Samurai Serial Killers and Mass Murderers

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2024-11-12 20:00:06

Art & Culture Japanese History & Culture

Killing is a funny old thing. You can cut down 17 people, decapitate their corpses and stuff their mouths with bamboo grass — and people will call you one of the greatest warriors ever simply because the slaughter happened during war. That’s why there are so few “evil samurai” on record. Throughout its history, Japan has strongly believed that all’s fair in love and war, and it’s had plenty of the latter over the years. But once Tokugawa Ieyasu finished unifying the country in the early 17th century, war in Japan all but ended. THAT’S when we start seeing instances of mass-murdering, serial-killing monsters with katana, who end up going down in history as Japan’s most infamous samurai criminals , like …

Yoshiwara was a government-sanctioned pleasure district in Edo (modern-day Tokyo) that helped create female geisha. It was also where people could engage the services of the capital’s sex workers or, if you were rich enough, flex on your enemies in truly spectacular fashion. Sadly, it was also the site of the first and only instance of spree killing during the Edo period (1603–1867) when one Sano Jirozaemon went mad and rampaged through the district, indiscriminately killing people with his sword. The event is now known as “Yoshiwara’s Hundred-Person Slaying.”