.
And again, these people
who started making fan art
and started doing stuff on the internet
to say, she’s amazing, she’s wonderful,
she shouldn’t be punished
because she’s beautiful.
And she was just doing
this wonderful thing.
She was killing because of her jealousy,
but her jealousy was an
indication of how strongly she loves
and if she loved me, then this
would never have happened.
Let’s get back into reality,
characterizing someone
as an anime character would
certainly increase your interaction
rate on the internet, which is
what these people really want.
But it also puts up this
strange sort of relationship,
the meta relationship,
the internet creates,
where these people are like truly going
forward and attempting to defend her.
They set up like a GoFundMe style thing
to try to get her money for her defense.
They were trying to get her not
punished for attempted murder.
And the media didn’t help by creating this
atmosphere around her of this character.
And she had an Instagram
and that of course got blown up
because everyone wanted to
see more pictures of the pretty girl.
And in that, she did cosplay
of Yandere characters.
And they’re like, wow, this is just her
showing who she really is on the inside.
So I think really the thing
I was interested in was
all the bits of the story,
of course, because we’re all
interested in these sort
of like real crime stories.
But then there was also the
secondary aspect of this crime
and the person who committed it
were being fetishized the whole time.
And the internet audience was eating it up.
So you have Yuka Takoka, she
was working in a bar, a girls bar.
She became a manager, so she
was obviously quite good at it.
Girls bars, basically guys
come in, they pay money, they
pick a girl, the girl will
sit with them, they’ll talk.
That’s the base standard.
I mean, it implies a
certain level of sexuality.
There’s all these other like
other aspects to the relationship
of a hostess club where, you
know, you’ll go out on dates.
The dates are nonsexual,
but the man is expected to
give presents and pay money
and buy expensive things.
One of the scams, I don’t know if it’s a
scam because the people are going for it.
They kind of know what happens as well.
Is that on my birthday, let’s
say, I would go to the five men
who love me the most who come
to are my most regular customers.
And I tell them, I want
this very specific watch.
I want this very specific bag.
And I get five of those and then
I can return four and then keep
the one and say, “Oh, look
at this bag, you gave me.
I love it so much.
” But then I also got the cash
money for the other four bags.
So this is the kind
of relationship that is
created within the
hostess club atmosphere.
This is also what happens on the host side,
which is men basically manipulating
women into giving them money
for the exact same thing
that sort of may fake meta
love relationship, which
is what her boyfriend did.
Her boyfriend’s name was Phoenix Luna.
I can’t be his real name, but
that’s actually a pretty good name.
You know, I’m going to
name an anime character.
I might name him Phoenix Luna now.
Both the men and the
woman in this relationship
had this job where they
created relationships with
other people in order to
extrapolate money from them.
They moved in together.
Now, she was looking, this
is the version of the story.
She was looking at Luna’s
phone while he was in the shower
and she found pictures of him
with other women at the bar.
Now, remember, that’s his job to go
to the bar, talk to women, sit with them.
They take selfies, whatever.
They try to put on this great atmosphere.
They just do this all the
time because that’s his job.
His job is to make these women
actually fall in love with him
so they will come back more, spend
more money, give him more money.
That’s how he makes money.
She does the same thing.
Maybe it’s at a manager level.
She doesn’t do it so directly anymore, but
she teaches the other girls how to do it.
She tries to develop these
relationships so that the
bar makes more money, so
she can make more money.
Like, this is not something
that should be a surprise to her,
but she immediately connected if
she’s taking pictures with these women,
then he must be sleeping with these
women, and she got insanely jealous.
This is another part of
the Yandade character,
attributes that
everyone was playing into,
thinking this was so great that she was
fulfilling this fantasy character so much.
So, in Takahoka’s mind, this meant
that he was having sex with them.
So, she waited until 350 in the
mornings that he would be dead asleep.
She got a knife from the kitchen,
and she stabbed him in stomach.
He woke up and he struggled, and he managed
to get to the elevator before he collapsed.
She, for some reason,
brought him down to the lobby,
so she must have actually pulled
him out of the elevator as well.
There’s a bit in there that’s sort of
unknown, but basically it was discovered.
He was laying on the floor, bleeding out.
She’s sitting on the
floor, smoking a cigarette,
and talking on her cell phone in
sort of pajamas and like slippers.
She, her legs and her
arms were covered in blood.
There’s blood all over the lobby for.
She wasn’t calling the police.
She wasn’t trying to save his life.
She was just sitting
there talking on the phone.
I don’t actually remember if it
was revealed who she was talking to.
A passerby came and saw all
the blood and called the police.
So, that is how this was
discovered in the first place.
The photos in the lobby
are what made her famous.
Now, the most famous picture is her
sitting on the lobby floor on the phone.
She’s wearing sort of a black shirt
and not much else, some slippers.
And so, of course, the fetishization
of this person began immediately there
because she has her legs
out and she’s covered in blood.
And it’s exciting and sexy and dangerous.
And that’s the bit everyone wants to see.
And she’s just ignoring
the police at this point.
So, she’s sitting there
talking on her phone,
ignoring the police
officers who are there.
The shocking bit to me was the
boyfriend is sitting in the background.
He’s just bleeding out.
Like, he’s going to die if someone
doesn’t take some emergency action.
The police don’t seem to be making
any moves to actually make that happen.
I don’t actually know what
the proper procedure is there.
I assume separate the two and immediately
start performing first aid on the man
and arrest the woman since
she seems to not be injured.
We don’t know what happened
at this point if you’re the police.
You don’t know if he attacked
her and she fought back.
You don’t know if she attacked him.
So separate them and start giving
the person a news injured some first aid.
But that’s the picture
that set off the internet.
It set off the story.
It set off this because
she’s an attractive woman.
All these sort of white
night guys coming in.
Crowd funding her defense to
try to get her off this very clearly.
She’s guilty of attempted murder.
Her statement was I intended to die
after watching him die from stabbing.
Basically her statement
was once he died on the floor.
So this is where my
actual question comes in.
Why did she take him to the lobby?
If she was just waiting for
him to bleed out and die.
Once he died, she
was going to kill herself.
There didn’t seem to be any
reason to take him to the lobby.
And it seemed weird that she
started calling someone on the phone.
That is all information that
is lost to history at this point.
Then the article started
coming out and they
started calling her the
two beautiful criminal
because she’s cute. And by Japanese
standards, she hits sort of ticks every box.
She’s cute and sexy.
And that’s sort of this whole
atmosphere of attractiveness.
And then they add on
this other layer this yandere
sort of anime thing
they’ve thrown into it.
Again, the media threw
this into it right away.
They leaned into this
hard, setting off this
whole crazy fetishization
of this person.
So this was published on Tokyo
Reporter and Seemic B is a podcast.
So of course, I’m going to read it to you.
But if you’re on the YouTube
channel, you can read along with it.
What follows is a transcription of
some of the questions by her lawyers in it.
Readers learned the details of the
innocent how it happened, how it ended,
and her later regret
reports news post seven.
This is back from December 9, 2019.
Let’s go back to the time of the incident.
After Runa arrived at around 3 p.m.
on May 23rd,
we put up the curtains
together, talked and had sex.
What did you talk about?
Apparently, he had made a
reservation at a hair salon that night,
and his boss had asked him why he
was meeting with me outside the bar.
Now, this is one of the things
about being a host or hostess.
If you meet outside the bar and you start
dating or forming an actual relationship,
that will actually take
money away from the bar.
So they want you to keep the customers
coming into the bar as often as possible.
So having these relationships outside
can actually be very dangerous for the bar.
Maybe you form a real enough relationship
that you stop working at the bar,
and then he loses two
streams of income because
you’re not there to
attract more people,
but then also, the people aren’t
coming in to give the money.
Why would your boss say something to
you if you met Takoka outside the bar?
Because if I meet him outside the
bar, I would stop coming to his bar.
Well, that’s actually what I just said.
After that, he fell asleep,
so I went to the kitchen,
and my desire to kill him
and die remained the same.
So I grabbed a knife from
the kitchen and went to him.
So again, this is, she saw pictures
on his phone of him doing his job,
sitting in the bar, talking to
other women, taking selfies,
and she immediately
extrapolated that they must
be having sex as well,
so he was cheating on her.
What was that knife?
On the morning of May 23rd, I
bought it at Don Quixote in Okubo.
After work for household purposes,
I had no intention of killing him.
I just bought it for household purposes.
How did you hold the knife?
This is again, that bits that, for
me, isn’t outside are very interesting,
because I don’t know what kind of
questions they ask in a Japanese court.
I don’t know what is
important, what is not important,
when they’re talking about an attempted
murder, because this is all new to me.
I held the knife in both hands and stabbed
him in the stomach as he was sleeping.
What was he wearing?
He was wearing a pair of pants.
Where were you positioned?
I was standing in the middle
of Runa’s torso on his left side.
How did you hold the knife?
So he’s asking it again.
I held it with both hands.
What direction was the blade facing?
I don’t remember.
I stabbed Runa in the stomach.
What angle was the blade at?
He was a right angle to him.
How many times did you stab him once?
So this is trying to make sure
that all the details are accurate.
So there is some, perhaps,
suspicion that maybe she’s just
saying this, maybe she’s
covering up for someone else.
So she has to get all the
details right to actually prove
that she was the one who
actually tried to kill the guy,
even though she’s admitted to it
very directly and very obviously.
After you stabbed him, he tried to get up.
So I got on top of him to
stop him from getting up.
And he tried to let me go by choking me.
And he tried to let me go by choking me.
So he tried to get her
off of him by choking her.
What kind of conversation
did you have with Runa?
He said, “Okay, I love you.
So let’s stay together forever.
” So I said, “I love you.
So let’s die together.
” He put the knife
under the bed and said,
“I won’t tell the police,
but I’ll call an ambulance.
” So I took his mobile phone.
So he’s now in a strange negotiation phase
where he’s trying to, he’s been stabbed.
He’s trying to get away from
her so he can get to the hospital.
He’s saying, “I won’t
hold this against you.
I won’t call the cops.
” We’ll just say it was an
accident, something like that.
She doesn’t believe him.
She just wants them both to die.
Why did you put the knife there?
When I stabbed him in
the stomach and saw the
pain on his face, I
felt really regretful.
And by that point, I think I had no
longer any intention of killing him.
So this is in the moment when it’s real.
She suddenly thinks this was a bad idea.
I regret it.
I had this must actually happen so much.
What happened after you
took the mobile phone away?
He got up and went to the front door so
I chased after him, telling him not to go.
He hit me, punching and kicking
with his arms, legs, and face.
That’s when my contacts came out.
So I went to get my glasses.
I also took my cigarettes and
cell phone and chased after him.
That is a strange detail.
But again, very realistic
because I bet every time she
leaves the house, she grabs
her cigarettes and cell phone.
That’s just a natural thing.
I always just reach for and grab my keys
to the house before I walk out the door.
And I bet even in an emergency situation,
I would instinctively
just do the same thing.
So I think that’s probably
why this panic, the stress,
she just did what she always does,
grab her cigarettes and cell phone.
The lawyer asked the same question though.
Why the cigarettes?
I don’t know.
But I found myself holding a cigarette.
I found Runa lying at the entrance.
I was so regretful
that I called the police.
Now, that may not be true.
This is her testimony from 2019.
It’s actually said that she
isn’t the one who called
the cops, that it was a
passerby who called the cops.
Now, I, again, I’m getting all
my information from the internet.
It’s all secondhand.
I have no idea what is actually accurate.
Why did you call the police yourself?
When I saw Runa’s blood
and how he looked and pain,
I really regretted it and realized
that I had done something terrible.
I didn’t want him to die and I was so scared
of him dying that I called the police.
You told the police something different.
You said to them, “I heard a woman scream
when I was going down the emergency stairs,
so I knew I couldn’t
die with him.
” I was really panicked
at the time and I said
yes to what the police
and prosecutor said.
But what I really regret
most is having stabbed him.
So she’s saying, in the
moment, she called the police.
She just started saying whatever she
felt she needed to say in the moment.
I think that’s a very
realistic answer, to be honest.
Please tell us about
when you called the police.
They first asked me if it was a crime
or an accident and I answered crime.
It seemed like they
thought it was a prank, so
I told them the same
thing over and over again.
This is an interesting reaction
because I think in other countries,
if you say I just stabbed someone,
it’s never going to be taken as a prank.
But Japan being such a generally saved
country, the police probably are like,
“We want to make sure this is real
crime before we take our time on it.
” What happened?
I told the my name, Runa’s
name, that I had stabbed him,
that I was at the entrance, and
that we needed an ambulance.
I explained what I had done and
made sure everyone asked me.
Why did you stab him?
I liked him and I wanted to be with him.
I’m sorry.
I did something selfish.
When did you start to
think this around June?
I thought so after hearing
about Runa’s situation
from my lawyer and hearing about
my mother and father’s situation.
So Runa was in a coma for five days
and it took him five days to wake up.
He’d been stabbed.
He’d actually pierced his liver
and so he wasn’t able to eat.
He was actually having a lot of trouble.
So there’s a lot of rehabilitation.
At this time, he was probably
still just starting his rehabilitation.
It was very tough recovery.
He did do a full recovery though.
What was Runa’s situation?
The scars were deep,
reaching all the way to his liver
and he had been in a coma
for five days without waking up.
What about your parents?
When they came to
visit, they were very thin.
Their hair was turning gray.
They were crying and
with so many media outlets
at our house, they
were almost neurotic.
So again, this was a massive news story.
Everyone wanted as much
information as possible.
They were trying to make
this as grandiose as they could
because this pretty
woman with this yandere
atmosphere, we want to
create the story of the century
so they were just all over
everybody in the story.
The parents, of course, are
going to be hounded by the media.
Is that both your father or mother?
Both my father and mother.
As time went on, I became
more and more scared
that I had done something
so horrible and I felt so sorry,
so scared and so sorry that I
had nearly taken someone’s life.
I also caused trouble for my parents.
What about Runa?
I wrote a letter of
apology to Runa in June.
I said I was truly sorry that I
would no longer be involved with him
and mentioned compensation and
had it delivered through my lawyer.
And what about while you were in custody?
I was thinking about Runa and my parents,
making sure they were eating
properly, getting enough sleep.
My mother came over at
least three times a week,
but my father was busy with work,
so he came about twice a week.
What did we talk about?
We talked about a lot of things,
like the incidents, the procedures
from moving out of the house and our cat.
What about Runa?
I heard they settled for five million yen.
Five million yen is not very much money.
Like it would be the average salary for a
year in Japan is four to five million yen.
So it’s the upper end of a
very average salary in Japan.
I heard that they had submitted a petition.
What about the five million
yen settlement money?
My mother prepared it for me.
This is interesting because
I’ve actually read the story.
I reviewed some of the details.
After Phoenix had made his recovery, he
actually came out with a statement saying
he didn’t have a grudge against her,
he didn’t hold anything against her.
He wasn’t necessarily saying
he was going to get back
together with her, but he was
saying I’m not holding a grudge.
I’m not angry at her for what she did.
What kind of exchange did
you have with your mother?
She told me I prepared it for your future.
Your desire to return the
money is enough for me.
You don’t have to pay me back.
What did you think?
I want to work and save five
million yen, earn more money,
pay it back, and make my
mom and dad’s lives easier.
How did you spend your
time while out on bail?
I took a training course called
initial training for care workers.
I want to be useful to
someone in the future.
I took it because I wanted
to be like my mother.
My mother is a certified care worker.
She’s a great person and
I want to be just like her.
Is that a qualification?
It’s a qualification equivalent
to a second class helper
and allows you to work
in homes and the like.
How often did you go about three days
a week for about six hours each time?
The lectures were really fun.
I learned a lot of new things
and it was very educational.
I want to take practical
training and study
become a certified
care worker in the future.
Did you get the qualification?
Yes.
I heard that you need practical experience.
So what will you do about finding a job?
I would like to find a job through
Hellowork and start working.
Hellowork is sort of a very
normal job search place.
I don’t know if it’s from the government,
but it’s a search.
It helps you find jobs in Japan.
When you enter society, you will probably
find people who know about the incident.
How do you plan to respond to them?
I haven’t thought about how
to respond in any particular way.
It’s a crime that I committed.
Should I just let it go?
Rather than just
letting go, I think about it
deeply and make efforts
to a tone for my crime.
Can you endure?
I will endure.
There’s a little bit more
listening to your mother’s story.
It really broke my heart seeing
my mother crying so much.
I didn’t know how to
apologize, even though
this crime couldn’t
possibly be the fault of
a parent, so no matter how
much it was painful for me,
I decided to stay with her so
that I could make her life easier.
And what about Runa?
No matter how much I apologize,
I can never apologize enough.
It’s a crime I can’t a tone for
even if I spend my entire life doing it.
I don’t think I’ll be
forgiven even if I apologize.
It may seem strange and weird for me to say
this, but I’m really glad that I’m alive.
I’m truly sorry.
I am doing a very Canadian story now.
Didn’t realize that.
Now that I’m actually listening to myself
speak, I realize just how Canadian I am.
So she got three and a half years in
prison and she just got out recently.
She’s still active on
Instagram, X and YouTube.
What does she do on Instagram and YouTube?
Well, her YouTube, the most recent
one, she has 10,000 subscribers by the way.
The most recent one is her
doing a variety of different cosplays.
So it starts out with
her with not much makeup
on and how to put the
makeup on and then it’s
applying more makeup and then some
wigs and stuff and this is two hours long.
So I don’t know if she’s
going to be making enough
money off this, but
again, the people who are
watching this, it’s a question of are
they interested in her as a cosplayer,
as a beauty influencer
or are they interested in
her because of his dark
criminal background that
makes her attractive in a
different and unique way.
She’s not doing care work. So what she was
saying in the transcript, who just read,
it’s not that she was lying.
She didn’t follow through on what she said.
I think in that thing, she’s trying to
say, “Look, I want to be a better person.
I want to help society.
” That’s not necessarily a
bad thing that she didn’t do it.
I think again, I have a negative
view of influencer, which is
ironic because I make podcasts
and YouTube videos and stuff.
It’s interesting that the guy has
no grudge or he says he doesn’t.
I’m sure he hasn’t met her again since.
So I guess it’s easy to say,
you’re not holding a grudge
if you just never plan on
seeing someone again, just
how I live most of my life.
So for me, the salaciousness of the
murder wasn’t enough to get me interested.
I read about murder all
the time because I read
about the news all the
time and there’s a lot
of real-life crime in the news all
the time. I think it was the immediate
fetishization of her as a character.
Not even as a real person as a character,
but the fact that she
was a hostess played
into it, the fact that
her boyfriend was a host
played into it, the fact
that all these people
on the internet inserted
themselves into that
relationship, so many of
the guys on the internet
saying that if it was me,
this wouldn’t have happened.
I’m wondering now that she’s built her
influencer sphere. She’s on the Instagram,
she’s on YouTube. Are
the people there holding
out that small hope that
they could be the one
that’s actually with her
in the future and that
her yandade love, that
strength of love, that they
actually in a weird way
admire and want because
you want that sort of
level of passion directed
towards you, that they
would return it and then
they would end up having the
perfect relationship with her.
It’s interesting to see where she
will go from here because in Japan,
they have a weird
relationship with fame, so
she’s now gotten famous and she can probably
hold on to that fame for a long time.
There’s a story. I don’t want
to go into the whole thing.
I actually think I may have done this
story on an old Velocipod cast episode,
but there was a guy,
a Japanese guy, and he
was in France, and he
killed an eight a woman,
and because of the rules,
he wasn’t a French citizen,
they were like, “Okay,
we’ll send him back to
Japan,” and they will
punish him, and then
he was sent back to
Japan, he was extradited,
and then when he ended
up in Japan, they’re like,
“Well, he didn’t actually
commit a crime in Japan,”
so the Japanese didn’t
persecute him, so he
ended up basically
just getting away with it,
and then, based on his
reputation as a cannibal,
started doing restaurant
reviews and became
a really famous restaurant
reviewer in Japan, based
purely off a crime that
he’d committed in France,
one of the most heinous
crimes you could actually
ever think of, killing and
eating another human being,
so there’s this weird
disconnect almost with the
fantasy and the reality
in Japan, and you see
this in a lot of different
aspects, but I think
in these situations, it
shows so clearly and so
really that people
don’t have a connection
between what’s really
happening and what they’re
seeing sort of in media,
because they’re living
the dream, they want
the dream to happen,
they think this could
be real, but the reality
is, this is a convicted
attempted murder,
or, God, that’s a terrible sense, convicted
attempted murder, as way easier to say,
all these guys on the
internet living out a
fantasy that isn’t real,
because the character they
gave her in the media
isn’t her real character,
and she may play into it
now because that’s how
she’s going to capitalize
on that fame, but that’s
just as fake as the love
she may have shown people
while she was working
in a hostess bar, while
her boyfriend was
working in a host bar,
while they were getting
money from other people
pretending that they
actually were into them.
It’s a skill, it’s a skill I don’t have,
you can tell by this ending right here.
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[MUSIC]
[MUSIC]