Takahiro Shiraishi, infamously known as Japan’s ‘Twitter killer’, was put to death this week in a first for the nation since 2022. The 34-year-old man had been sentenced to death for the brutal killing of nine people back in 2017.
Shiraishi exploited social media to locate and lure suicidal women, providing them with help in ending their lives. Instead, he invited them to his apartment in Tokyo, where he strangled and murdered them. He dismembered the corpses and kept parts in coolers and boxes, while dumping others at a dump site.
“Nine victims were beaten and strangled, murdered, robbed, and mutilated after having pieces of their bodies hidden in boxes, and their body parts thrown away in a trash dump,” Japan’s Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki told AFP. Suzuki said Shiraishi did this for a ‘selfish motive of fulfilling his own sexual and economic desires’.
The victims ranged in age from 15 to 26. Authorities started to discover the murders after a 23-year-old woman went missing following tweets in which she wrote that she wanted to commit suicide. That investigation directly led the authorities to Shiraishi, revealing the ghastly scope of his crimes.
Shiraishi’s legal team opposed his execution, arguing that his victims had consented to die. However, the court rejected that defense, citing the brutality and manipulation involved in the killings.
This marks Japan’s first execution since that of Tomohiro Kato in 2022. Kato was responsible for a 2008 rampage in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, where he drove a two-tonne truck into a crowd and fatally stabbed seven people.
Capital punishment remains popular with the public in Japan. A government poll conducted in 2024 discovered that 83% of the 1,800 people questioned regarded the death penalty as ‘unavoidable’.
Japan and the United States are the world’s only G7 countries that continue to have capital punishment. Although the law requires that executions should take place within six months of the last court decision, most prisoners spend years in solitary confinement before they are hanged. Critics have long condemned the system as not being transparent and psychologically damaging to the prisoners, who are normally informed of their execution only hours ahead of time, usually in the early morning.