In the evening of May 20, 1938, the small village of Kamocho Kurami, in present-day Tsuyama, Japan, suddenly lost power and the whole village was drowned in darkness. Around one o'clock in the morning on May 21, a 21-year-old young man, Mutsuo Toi, prepared everything at his house. He carried two flashlights on his head, armed with an ax, a katana, and a Browning M11 shotgun, entered his grandmother's room, and beheaded her.
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| Mutsuo Toi |
For the next 90 minutes, Mutsuo Toi roamed the village and broke into a total of 11 houses, killing 29 people and injuring 3 others. Some of the survivors reported that the killer's two flashlights made him look like a demon, while others said he was calm during committing the crime. When he broke into a house, the whole family begged him for forgiveness, but all he said was “Love life? Then you must die!" before killing the entire family.
The death toll of the massacre was 30 people, and that was half of the village’s population. After murdering people, Mutsuo Toi went up a mountain, wrote a suicide note, and committed suicide with a gunshot to his chest.
The massacre shocked the whole Japanese society and was a remarkable event in the history of crime when a single person was able to kill dozens of people in such a short time. However, now let's find out what led to Mutsuo Toi's cruel act.
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| Japanese news reporting about the massacre |
Mutsuo Toi was born on March 5, 1917, in a wealthy family in Okayama. However, tuberculosis killed his parents when he was young, and so he and his sister were raised by their grandmother. In the suicide note he wrote before committing suicide, Mutsuo said that he was isolated by everyone in the village because of tuberculosis he contracted from his parents. He was always alienated and rejected by the girl he loved, and he couldn't even serve in the army. In the 1930s, tuberculosis was a disease with no cure, and those who contracted it were considered getting a death sentence. After Mutsuo's sister got married in 1937, he withdrew even more from society.
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| Mutsuo Toi's house before its demolition in 2015 |
Mutsuo Toi's illness got worse and he couldn't live much longer. His poor health as well as a mental breakdown due to stigma left him with nothing to lose. So Mutsuo prepared for the massacre, he assumed that all those who hated and isolated him must die. To explain his grandmother's murder, he wrote that he didn't want her to live alone in the humiliation of being a murderer's grandmother. At the same time, Mutsuo also wrote that he cannot kill everyone because there were many innocent people.
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| Burial site of the victims |