In the dark of a spring night in 1938, an act of unmitigated violence would forever alter the communal life of one small Japanese village.
A young man stalked through his home village, light streaming from flashlights affixed to the sides of his head, rifle in hand. At his side slung a katana. This man had allowed the rage building up inside him – rage against his sick body, and at the women of his village, and their sexual inaccessibility to him – to lead him on a murderous rampage.
Before the night was out, thirty people would be dead. To this day, the Tsuyama Massacre remains the deadliest act of lone-gunman violence in Japanese history.
The Tsuyama Massacre occurred nearly 85 years ago. Its memory, once repressed, continues to haunt the Japanese consciousness. And while such acts of mass violence are rare in modern Japan, the incident does strike an eerie familiarity to many abroad. Nearly a century onwards, similar motivations combined with easy access to firearms have led to numerous young men committing comparably unspeakable violence on the people around them.
Was Toi Mutsuo, the 21-year-old perpetrator of the Tsuyama Massacre, an early harbinger of an age of grievance-based, lone-wolf killings? What was the village milieu in which he was raised like, deep in those mountains? And was Mutsuo really the first proto-incel mass murderer?
A Hamlet Lost in the Trees
Modern Tsuyama, which gives the massacre its name, is a quaint provincial city in northern Okayama Prefecture.
The hamlet through which Toi Mutsuo stalked that night in 1938 only became part of Tsuyama in 2005. Until then, it was part of a separate entity, known as Kamo-machi (加茂町). Kamo was a collection of small, mountainous agricultural hamlets.
At the time of its absorption into Tsuyama, the entire town had a population of only a little over 5000. Back in 1938, it was further broken down into smaller villages and towns.
Toi Mutsuo (都井 睦雄) was born in March of 1917, in the 6th year of the Taisho era. His birthplace was deep in the Chugoku Mountains, north of Tsuyama.
While still a toddler, he lost both his father and mother to tuberculosis. Mutsuo and his older sister were given over to the care of his grandmother, and this newfound family moved into a small temple further down the mountain.
When he was six, they relocated to his grandmother’s home hamlet, Kaio. (貝尾部落.) A small valley bounded by mountains to the east and west, Kaio was a rural community like many in early 20th-century Japan: Isolated, insular, and agricultural.
Young Mutsuo was officially the head of his small household – women not being able to be registered as such. Yet despite their circumstances, the Toi family was well enough off. His grandmother had both an income and some land, and engaged in dry farming. Their livelihood was fairly stable. From that point on, Mutsuo’s entire life would revolve around that small mountain hamlet.
A Different Sort of Community Life
In Kaio, many of the rhythms of life resembled those of Japanese villages for centuries previous. People farmed, held harvest festivals, and carted their crops off to larger communities for sale. Everyone in little Kaio knew each other.
Modernity had brought some changes. Telephone poles reached high above parts of the hamlet, connecting it to the outside world. Farmers used modern hunting rifles to repel wild boars. Childhood education was formalized and compulsory.
Mutsuo entered Nishi Kamo Elementary School, where he generally excelled. He was considered a gifted child, and was fairly well-liked. It was upon graduation at age fourteen that he had his first brush with a long line of recurring illnesses. He was struck with pleurisy, and his doctor ordered that he be relieved of any farmwork. For three months, he lived an idle, boring life. The youth’s illness took a turn for the better, however, and he was soon moving on to the next level of his education.
Here he continued to do well, and it was believed he had a bright future ahead of him. Yet despite many of his classmates having generally positive feelings towards Mutsuo, he was not particularly close with any of them. Some would later say that there was a pessimism behind his gentle smile.
The Village Art of “Night Crawling”
There was another element of village life that bares acknowledging here: the nature of intimate relationships between men and women.
For hundreds of years, village communities in Japan gave little attention to the concept of chastity. Marriages were not always binding, divorces were common, and promiscuity was not considered immoral.
In the cover of darkness, men and women were free to do so as they pleased. And they often did so via a practice called yobai.
Yobai (夜這い) literally means “night crawling.” Amongst peasants, the practice dated back to the middle ages. (Reading the 11th-century novel The Tale of Genji will reveal that even the nobility in Kyoto engaged in similar night courtships.) Village doors were often unlocked, and men would sneak through the dark of the night and enter the houses of women they fancied.
Most of the time, these dalliances would have been mutually decided upon beforehand. Each village and region had its own rules: were married women out-of-bounds? Did parents accent? Despite regional differences, yobai was a part of village life throughout the archipelago.
Did Toi Mutsuo Engage in Yobai?
Many authors associate Toi Mutsuo with the practice of yobai. Yet by the early Showa era (1926-1989), public morals and decency laws had disrupted the age-old tradition.
Survivors from his hamlet became angry when, post-massacre, police from Tsuyama asked if villagers still engaged in night crawling. Some contemporaries of Toi, however, have said that yobai was still common amongst the youth of Okayama in those days.
Either way, Toi Mutsuo is believed to have been intimate with a fair few village women. The implication is that he was already used to sneaking from house to house in the dead of night. When access to the women in the village was suddenly denied him, he reacted with increasingly erratic anger.
In the villages, there were aspects that demarcated an appealing man from an unappealing one. Starker still were reasons for social shunning. Toi Mutsuo was about to find his social standing rapidly falling. And he would place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the society that surrounded him.
Dreaming from Isolation
Despite recovering from pleurisy, Mutsuo continued to be plagued with occasional bouts of ill health. This left him lethargic and progressively more reclusive.
Following his initial three months of illness, he took his doctor’s advice to heart, and stopped working in the fields. His grandmother was often forced to plant and harvest on her own.
Meanwhile, Mutsuo would be inside, spending his days idly reading magazines. His isolation only increased when his sister married and moved away when he was 17.
In the 1930s, the reading material available for young men often centered around tales of masculine derring-do. Both real-life and fictional columns in magazines presented stories of rugged Japanese men adventuring on the continent. It was a colonial, expansionist time in Japan’s history. and the idealized male was one who left his home to join the emperor’s fighting forces. As he lay alone in his darkened room, the lonely youth dreamt of the day he’d make his mark on the world as an honorable soldier.
Toi wouldn’t have wanted to join the imperial military out of a growing sense of nationalism alone. For the women of his village, military men – and especially those who passed their military conscription exam with flying colors – were considered especially appealing.
During meetings with prospective marriage partners, the potential bride’s parents would often ask after conscription exam results. Concerned as he was regarding his relations with the women of his hamlet, much hinged on passing the test.
Yet a sense of apprehension seems to have lurked in Mutsuo’s chest. He kept on getting sick, and so often with lung diseases. His parents had been struck down by similar illnesses while still young. If the real source of his affliction was what he most feared, then all his dreams – of military and sexual conquest – would be for naught.
The Moment of Truth
In 1937, Mutsuo turned 20. He was now an adult. The time for his military conscription exam had arrived. Everything had been building to this moment; he pinned his dreams upon the possibility of being granted the “A” rank, or at least a “B.” Either would mean he was physically fit and suited for conscription.
A military official in his district was also suffering from a lung ailment, and took pity on Mutsuo. He sent a letter ahead of the youth’s conscription examination, asking that he be well taken care of. Mutsuo then set off down the mountain roads to the examination center, in the local hub at Tsuyama.
Mutsuo stripped naked in front of military doctors. The physicians took his height and weight and checked him for disease. Then, at last, the moment of truth arrived.
His attending military physician looked him in the eyes. “You have tuberculosis.”
Mutsuo’s world must have gone dark. All his fears confirmed, he broke down crying. Now the source of his years of lung problems seemed clear. Mutsuo was sent home with the conscription rank of “C,” reserved for those with “significant physical defects.” He was not fit for military duty, and would see no glory on the battlefield. [1]
Heading Down a Dark Path
Toi Mutsuo had tuberculosis. This not only meant the end of his dreams of military service. It also meant an end to his social prospects in his home hamlet. An excerpt from the writings of post-war psychopathologist Nakamura Kazuo, quoted in Bunshun, explains the situation well:
There were not a terribly large number of lung disease-suffers in the hamlet. Yet, there was a strong, customary social aversion to tuberculosis and leprosy (Hansen’s diesease). Mayor Mishima of Kamo-machi was someone with a great passion for public health… According to Mayor Mishima, the level of disgust townspeople held for tuberculosis was even beyond the run-of-the-mill. They believed it to be hereditary, and when passing in front of the house of the diseased, they would even cover their mouths and noses with a hankerchief.
Nakamura Kazuo. (1963.) 自殺 精神病理学的考察.
As word of his disease spread, the women of the village began rebuffing Mutsuo’s attempts at intimacy. Already isolated, the darkness now consumed him.
Mutsuo began exhibiting extreme suspicion of all those around him. When he did go outside, he would often make unwanted advances toward neighboring women and girls. The people of the hamlet began to see him as increasingly dangerous. They shunned him.
Mutsuo saw this as proof that the village conspired against him because of his disease. He sunk deeper into his own world, feeling increasingly victimized by society at large. That society, he decided, was immoral – and in need of moral cleansing.
Planning the Horrific
Mutsuo decided to arm himself. He went into Tsuyama, using a newly-registered hunting license to purchase a firearm. This he then traded in for one of the weapons he would eventually become associated with; a Browning Auto-5 recoil-operated semi-automatic shotgun.
Mutsuo spent his days deep in the mountains, training with his shotgun. By night, he prowled through the hamlet, gun in hand. This further aroused the suspicion of his neighbors.
His grandmother was greatly worried by her grandson’s erratic behavior and increasingly self-righteous attitude. He’d also put loans on the family house and farmland, mortgaging the fields she toiled in, all so he could buy more weapons.
Then, one day, she saw him putting some sort of powder into her miso soup. Sure he meant to kill her, she reported her own grandson to the local police. Mutsuo claimed that the powder had only been medicine. The police searched the house anyway. They confiscated the various swords and knives he’d recently amassed and revoked his hunting permit.
This might have been the end of Mutsuo’s violent scheming. Alas, he still had some contacts nearby, and managed to purchase more weapons from an acquaintance. His planning continued apace.
Then, Mutsuo happened to hear through the village grapevine about Teramoto Yuriko. Yuriko, a former lover who had left Kaio to get married, would soon be returning to the hamlet to visit her family.
This was the last bit of murderous motivation he needed. The Tsuyama Massacre was now in the offing.
The Terrible Night Arrives
Around 5 PM on May 20th, Mutsuo scaled one of the local electrical lines, severing power to the hamlet. The entire district went dark. The local residents do not seem to have been overly worried, however. They made no report of the power outage. Likely many of them did not yet use electricity in their daily lives.
Darkness settled over Kaio; the same darkness the people of the mountain had known since time immemorial. In his house, the only home he’d known since he was six years old, Toi Mutsuo readied himself for acts nigh-unimaginable.
He assembled his chosen outfit, one which would eventually become synonymous in the minds of many Japanese with the concept of “mass murderer.” He wore his school uniform with its stand-up collar; he affixed military gaiters to his shins, and jikatabi (split-toed workman’s boots) to his feet. Then he wrapped a hachimaki headband around his forehead, binding a flashlight to either side of his temples. Around his neck slung a further headlight.
Lastly, Mutsuo prepared the tools of his horrible vengeance. He slipped a full-length katana through a sash at his waist; two daggers slung from his other side. He then picked up his shotgun, with its 9-shot capacity. Mutsuo then prepared to head out into the night of the hamlet one final time.
The Tsuyama Massacre
Toi Mutsuo’s first murder victim was the one closest to him. He decapitated his grandmother, the woman who had cared for him nearly his entire life, with an axe while she slept.
Mutsuo wrote three notes detailing his motivations for the crimes he would undertake that night. In his last one, he described how death seemed a kindness compared to the shame his grandmother would have endured if left alive. One wonders if she would have agreed.
Mutsuo moved on to his first non-familial victims. Sneaking into a neighbor’s house, he murdered a woman and her three children. The sudden roar of his shotgun reverberated through the mountainside; some in the hamlet started awake. In the next house over, he shot yet another woman and her two daughters to death.
Already having killed eight people, Mutsuo moved on to the next house. Here he found a married couple, the husband’s mother, and a relative in town to help with the fieldwork. He shot them down in quick succession as they begged for their lives; at last, only the elderly woman remained breathing. On her knees, the old woman pleaded for her life. Mutsuo explained his rationale for her murder to her calmly:
I didn’t have no quarrel with your family. But then your son went ahead and married a girl from one of those other families [against whom Mutsuo held a grudge]. So now I gotta kill you.
He shot the old woman at point-blank range. Miraculously, she survived – and was able to tell of the horrors she’d witnessed that night.
Mutsuo stalked back into the darkness of the hamlet, leaving a third family devastated. And yet the night was far from over.
The Horrors Continue
In a fourth house, yet another family came face-to-face with the bloody visage of Toi Mutsuo. He shot down the father, mother, and two of their daughters.
Another daughter fled; Mutsuo gave chase. She ran into a neighboring house, where the father of the household quickly hid her under the floorboards alongside his own daughter.
Mutsuo entered, the triple headlights on his head and chest blazing in the darkness. He shot the father to death. The two girls under the floorboard sustained injuries, but survived.
In a sixth house, Mutsuo murdered the owner and his mother. In a seventh, he shot down a mother and two daughters, but let the father live, saying “You never spread rumors about me. Suppose I’ll give you a reprieve.”
Moving to the eighth house on his list, Mutsuo killed a daughter and her grandmother. The girl’s father escaped, running to the closest police station. He became the first to report the massacre then still ongoing.
At the ninth house, he slaughtered four people – three adults and a child. At the tenth, Mutsuo found a woman peering out through her storm shutters. He shot her to death. At a final, eleventh home, he killed yet another husband and wife.
At last, after an hour and a half of unspeakable violence, the shotgun blasts and screams ceased. Mutsuo, satiated, departed his home hamlet. Heading for a neighboring village, he left a shattered community behind him.
As a Terrible Dawn Broke
Shortly afterward, the door to an isolated house some ways off slid open. Inside, a father and son cowered as the blood-soaked, almost inhuman form of Mutsuo strode forward.
He asked the father for a pen and paper; the man simply sat, stunned into silence. His son, who had heard rumors of Mutsuo’s strange behavior, understood who it was before him. He rushed off to grab the requested stationery. Mutsuo took the pen and paper, and exited – although not before the mass murderer admonished the boy, telling him to mind his studies.
As dawn broke, Mutsuo ascended a mountain peak some miles away. There he made use of the borrowed pen and paper, writing down the last of three notes explaining his motivations. He made a great show of regret for murdering his grandmother and placing his surviving older sister in such a situation. He expressed similar regret that Teramoto Yuriko and another woman he’d formerly been involved with had fled, escaping his vengeance. Society, he wrote, needed to treat those with tuberculosis more kindly; those he had killed that night had brought their deaths upon themselves.
The last words of his missive read:
Already dawn is breaking. Time to die.
He placed his shotgun against his chest, and pulled the trigger.
The Aftermath
The Tsuyama Massacre remains the worst mass murder incident by a lone gunman in Japanese history. The community at Kaio was utterly shattered. In all, thirty individuals died; three survivors sustained major injuries.
Out of the eleven households Mutsuo broke into, three were completely wiped out. Four families had only a single survivor. Before Toi began his rampage, Kaio hamlet had a population of 111 people; one-fourth of that population died by his hand.
The murder spree was based on specific perceived grievances, and Mutsuo’s rampage purposely left some households unscathed. Survivors viewed those families who had been totally spared with suspicion; perhaps, they thought, those spared had been in league with Mutsuo. Thus, those lucky enough to escape his wrath were instead subjects of ostracization.
As for survivors who lost family members, they had to deal with more than immense grief and trauma. Reduced manpower in the local agrarian economy made life very difficult for them in the coming years. Before long, most of the survivors left the region. Discussing Mutsuo or the massacre became a local taboo.
Reports of the horrific spree killing quickly spread throughout imperial Japan’s mass media, casting a dark shadow on the bereaved community. Yet coverage quickly died down. Some speculated that the wartime media self-censored the story, seeing in it the seeds of inauspicious discussions of societal breakdown and the failure of local authority.
It wasn’t until after the end of World War II and the American occupation that the Tsuyama Massacre emerged back into the national discourse. It did so with a vengeance.
The Legacy of Tsuyama
Unbound by the self-censorship of the war years, the Tsuyama Incident wound its way into public discourse from 1949 onwards. It was at this point that the salacious nature of the massacre found its mass audience; many aspects lent it an air of the intriguing and the bizarre. The cloistered mountain village setting, huge body count, sexual intrigue, mix of modern and ancient murder weapons, and striking outfit of the murderer were all points that granted the Tsuayama Massacre continuing “appeal” as something that felt closer to a folk legend than a true crime story.
In 1949, renowned mystery novelist Yokomizo Seishi reworked the horrific events of Tsuyama into “The Village of Eight Graves” (八つ墓村.) In his tale, a horrific mass murder of some 32 people in a village “perched amid the desolate mountains on the border of Tottori and Okayama prefectures” is the inciting incident for the uncovering of a sordid local past. The murderer’s outfit is patterned directly on Toi’s real-life appearance during his murders. With three films based on it, “The Village of Eight Graves” continues to promote Toi’s image up until today.
Numerous books, movies, manga, and even plays have continued to mythologize Toi Mutsuo. Until 1982, his massacre was considered the worst carried out by a single individual worldwide. Seen as an outlier whose motivations stemmed from a very specific time and milieu, it’s only been in more recent years that his actions have started to feel uncomfortably close to home.
The First Incel Massacre?
Since 2014, attackers emerging from online “incel” (involuntary celibate) communities have murdered dozens of individuals. Their stated motivations often focus on vengeance against a society they believe has ostracized them, with a special animus aimed against women they see as sexually unavailable.
The first clear case was that of 23-year-old Elliot Rodger, who murdered six passersby and injured many others after failing to enter a sorority where he had intended to kill as many women as possible. His 133-page manifesto, in which he rants against society and the women who he believed spurned him, contains echoes of what Toi Mutsuo wrote some 76 years earlier.
There have of course been attempts at pathologizing Mutsuo long before the concept of “incel” made its way into our modern discourse. The death of his parents led to “a life without love,” or being raised by his grandmother “with a singular blind affection” made him a spoiled young man. [2] Others saw him as overly emotionally sensitive. Now, as disaffected young men increasingly make their desire to harm women known on online spaces, Mutsuo’s own vicious actions have begun to take on a new aspect.
The case of the Tsuyama Massacre seems to show that there’s a darkness that can lurk in the heart of discontented young men; that violent desires for “vengeance” against a societal whole, fueled by feelings of moral superiority and isolation, are not a new phenomenon.
Echoes of the Past
Yet part of the terrible draw of the Tsuyama Massacre has been the aspects of the narrative that remain a mystery. So few survived to tell their side of the story; the hamlet closed ranks and refused to speak of their communal experience.
Before long, the population had dispersed. None remain in the mountains of northern Okayama who remember the sound of those shotgun blasts, nor the screams. Toi Mutsuo turned his gun on himself, avoiding questioning. In 2015, after nearly eight decades of disuse, the rotting house in which he’d lived and murdered his own kin was finally torn down.
So Japan has been left with a muddled canvas on which to attempt to paint in the details. Did the youth of Kaio, Mutsuo included, still engage in yobai? Did the locals really spurn Mutsuo for a disease he was not at fault for catching? Was he an intelligent lad with a bright future in front of him, or a broken, reclusive sociopath from the start?
Toi Mutsuo’s incel nature is up for debate. As usual, all of these questions will continue to arouse a sense of morbid curiosity. The nature of the murderer, who stole the lives and futures of dozens of people, will continue to be discussed, researched, and debated. Meanwhile, the voices of those he killed will remain silent, the details of their lives forgotten.
Today, the former hamlet of Kaio has a population of fewer than thirty people. And amidst the empty lots, only the ghosts remain to recall the lives of those who came before.
Illustration of Toi Mutsuo, in one of many, many manga to portray the Tsuyama Massacre.
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Sources
小池 新. (2020/06/21). 21歳の青年が猟銃と日本刀で30人を襲撃……82年前の世界的事件「津山三十人殺し」とは. 文春オンライン.
[1] Koike, 2020. Various sources on Toi Mutsuo and the Tsuyama Massacre give different renditions of how he learned of his disease. Some say he knew before his conscription examination, while others describe the final confirmation only coming during the exam, as recounted here.
小池 新. (2020/06/21). 肺結核、徴兵検査、夜這い……なぜ村の秀才青年は残酷すぎる「津山三十人殺し」を決行したのか. 文春オンライン.
[2] Ibid, p3
Bruce Hoffman, Jacob Ware & Ezra Shapiro (2020) Assessing the Threat of Incel Violence, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 43:7, 565-587.
Ochiai, E. (2011). Love and Life in Southwestern Japan: The Story of a One-hundred-Year-old Lady. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 42(3), 399–409.
