“I looked inside and found what looked like a human leg inside the iron lid of the septic tank, which was suspiciously open.”
– Teacher A, The Case of the Corpse in the Toilet, Fukushima
The Fukushima toilet death mystery
On February 28, 1989, ‘Teacher A’, a 23-year-old woman working at an elementary school in a small village near Fukushima, Japan, finished work around 5:10 pm and headed to the faculty dorm next to the school.
She need the toilet. She walked to a traditional toilet in the dormitory. She looked down and spotted a shoe floating in the toilet bowl. Thinking it odd, she left the toilet, walked outside the house and went to the septic tank behind it. “I looked inside and found what looked like a human leg inside the iron lid of the septic tank, which was suspiciously open.”
Teacher A ran to the school and reported this to the vice principal and fellow teachers who were still there. At around 6:20 p.m., police and a local fire crew arrived on the scene.
The firefighters attempted to pull the foot out, but failed because the hole was too narrow. They used equipment to dig into the soil around the septic tank and then destroyed the exposed septic tank. That’s when they saw the body.
The body was that of a male. Despite the cold weather, he was inside the septic tank with his upper body uncovered. He was holding a neatly folded dress shirt and two pairs of underwear that he seemed to be wearing tightly wrapped around his chest. His elbows were bent and his face slightly tilted to the left, facing upward.
The body was taken to the fire station, where it was cleaned before an autopsy was performed. Aside from abrasions on the knees and elbows, the body showed no significant external injuries, and the doctor concluded that the cause of death was frostbite and thoracic circulation disorder.
But how did he get into such a small space?
The U-shaped pipe was symmetrical, with a diameter of 36 cm. One end led to the outdoor sewage, and the other end was in the restroom inside the house. The indoor toilet was a squat toilet with a diameter of only 20 cm. The victim was 1.7 meters tall. The average shoulder width measurements for Japanese men aged 25 to 29 was 40.4 cm.
When the body was discovered, the victim was not wearing shoes. The police conducted a search around the crime scene and found one of his shoes wrapped inside the pipe. This was the shoe that the female teacher had seen. Later, the police found the other shoe far away in a riverbed.
The deceased was Naoyuki Kanno, a 26-year-old man who lived with his parents and grandmother in a nearby village about 10 minutes away from the teachers’ quarters.”
Despite the police considering it an accidental death, both the victim’s father and the local people couldn’t accept that explanation. They knew him well and regarded him as a promising young man. He was responsible for business management at a company in charge of maintaining the nuclear power plant at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
He and the female teacher had a close relationship. He also had a good rapport with her boyfriend, and they were well-acquainted with each other’s activities. Prior to the incident, the female teacher had received multiple harassing phone calls, prompting her and her boyfriend to record them and report them to the police. Additionally, the victim assisted the female teacher in identifying the harasser’s identity.
Over 4,000 residents signed a petition demanding a murder investigation, noting that he had been involved in local politics and there was opposition to the expansion of the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
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