For about 40 years he went by Hiroshi Uchida. He worked for a building firm in Fujisawa, south of Tokyo, took his pay in cash and kept clear of banks. He had no driving licence, no mobile phone and no health insurance. Regulars at a local bar knew him as “Ucchi,” a quiet man who liked beer and rock music and said little about himself.
Then, in January 2024, terminally ill with stomach cancer, he told hospital staff who he really was. “In the end, I want to die as ‘Satoshi Kirishima,’” he said, according to The Asahi Shimbun. Kirishima had been on Japan’s wanted list since 1975.
A confession, then a death
The man had been admitted to a hospital in Kamakura in early January under the Uchida name. On January 25 he gave his real one. He also told staff he regretted his part in the attacks. Police questioned him and, the Asahi reported, he supplied details of the bombings and his family that only Kirishima could have known.
He died on January 29, aged 70. So there was never an arrest in the usual sense, and never a trial. DNA tests on the body and on several relatives came next, and police searched his home near the construction firm on February 2. By February 27 the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had confirmed the identification. The same day, five cases were sent to prosecutors on suspicion of violating the Explosives Control Law and attempted murder.
The group and the bombs
Kirishima belonged to the “sasori” (scorpion) unit of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, which claimed responsibility for 12 bombings of building contractors and other firms in the mid-1970s. The deadliest hit the Tokyo headquarters of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Eight people died and more than 360 were hurt, The Guardian reported, apparently because the company had supplied US forces during the Vietnam war. It stood as Japan’s deadliest terrorist attack until the 1995 sarin gas release on the Tokyo subway.
Prosecutors’ papers on Kirishima concern other attacks. Investigators suspected him over a bombing at a building of the Economic Research Institute of Korea in Ginza in April 1975, and four attacks on the contractor Hazama between February and April that year. He denied the Ginza bombing, sources told the Asahi, but indicated he took part in at least one of the Hazama attacks.
Police had arrested nine of the group’s 10 suspected members. He was the one who got away. He told investigators he had worked day-labour jobs in Kawasaki before the Fujisawa firm, had never contacted the others and had lived alone for half a century on the run.
Victims’ families left without a courtroom
The statute of limitations on the five cases has been suspended because other alleged accomplices fled overseas. With Kirishima dead, though, the families will not see him face a judge. One relative, whose 23-year-old sister died in the Mitsubishi bombing, told the Yomiuri Shimbun that his apology had come “too late.”
Sources
- DNA test proves elderly construction worker was one of Japan's most wanted fugitives
- Dead man confirmed to be 1970s fugitive Kirishima
