At the crossroads of bullying, suicide and murder

What appeared to be a suicide in the quiet neighborhood of Itabashi, Tokyo, has unraveled into a sordid tale of betrayal, brutality, bullying and finally murder

What appeared to be a suicide in the quiet neighborhood of Itabashi, Tokyo last December has unraveled into a sordid tale of betrayal, brutality, bullying and a chilling cover-up. The victim, Takano Osamu, a 56-year-old former employee of a painting company, met his end on a railroad crossing in December 2nd 2023. They found Takano on the train tracks in Itabashi, a quiet neighborhood where the worst thing that usually happens is a neighbor’s dog relieving itself on the wrong doorstep. But Takano wasn’t there by accident, and he hadn’t simply chosen the wrong day to give up. He was trapped there, thrown away like a discarded tool no longer of use, by the very men he had worked alongside. Men who had beaten, tortured, and humiliated him until the last shreds of his dignity had been stripped away, leaving him with nothing—no will, no choices, no life.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police knew what they were looking at wasn’t an ordinary suicide. Too neat, too staged. There was footage of a car parked by watching at happened even though Takano himself lifted up the safety bar and went on the tracks. The Homicide Division started pulling at the loose threads, and what unraveled was uglier than anyone could have guessed. Four men—Manabu Sasaki, the 39-year-old company president, along with Akihito Shimahata, 34, Shunta Nozaki, 39, and Atsuya Iwaide, 30—had orchestrated every step of Takano’s death. But their cruelty hadn’t begun that night on the Tobu Tojo Line. It had started long before, with years of torment that would have broken any man.

The abuse was systematic. Daily beatings, burns, a slow-motion dismantling of Takano’s personhood, all meticulously recorded on their smartphones like trophies of a sport only they were playing. The videos—seized by police—showed scenes of pure sadism. Takano being burned, forced into degrading acts, used as a human punching bag for their amusement. In one particularly vile display, recorded at an izakaya in Shizuoka, Takano was held down while Shimahata, his so-called mentor, violated him with a muddler, an act met with raucous laughter from Sasaki and Iwaide. The kind of thing that, in a just world, would earn them a punishment far worse than what the courts would ever deliver.

And it went on like that. They had all the tools at their disposal—construction materials from the painting company where they worked together. A one-centimeter-thick iron rebar, a three-centimeter-wide corrugated hose. Everyday objects turned into instruments of suffering. The kind of cruelty that doesn’t just emerge in a moment of rage but is nurtured, sharpened, practiced over time. It’s the difference between a crime of passion and a crime of habit. This was the latter.

December 2, 2023: The night they made their final move. They packed Takano into a car, drove him to the crossing, and ordered him to stand there as the train approached. He obeyed. After everything they had done to him, resistance wasn’t in his vocabulary anymore. Surveillance cameras caught two cars speeding away moments after the impact. The plates led back to Shimahata and Nozaki, but the guilt belonged to all four.

A lifetime ago, Takano had been a boy in Hakodate, Hokkaido. A high school dropout who worked his way down to Tokyo, drifting between jobs, ending up at MA-Kensou around 2014. They gave him a room to sleep in but paid him in food instead of cash. And in the days before his death, they had even taken that from him, starving him into submission. No money, no meals, no choices. Just a long, slow march to the inevitable.

Psychologists brought in by the police confirmed what the evidence already suggested: Takano had been so thoroughly conditioned by years of torment that by the end, he had no autonomy left. When they told him to step onto the tracks, he did. There was no decision to make—because he wasn’t a man anymore. They had stripped that from him.

When the press caught up with Sasaki before his arrest, he brushed it all off with the nonchalance of a man discussing the weather. Takano, he said, had asked for the punishment. As if a man begs to be brutalized, humiliated, discarded. As if he deserves it. And if there is any greater indictment of the human soul than a man who can say such things with a straight face, I’ve yet to hear it.

The legal case is an unusual one. There was no direct physical force at the moment of death. No knife to the throat, no gun to the head. Just words, orders, a long history of control. But the prosecutors are pushing forward, charging Shimahata and Nozaki with murder and confinement, Sasaki and Iwaide with confinement alone. It’s a case that could change how psychological coercion is prosecuted in Japan—if the courts are willing to see what’s right in front of them.

Osamu Takano’s death was not a single act of violence. It was the final scene in a horror show that played out for years, unseen, ignored, allowed to fester. A man didn’t just die—he was erased, bit by bit, until there was nothing left but the inevitability of his end. And maybe, when all is said and done, that’s the most horrifying part of all.

In Japan, only 4% of suspicious deaths ever get autopsied. Murder disguised as suicide happens more often than you can imagine. Sometimes, it’s for insurance money. Sometimes, it’s just bullying carried to the extreme.

Imagine this scene worthy of any noir nightmare: jagged cliffs at Tojinbo, the waves smashing below, and a boy forced to jump. The story unfolded in Fukui Prefecture, in 2019, where the famed coastline was turned into a murder stage. A young man barely 21, was sentenced to 19 years in prison for orchestrating a brutal plot to make a friend's death look like a suicide. The victim, 20-year-old Yuki Shimada, must have felt terrible fear and desperation before his death and all the way to the bottom.

Shimada, who had offended his buddies, was beaten with a wooden bat, pinned under a car, and locked in a trunk before being hauled to the cliff’s edge. Seven teens, following the defendant's lead, made sure he had no choice but to leap into the sea. Six of them have already faced the music, their prison sentences a cold comfort to the victim's family. As Judge Onishi put it, the crime was "relentless, unforgivable, and beyond repair." It leaves one wondering if the waves will ever wash away the horror of what happened there.

A man can die in the most inexplicable of circumstances, and the world will simply take it at face value. Takano almost became one of them. Almost.

As the investigation continues, one thing is clear: Takano Osamu’s death was not just a murder. It was the culmination of a campaign of terror, a grim reminder of how far cruelty can go when left unchecked. And while his killers may face justice, the scars of this case will linger, a dark stain on the otherwise unremarkable streets of Itabashi. The question remains: what kind of men could commit such atrocities, and what does it say about the world that allowed it to happen?