00:02six people died in a small apartment in fukushima not in a war not in an accident
00:09they were beaten to death one after another over five months inside a building where every single
00:15person living there knew what was happening and the person who ordered it was a 47 year old woman
00:20who called herself a god her name was sachiko ito in 1994 she was not a criminal she ran a
00:30small hand
00:31healing practice in her living room the kind of thing that existed in every japanese town
00:36she had no theology degree no religious order behind her just her hands and a confident voice
00:42people came to her with aches and stress and some of them went home feeling better
00:47then she discovered something far more valuable than healing when she told people what she
00:53thought was wrong with them they believed her and belief can be monetized soon she was calling
01:00herself a psychic the queue at her door grew longer every week the families who followed her gave up
01:07everything one woman stopped taking her blood pressure medication on ito's orders her daughter
01:13brought her chronically ill husband and her 18 year old child they quit their jobs they sold their
01:20house they moved into ito's home because ito told them that living under her roof would erase their
01:27illness entirely then another family arrived with a child in elementary school eleven people one ordinary
01:35house what broke the group was jealousy a young woman arrived with an attractive boyfriend named namoto
01:42and ito seeing him for the first time announced in front of everyone that she and namoto had been
01:47married in a previous life from then on everyone had to address him as master but other women in the
01:55house also looked at him that ito could not tolerate so she invented a ritual she called it exorcism
02:04it was in practice a public execution conducted by the whole group the first target was the
02:10woman who had stopped taking her medication ito told her that a spirit lived inside her and then
02:16ordered the followers to beat her she was forced to perform a dance called the spirit dance for hours
02:22until she collapsed and then was beaten again for stopping beaten if she asked to rest beaten if she
02:29asked for the toilet one meal a day and she was never allowed to eat it then ito introduced the
02:36most
02:36cruel question in the whole case she demanded that the victim name out loud another member of the
02:43household she wanted to sleep with whatever name the victim gave became proof of demonic possession
02:49and that person became the next target the victim's own daughter was ordered to hit her mother
02:55and she did because she genuinely believed the beatings were for her mother's own good
03:01on the 25th of january 1995 at three in the morning the first woman was taken to the bathroom and
03:08beaten
03:08until she stopped making sound she never got up at five in the morning another woman stopped breathing
03:16ito told the group they were not dead their souls she said had merely moved into an accelerated state of
03:23evolution the bodies were left in a room on the ground floor waiting to come back
03:28the third victim was the 18 year old girl her only crime was that she had once called the master
03:35handsome
03:36she was forced to sleep on the floor for nights denied water denied the toilet while ito and namoto spent
03:43nights away at a love hotel and returned to continue the beatings she died on the 18th of february
03:50the fourth body was the girl's own mother beaten to death by her other daughter because ito
03:55claimed that mother had a spirit too in april four months in a new follower brought a 27 year old
04:02woman into the house ito was jealous of her beauty two days and two nights of uninterrupted beating
04:09followed on the 21st of april both women were dead six people five months one apartment
04:19so how did it end the only surviving daughter escaped and reported it a doctor noticed the injuries
04:27on one of the victims both times the police were called and both times someone decided the case did
04:33not merit a serious investigation if a single officer had looked properly the last four deaths might
04:39never have happened in 1996 the fukushima district court sentenced sachiko ito to death her lawyers
04:46argued she had been possessed that she lacked criminal responsibility that this was religious practice
04:53and the victims had consented the court refused every argument the ruling stated plainly that this
04:59was murder committed under a religious name and that her motive was not devotion it was jealousy over
05:05one man the supreme court upheld the sentence in 2008 on the 27th of september 2012 sachiko ito was hanged
05:16she was 65 she became the fourth woman executed in japan since the war but the thing that stays with
05:24you
05:24is not her it is the 11 people who lived in that house six of them died and many of
05:31the survivors had
05:32raised their own hands to beat the people they loved they were not monsters they were people who believed
05:39which means the most dangerous thing in this story was never the woman who called herself a god
05:44it was how quickly the rest of us say yes
05:49so
05:53so
05:59so
06:00so
06:00so
06:00so
06:30Transcription by CastingWords
07:00Transcription by CastingWords
