Serial Killers of Medieval Japan | Human Voiced, No Ads

Pre-modern Japan, a land of oath-bound samurai on battlefields, aristocrats composing poetry. Yet beneath that veneer of courtly refinement and warrior honour there's a different tale to tell. And so allow me to walk you through a scene. It's a calm medieval night in the late 15th century, and a boat glides across the waters of Lake Biwa. On board, a group of fifteen travelling monks and a young acolyte had entrusted their lives to the boatman en route to a temple in Kyoto. But unbeknownst to them, that very boatman, a local pirate known as Hyogo of Katada, had marked them for death. Lured by the sizable funds the monks carried as offerings for the monastery, Hyogo had plotted a ruthless attack. Once the boat reached a narrow strait, his armed confederates ambushed the monk's vessel, and in a matter of moments the prayers turned to screams. One by one, the passengers were slaughtered, speared as they left overboard, or cut down on the deck, and by dawn all sixteen souls lay dead, and Hyogo absconded with the treasure. This was the Lake Biwa mass killing, and it's perhaps one of the most bloodiest criminal outrages in Japan's Muromachi period. Remarkably, Hyogo felt little remorse for the lives he took. What ultimately shattered him was that his own father committed seppuku to atone for his crime, and save their town from reprisal. It was only the loss of his own father's life, not the slaughter of the strangers, that drove Hyogo to repent and seek salvation as a Buddhist monk. Now, that's a chilling tale, don't you think? But it's no stage drama, it's no samurai legend. It's real. It was recorded in the medieval chronicles and later retellings, and it hooks us not only with its horror, but with its very real revelation of a very different mindset toward murder in medieval Japan. Of course, this invites us to question what other atrocities were committed, what other killers lurked in Japan's medieval period. It's exactly what we're here to discuss. And so, if you'll permit me today to spend the next hour with you, we can journey into the realm of Japanese medieval serial murderers. You might find something you didn't expect. But allow me first to welcome you to the channel. If you're new here, I invite you to subscribe. Once again, we are sponsored by no one, and actually we rely on word of mouth and a bit of engagement. So liking the video, commenting, subscribing, sharing with your friends, that really, really helps us out. So thank you in advance. Also, if you're interested in supporting the channel in a more material manner, there are links to the Patreon. You can also become a YouTube member. We have a merch store. And we also have donation links, whether on the YouTube or the Patreon or PayPal side of things. This helps us keep everything ad free. You won't find any interruptions from start to finish on this video, along with all of the other videos in the playlists, all for your enjoyment. And so with that being said, let us relax, and we can enjoy our video for today. So why don't we start with the Heian period? If you're not familiar with that, we're looking at 794 to 1185. And it's a famous time as a golden age of court culture, time of elegant poetry, subtle romance and refined art. Even the very name Heian means peace. So somewhat ironically, behind the closed doors of the capital of Heian-kyo, which is today's Kyoto, order was quite precarious, not peaceful in anyone's definition of the word. Major wars were absent for much of the era, but crime and banditry, well, they were pretty widespread. The emperors had a hard time policing the country effectively. And by a hard time, I mean, they completely failed in doing so. So the imperial government's police force, the kebishi, struggled to maintain control, especially at night and in the provinces. And while the aristocrats composed their diaries by lamplight, the common folk whispered of robbers roaming the roads, and corpses found thrown into ditches at dawn. In the Heian imagination, the capital after dark became a stage for ghostly horror stories. A telling sign that the living were just as frightening as the supernatural. Let's start with one of the most vivid crime anecdotes from the late Heian Japan court. It comes from the Konjaku Monogatari-shu, that is the collection of the tales of now and then, circa 1120, a treasure trove of popular stories. It tells of a notorious bandit named Hakamadare. He was once a petty thief, and was jailed for his misdeeds, but released in a general amnesty, only to immediately return to a life of crime. Lacking resources after leaving prison, he resorted to a grim ruse on the highway connecting the capital and the eastern provinces. Hakamadare lay naked by the roadside at Aosaka Pass, pretending to be dead. To arouse the curiosity of the passer-by, of course. And so, when a lone samurai dismounted and prodded the corpse, Hakamadare sprang up to life. In a flash, he would snatch the man's sword and drag him from the saddle. With a vengeful glee, crying, is how I repay my enemies, the bandit stabbed the Atlas warrior to death. Hakamadare then stripped the body of its clothes and weapons, and mounted the stolen horse. As he galloped eastward, a chilling scene would unfold. Ten or twenty fellow ex-convicts emerged from hiding, forming a brigand band under Hakamadare's leadership. Along the road, they robbed other travelers in turn, arming themselves with seized swords and armor, until this once-naked outlaw rode at the head of what looked like a small private army. Now this tale makes a darkly humorous point. Earlier in the episode, another weary samurai had seen the corpse, and wisely kept his distance, burning mockery from onlookers, until news spread that his caution had saved his life. Heian readers and listeners would have nodded at the lesson. Is he only a fool who underestimates the danger of bandits on the open road? And then there's a companion story, from the same volume, that drives home how commonplace such violence had become. Konjaku Monogatarishu recounts that corpses were often seen lying by routes in and out of Kyoto, and far from eliciting shock, they were treated as mundane curiosities. People might gather around a body, speculating about the cause of death, while casually noting the absence of visible wounds. Now, in fact, it was not unusual for those passing by to strip a dead body of any valuable clothing, a practice born of both practicality but also hard-bitten desperation. Times were tough. This macabre image is corroborated by another famous Heian tale, one that inspired Ryunosuke Akutagawa's modern short story, Rashomon. In the original, twelfth-century anecdote, a lone thief, taking shelter at Rashomon Gate, discovers an old woman on the upper level of the dilapidated gate. By the light of a dying sun, he watches in fascination as the hag yanks out the hair of corpses strewn about the floor. Well, when confronted, the old woman justifies her grisly deed. She says she intends to weave the hair into wigs to sell, saying that she simply has to do this kind of work to make ends meet, otherwise she'd starve to death. Now, the interesting thing—a rather ironic twist—the thief then robs the old woman of her clothes, reasoning that her misfortune is justified by her own vile acts. It's a layered tale of theft upon theft, and it shows the cutthroat logic of the time. In a city where unburied bodies pile up at the gate, and even the crone living off carrion can herself fall victim to a stronger thief. Every life was precarious. Peaceful Heian Kyo had a dark underbelly. By night it was a city of shadows, where the law provided scant protection. Now, in some cases, high-born individuals themselves fell prey to violent criminals, shocking the courtly society. A notable incident recorded in contemporary sources describes how Kiyohara no Yoshimizu, a learned court official and doctor of law, was waylaid by robbers. The tale relates with gruesome clarity that the bandits stabbed him dozens of times, left him for dead, simply to steal his money and possessions. Such attacks on aristocrats were rare enough to become scandalous, but their occurrence also shows that even rank and education offered very little immunity outside well-guarded compounds. Another legend from the period flips the script somewhat, showing an elite warrior triumphing over a criminal instead. Fujiwara no Yasumasa, a famed noble and swordsman, was said to have encountered Hakamadare, the same bandit that we mentioned earlier on a moonlit road. In one version, rather than fight, Yasumasa calmly played his flute, unnerving the thief with his composure, until the chastened Hakamadare slunk away, and even received a garment from Yasumasa as a strange token of mercy. Now, whether or not this account actually happened—some sources speculated Hakamadare was in fact Yasumasa's own brother in disguise—the story still became famous. It paints the bandit as ultimately owed by aristocratic St. Freud, highlighting an ideal that refined courage could conquer brute violence. But happy endings like that were far from the norm. By the twelfth century, as central authority waned, outrages by rogue bands grew to be quite frequent. The capital and its approaches teemed with lawless elements, and even the youthful heroes of the age cut their teeth battling such criminals. The epic chronicles relate that around 1174, Minamoto no Yoshitsune, the future legendary general, fought a duel not with the Taira clan samurai, but with a notorious bandit chief named Kumasaka Chōhan. At only fifteen years old, Yoshitsune, who was then known as Ushiwakamaru, encountered Kumasaka and his brigands, who had been terrorizing travelers in the provinces. Sources lured the boy's sword skill as he defeated the powerful bandit leader in single combat. Yoshitsune's slaying of Kumasaka became legendary, immortalized in no drama and ukiyo-e art. But it also reflects reality. You see, banditry was so endemic that vanquishing a robber chief could be a stepping stone in a hero's career. Similarly, another rising samurai, Kajiwara Kagetoki, made a name for himself through an act of vigilantism against a robber. According to the Heike Monogatari and related sources, Kagetoki tracked down a feared thief, some call him Kazusa no Goro, who had been preying on the Kanto region. Now, in a ruse worthy of a modern crime novel, Kagetoki plied the bandit with sake at a temple and slew him, later presenting the brigand's head as proof of his deed. Tales like that certainly blur the line between warrior justice and outlaw violence, that's for sure, but they do remind us that the emergence of the samurai class itself was tied to suppressing and, well, sometimes emulating bandits. And in an era with no strong police force, it often fell to individual warriors, or, failing that, to the mercy of the thieves themselves, to determine whether travelers lived or died on the roads. But things changed a little bit with the establishment of the Kamakura Shogunate in 1185 by Minamoto no Yoritomo, and a new era of order was promised. Let's see how that goes. As samurai lords took power from the court, one of their mandates was to pacify the countryside and protect the populace from the kinds of brigands that had proliferated in late Heian times. And indeed, early Kamakura law codes and documents frequently addressed the problem of banditry. The Shogunate established deputies called shugo in each province to enact strict penalties for theft and murder. Yet the very need for such measures indicates that violent crime did not disappear. Instead, the Kamakura government found itself in a constant struggle against men it labeled akuto, literally evil bands or violent outlaws. Now this term akuto is interesting. It appears repeatedly in the 13th and 14th century records as a catch-all for groups that engaged in robbery, banditry, arson, and killings. These could range from peasant mobs rising against landlords, all the way up to samurai brigands acting outside their lord's commands. In many cases, akuto were simply local strongmen or dispossessed gentry who resorted to force to get their way, blurring politics and crime. But to the victims on the ground, distinctions like that hardly mattered. Whether one's village was raided by rebel samurai or common bandits, the experience would be equally terrifying. Official letters from this period gives a glimpse of just how far reaching the lawlessness was. A complaint to the Shogun deputies of Kyoto, for instance, might describe a gang of ruffians pillaging a shogun manor estate, burning down storehouses, and murdering all of those who resisted, or referred to generally as the misdeeds of akuto. The Shogun's reaction was often to dispatch troops to hunt down the ringleaders, but as for the enforcement, that was spotty at best. In western Japan especially, Kamakura's grip was quite weak. Some local samurai charged with stopping bandits actually collaborated with them instead, finding it to be more profitable to share in the loot or use the bandits as pawns in local feuds. The phenomenon was indeed so prevalent that one scholar later described the Kamakura period as, quote, hardly a time of peace, but a time of endemic guerrilla war. Well, essentially, a warrior government contending with countless micro-rebellions. Certainly not a good time to be traveling through Japan, that's for sure. Now for the common people, this meant that violent death could come at any time, not just from official battles, but from rogue actors operating under the radar of history. And indeed, we do have some specific incidents. Sound more like bloody dramas, but they're quite real. For example, in 1227, at the Toyokuni estate in the Yamato province, a former estate steward led a force of several hundred men in an uprising after losing his position. This mob, labeled Akuto by authorities, leveled homes, set fires, and killed retainers of the new steward, even repelling troops sent to subdue them. Well, such large-scale clashes were essentially rebellions, but they were rooted in personal grudges and greed as much as any political cause. Meanwhile, smaller bandit bands continued to stalk the highway as Azuma Kagami, the Kamakura Chronicle, notes that episodes of bandits being captured and executed are so often without names, as if they were a faceless hazard of the time. Punishments for multiple murderers were quite draconian. Beheading was common, especially in heinous cases. Crucifixion or execution of an entire family was also ordered. Yet even these harsh measures did not stamp out violent crime. If anything, they just added one more grim spectacle to the landscape. Heads of the executed robbers were mounted on prison gates or along roadsides as warnings. The practice continued from late Heian into the Kamakura and beyond. But one could say that the line between brutality of the criminals and that of the enforcers was exceedingly thin. In any case, amid the backdrop, the concept of a serial killer as understood today, someone murdering repeatedly for personal compulsion, was not a clearly defined category. But chroniclers do single out a few individuals whose cruelty stood out even in a violent age, such as this. And one such figure, though coming slightly after Kamakura in the late 14th century, was the female gang leader of Iga, an unusual case recorded in the Kokun Chomunju in 1284 and later sources. According to these accounts, a seemingly respectable noblewoman turned out to be the secret head of a bandit group responsible for numerous robberies and killings along the key road. And when her identity was revealed, she was arrested. Of course, this scandalized society a woman of status orchestrating crimes like a lord of thieves. Though details are scant, the story's inclusion in medieval collections suggests that it certainly struck a chord, possibly reflecting anxieties about hidden crime in unexpected places. And another notable case from the late Kamakura is that of Shimotsuke no Yasasuke, a samurai retainer, who in the year 1302 was accused of a string of murders of travelers in Hitachi province. The court records, which are fragmentary today, indicate he had waylaid and killed at least six people on separate occasions, all apparently with the motive of just robbing them. Apparently robbing them was not enough, he wanted to go the extra mile, I suppose. So Yasasuke's lord ended up handing him over to the authorities, and that's a rare instance of a samurai being treated as a common criminal. Of course, being treated as a common criminal means he was also executed, mainly as a warning to others. Cases like Yasasuke's hinder the existence of what we might term serial predators, individuals killing repeatedly outside of warfare. But medieval writers rarely probed into their psychology, which kind of leaves us guessing. These killers were generally explained in terms of greed, grudges, or sheer wickedness, rather than a notion of pathological compulsion. But of course that third category, sheer wickedness, just doing it because they're evil, well, perhaps there's the seeds of psychological things in that manner. Well, in any case, as the Kamakura era drew to a close in the 1330s, Japan plunged into further turmoil with the collapse of shogunal authority, and the onset of the Northern and Southern Courts Conflict, which is also called the Nanboku-cho War. In such times of civil war, it can certainly be hard to distinguish criminal killings from the general war atrocities. Loyalties shifted. Ronin, the masterless samurai, roamed the provinces, and many took up the sword for survival, once again flaring soldiery with banditry. And there is even a saying from Nisera, when the village burns, even thieves fight the fire, implying that in chaos, even bandits might momentarily act in the common interest, only to resume their plunder afterwards. And indeed, by the mid-fourteenth century, some Akuto bands had effectively become small warlord armies, sometimes hired by bigger lords as mercenaries. The famous Murakami pirates of the inland sea is one example. They started as mere brigands, but grew into an organized naval power. While they primarily extorted tolls from merchant ships—a euphemism for organized robbery, of course, just like the bridge toll in the more land-based bandits—they did not shy away from massacring crews who resisted. After all, they wanted to know that resistance would not be met kindly. Far to the north, on the fringes of Honshu, tales spread of cannibal bandits. Men set to capture travelers, literally devour them. Now, of course, this is likely exaggerated folklore, perhaps inspired by the rugged Matagi hunters or the distant specter of the Emishi people, but the fact that such stories gain traction indicates a climate of fear. In the popular imagination, the late medieval period brittled with evil bandits who could strike out anywhere at any time, and that had plenty of people looking over their shoulders. It was an era when villagers prayed not just for good harvests, but also for safety on the roads, and, of course, that the authorities had to get their act together and finally capture these brigands and rebels. But by the Muromachi period, that being 1336 to 1573, Japan's feudal order had fragmented even further. The Ashikaga shoguns in Kyoto often wielded less control over the provinces than their Kamakura predecessors had. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw intermittent warfare among rival courts and daimyo—that is, feudal lords, by the way—punctuated by peasant uprisings, and plenty of localized conflicts. And so, as within this milieu of near-constant strife, the distinction between wartime killing and peacetime crime grew even murkier. All's fair in war, so the saying goes, and medieval Japan had plenty of that. It perhaps is a worthwhile observation, but samurai could pretty much get away with cutting down as many people as possible, decapitating them and just throwing their heads among the grass, and they'd still be hailed as a kind of heroic warrior. Oh, so long as it was done on the battlefield, of course. But take that same samurai out of war, and if he killed innocent people in times of nominal peace, suddenly he became a monster, a beast to be hunted down and taken care of. It was in relatively stable interludes, or in the rare pockets of peace, that we start to see chroniclers describe certain samurai as outright criminals for their exploits of homicide. Let's take one example. It comes from the early Edo period, just after the Muromachi in the 17th century, but it refers to the end of the age of wars. The case of Magara Shogoro. Around 1663, this former ronin, the masterless warrior, went on a night-time rampage in Edo, slashing pedestrians at random, getting eight and wounding ten, until finally he was caught. But when caught, Magara calmly confessed that he was acting on a delusional goal, a divine message at Atago Shrine told him that if he killed a thousand people, all of his wishes would come true. He even begged authorities to let him continue killing until he reached that mystical number. While Magara's spree occurred just after our period, it's illustrative because it shows a mentality that may well have existed in earlier centuries, just a little less documented. In fact, an eerie parallel is found in Muromachi folklore. Some samurai in the 15th to 16th centuries reportedly believed that slaying a thousand souls could cure illness, or even grant invincibility. Such superstitions point to a deep-rooted cultural phenomenon, a twisted quest for personal power or salvation through indiscriminate killing, essentially sanctifying serial murder as a dark ritual. But more concretely, Muromachi Japan was rife with banditry and local wars, creating fertile ground for serial violence. The period of the Onin War, that is 1467-77, and the subsequent Sengoku, the Warring States era, saw the complete collapse of central authority. Bands of ronin and rogue soldiers roamed the countryside. Some hired themselves out as muscle to whoever would pay the most. Others simply preyed on peasants and merchants. In these conditions, the old practice of tsujigiri, literally crossroads killing, reached a grotesque proportion. Originally, in the earlier samurai tradition, tsujigiri referred to a form of duel or a test of skill. But by the late Muromachi, it had degenerated into something far more sinister. You see, the samurai would lurk around at night at intersections and test their new swords on passing strangers. And by test, they would basically slice down innocents in cold blood. Some of the perpetrators were merely cruel or seeking thrills. Others claimed they were honing their technique or verifying the quality of the blade. Chronicles and later essays note that Kabu Kimono, that is wayward young samurai known for outrageous fashion and behavior, in the 16th century engaged in tsujigiri as a gruesome kind of sport. There was even said to be a kind of game among certain warlike clans to see who could kill a passerby most swiftly in a single stroke. So it's needless to say. Common folk walked the roads in terror of crossing paths with such a warrior. A Muromachi anecdote tells of farmers in Kai Province who, upon hearing that a troop of hungry samurai were nearby, hid indoors after dusk, not only to avoid robbery, but for the fear that the warriors might kill somebody for practice. What's particularly chilling is that tsujigiri in the Sengoku era wasn't always impulsive, but it would be systematic and repetitive, fitting the mold of a serial murderer. There was an infamous case that concerned a samurai retainer who believed that dispatching a thousand victims in this manner he could overcome his personal illness, a variation of the previously mentioned superstition. He of course managed to slay dozens before being apprehended, and his rampage only ended when a skilled swordmaster hunted him down in a manhunt reminiscent of a predator being put down by a hero. As for the Edo authorities, once they came to power in 1603, they were so alarmed by continuing incidents of tsujigiri that they eventually made it explicitly punishable by death, imposing gruesome public executions for any offender as a deterrent. Well, this effectively stamped it out by the mid-seventeenth century, but in the preceding Muromachi and Sengoku periods no strong central law existed to universally forbid or punish such acts. Each domain or warlord set their own rules. Some tolerated quite a bit of the extracurricular violence by their men as long as it did not undermine their interests. But within this climate of chronic warfare and weak law, piracy and raiding also gave rise to mass killings, blurring the line into serial atrocities. Now we opened with that story of Hyogo of Katada, the lake pirate who massacred a boatload of pilgrims for gold. And his case, around the 1450s, is quite illuminating. In medieval Japan, pirates—kaizoku, or on lakes they were known as kozoku—were often semi-legitimate operators. They exacted tolls from passing vessels, a bit like mafia taxing their territory, protection money, this kind of thing. Many did follow an internal code to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. After all, a dead trader can't pay any tolls. They were more interested in having repeat customers, after all. But when temptation proved to be too strong, that tacit code was broken. Hyogo, as recorded in local chronicles, had likely extorted payments on Lake Biwa for years without any incident. Yet the one time he chose to slaughter his passengers to a seize of great treasure, it nearly brought disaster upon his entire community. The Muromachi authorities, prodded by outraged Buddhist monks, threatened harsh retribution not just against the pirate, but the whole port town that harbored him. Guilt by association, kind of thing. The extraordinary twist was this, Hyogo's father sacrificing himself, and it shows how medieval Japanese justice could be collective. A whole village or family might suffer for the crimes of one. In effect, Hyogo's father understood that one man's serial crime could condemn all of his neighbors, and by offering his own life, he seemingly contained the fallout. Well, Hyogo's story thus reveals both the raw brutality of serial murder and the societal mechanisms, honor and sacrifice, that tried to rein such violence back in. But it is worth noting that not all medieval Japanese serial killers were outlaws in the world. Sometimes the line between hero and villain would depend entirely upon the context. A warlord might employ a ruthless retainer, specifically for dirty deeds, for example, ninja-like assassins who quietly eliminated dozens of rivals over years. These killers operated in secret. Chronicles rarely named them, but their handiwork is recorded as sudden, unexplained deaths of enemy officers. One could argue that these were serial killers sanctioned by authority. And on the other hand, there were samurai who slid into freelance murder when bereft of a cause. The archetype of the ronin who goes off the rails is epitomized by figures like Suzuki Magoichi, the leader of the Saika mercenaries, who in the sixteenth century was said to execute prisoners en masse and even kill for sport. While celebrated as a freedom fighter by his followers, to others he was little more than a killer at large. The war-torn Muromachi period thus produced individuals who, in a more peaceful age, would have unquestionably been labeled heinous criminals. Instead, some were valorized, others were quietly tolerated. And only a few, like Hyogo, met with unquivocable punishment when their actions embarrassed those in power. So when we examine these cases, we get to a question. How exactly did the society of the time view serial or spree killers? Well, that's a complex question to answer, because really it depended on who the victims were, and it also depended on who the killer was. And then there was when and where it happened. You see, unlike modern societies which have clear legal definitions of serial murder and of course a strong stigma attached to it, medieval Japan's attitude was often pragmatic and rooted in collective values. You see, a warrior who killed dozens of foes in battle could be praised and rewarded, but a commoner who murdered even one innocent for personal gain was committing an unforgivable sin in both legal and religious terms. The dichotomy's pretty stark. Killing within the accepted framework, vendetta, war, samurai, honor. It could be acceptable, or even in some cases viewed as a kind of glorious thing, whereas killing outside these bounds was obviously quite abhorrent. Well, when war ended, mass killing swordsmen all of a sudden became criminal. In other words, the context is everything. Legal records from the Heian through the Muromachi periods show that murder was formerly a capital crime, often punished by beheading or exile, if the culprit was of high status. However, the enforcement was quite inconsistent. Many a bandit lord went years and years before facing justice, and especially if local officials were weak or even at some points colluding with him. And when punishment did come, if it did come, it could be quite spectacular. For example, the Muromachi chronicle tells of a samurai serial murderer being executed by sawing, literally tied between two boards and sawed in half. Now that's a pretty gruesome warning to others. And this execution method was exceedingly rare, reserved for the worst crimes like treason or multiple murders. But more often, though, execution was by a swift beheading, with the severed head exposed publicly. Another way of warning, you see, public display of an executed criminal's head served as both proof of justice and a kind of ritual purification of the stain on the community. Now, interestingly, this practice mirrors what we saw criminals themselves sometimes doing. You see, Hakamadare beheading a victim or a samurai keeping enemy heads as a kind of grim kind of trophy. The treatment of life was starkly transactional in medieval Japan. Take a life wrongly, and society might come after you in return, often in a manner that was making an example of you in the most brutal of terms. Well, beyond legal punishment, there was also the question of moral and spiritual consequences. And that, of course, runs a little bit deeper. Buddhism, you see, was widespread in medieval Japan, and it taught that killing was a grave sin, and grave sins lead to dire karmic repercussions. The concept of metsuzai, literally destroying sins, led some murderers to seek religious penance. And we saw this with Hyōgo, actually. After causing the death of innocent people and indirectly his father, he renounced the world and embraced nenbutsu, the prayer to Amida Buddha, in a desperate hope to somehow save his soul. He could have done it before he killed all the people, though, right? Chose a strange time to become pious. Numerous folktales tell of killers turned monks, wandering in repentance. And one famous story involves Kazuhira, a bandit so bloodthirsty he was called the Ogre of Oeyama. After years of robbing and murdering travellers in the mountains, supposedly he encountered a Buddhist saint who showed him all the victims' souls clinging to him like shadows. Unoverwhelmed by remorse, Kazuhira laid down his sword, and spent the rest of his days digging graves for those he had killed—an act of contrition to balance his karma. And while likely apocryphal, stories like that were quite didactic, reinforcing the belief that even the cruelest killer could, and should, feel the weight of Buddhist hell looming down upon them, prompting repentance. Now, that said, not all medieval Japanese accounts are sympathetic to the murderer's redemption. Many are quite blunt in their condemnation. The language used for secular criminals is quite telling. They're often called chōteki, which means enemies of society, or akashitamono, blood lickers—a strong pejorative. Well, these terms show zero tolerance, of course—a sense that certain acts placed one outside the human community. And when bandits were caught, chronicles sometimes note villagers tearing the bodies apart, or warriors dueling for the honour of the felon. The spending of communal rage suggests that serial killers, in the broad sense of repetitive murderers, were viewed as more than ordinary felons. They were a kind of pollution in the Shinto sense—sources of ritual impurity that had to be excised for the social body to heal, rather. And in the rare event that a killer evaded capture, folklore often took over the story, and transformed them into vengeful ghosts or demons. For instance, the legend of Rashomon's demon may have roots in the unsolved crimes around that eerie gate. People said the spirits of those murdered there coalesced into an oni demon that haunted the site until it was ritually purifying. Thus, medieval Japan's response to serial murder spanned the spectrum from legal retribution and moral outrage to spiritual caution and myth-making. Each response aimed in its own way to restore balance to a world disrupted by unnatural bloodshed. And finally, we should do consider the legacy and memory of those medieval serial killers. You see, unlike in modern times, there were no newspapers or police dossiers to immortalize their names. Perhaps that's for better or worse—not quite sure. But many such criminals passed into obscurity, known only through a line in a record or local lore of a village. However, a few were later picked up by popular storytellers and incorporated into Japan's rich performance tradition. During the Edo period, with the land at peace, people developed a morbid fascination with historical criminals as a kind of grim entertainment. And that's not unlike modern true-crime interest. Edo-period kabuki and yoruri plays dramatized some earlier cases, often embellishing them with romance or ghostly revenge. Hirai Gonpachi, a real seventeenth-century murderer, became a tragic hero in plays, though he lived outside our period. The story of Sanno Jirozaemon, who ran amok in Edo's Yoshiwara district in 1696, was likewise dramatized and mythologized until the line between fact and fiction blurred. And in a similar way, medieval tales of serial killers sometimes mutated into folklore. Akamadare, the bandit of Heian times, was remembered in later centuries not just as a thief but kind of as a trickster hero in some stories, even appearing as a character in kabuki theater. The real horror of his ambush murders faded. They were all replaced by a kind of admiration for this cunning man on the fringes of society. But on the other hand, someone like Hyogo of Katada, who murdered innocent holy men, he never managed to get such positive spin. In local legend he remains a cursed figure, and it's said the area of the lake where he sank the monk's boat is haunted by ghostly chants on certain nights. By the way, Lake Biwa—I went there a few months ago, actually— quite a lovely place. There's a boat there that's set up like an old riverboat. It's called the Michigan. It's really nice. And they put on a little bit of a show. You can get a coffee and a hot dog on there, too. Hot dog. It's quite a good trip. So if you do go to Osaka, take about an hour and ten-minute journey out to Lake Biwa. A little bit complicated to get there, but it really is worth it. In any case, all these evolving narratives that we have, how things change over time, they show that after a while society seems to process these dark figures in different ways. Some were rehabilitators, folk heroes, or cautionary tales, and others were just demonized forever. And so as we come to a close, you might want to ask, what makes the study of all this valuable? Well, beyond the gory curiosity, I think it gives us a bit of a reality check on any romanticized view of the past. It highlights that human nature, with all its capacity for violence and transgression, has always been a even in societies often depicted as rigidly honorable or harmonious. It also teaches us about medieval Japanese values, the fine line between lawful and lawless violence, the role of honor and community in confronting crime, and of course the deep influence of religion on interpreting moral deviancy. I suppose you have to remember to exercise critical thinking. Don't take all the old chronicles at face value. You might want to recognize propaganda or literary flourish before you make any decisions about it. Yet in these old sources, as sparse as they are, we can piece together the truth that medieval Japan did have murderers outside the battlefield, and the society coped in whatever way it could. We also learned about a few small intriguing details, too—the way a bandit might use a fake corpse trick, or how a samurai could justify killing a stranger to test a sword, or even how a father's ritual seppuku could absolve a whole town's guilt. Some details you might not learn elsewhere. They give a richer texture to our understanding. So picture for a moment a scene from the late 1400s. You might have had travelers huddling close, nervously on a country road, hands rested on short daggers as they passed by a weathered bulletin board at a crossroads. Now to the board there might be an official edict, warning that all robbers and murderers would be punished by death, their heads hung out for all to see as a warning. Beneath it, crudely scrawled, someone might have added a little graffito of their name, mocking it. Well, this was medieval Japan, a land of refined culture, living side by side with death and danger, a society that feared killers in the shadows even as it idolized warriors in armor, and by peeling back that duality we gain not only a thrilling tale to tell, but a deeper appreciation that history is not just the story of heroes and saints, but also of those darker figures who sometimes force us to confront the fragile seams of civilization. We find a past that seems startlingly real, and in some ways not so distant from the past. Perhaps, like I said, you've encountered some things that you didn't quite expect. Well, that's it from me tonight. It should feel like going and watching another video, which you're welcome to do so. It's all up to you. And like I said, do visit Lake Biwa if you are in the area of Osaka. Really, really is nice. Anyway, I'd like to thank my top dear patrons and supporters now. Keeping everything ad-free. 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