Episode 115:
A YouTube Algorithm Turned Her Into a Monster. What She Did to Her Mom Is Still Unexplained.

A Japanese woman came across a mind-healing video through the YouTube algorithm. The man in it called himself a spirit medium — a bridge between the universe and humanity — and claimed his music could heal the soul. Dig a little deeper, though, and it looks like something else entirely: a new kind of cult, operating through YouTube. He insisted that with a spiritual awakening, anyone could become a medium, just like him. For one of his followers, those words would lead to the murder of her own mother.

June 28, 2023, 10:30 a.m. A Japanese police station received a concerned call. "I work at the fitness center. One of my coworkers still hasn't come in, and we can't reach her. She's been acting strange for months — claiming she'd developed some kind of special power, rambling about quitting her job to prepare for 'it.' Still, she always showed up on time. Today, I have a really bad feeling." The missing woman was forty-five-year-old Kaori Arata, a well-liked freelance Zumba instructor across fitness centers in Tokyo and Chiba.

Ten Bags

At 11 a.m., police went to Kaori's house and knocked repeatedly with no answer, eventually leaving. Twelve hours later, at 11 p.m., a woman walked into a police box in Chiba Prefecture, lifted her bowed head, and spoke first: "I have killed someone. The body is still at my house right now." It was Kaori. Police rushed to her home ten minutes away and found blood throughout the house — and ten heavy plastic bags on the balcony and in the bathtub, each filled with dismembered flesh. The damage was so extensive investigators couldn't identify the gender with the naked eye. But they already knew who the victim was, because Kaori had told them herself: "I murdered my mother. And I have parts of her body right here in this backpack" — delivered with no fear or emotion, as if reporting a completed task. A recovered jawbone confirmed through dental records that the victim was seventy-five-year-old Hiroko Arata — Kaori's own mother.

A Family That Performed Happiness

Kaori grew up with nothing to want for — a high-earning father, a tennis-playing, high-society mother — an elite, athletic student who became a yoga and Zumba instructor after high school, strictly semi-vegetarian, and as bright and energetic as the job demanded. But behind closed doors, her parents' public affection vanished the moment they got home, retreating to separate locked rooms in an atmosphere of constant screaming and cruel insults. To escape it, Kaori threw herself into exercise — Zumba's forced smile becoming a genuine refuge from her actual life.

Then, starting in 2015, the burdens compounded one after another. Her brother's sudden divorce left his two daughters in the family home after their grandparents refused to raise them, and childcare fell entirely to Kaori. Her grandmother's dementia diagnosis added full-time caregiving on top of that, sparking screaming matches between her parents in front of the grandchildren whenever the grandmother lashed out. Her brother eventually took his daughters and left, briefly easing the load — until her father collapsed with an incurable illness, bedridden and needing constant care, which again fell to Kaori. He passed away, and soon after, so did her grandmother.

A Second Collapse, and a YouTube Channel

For a while, with only Kaori and Hiroko left in the house, life actually got lighter — Kaori's social media filled back up with workout photos and Zumba class recruitment posts. Then, in 2022, everything reversed. Kaori began abruptly deleting her social media, and the reason was her mother: after her father's death, Hiroko changed, screaming over small things, refusing to leave the house, and eventually forbidding Kaori from even opening the windows. Caregiving consumed her life again, and this time she was pushed to the edge — exhausted, isolated, and desperate for anything that might relieve it.

That's when she found a YouTube channel run by a man calling himself Kamibito, who produced videos about "healing the heart," "the laws of the universe," and "the spiritual world," and claimed to be a spirit medium bridging the universe and humanity — publishing books, giving lectures, building a following of roughly thirty thousand. Hoping it might help her mother, Kaori brought Hiroko to see him; the moment he saw her, he declared she was possessed by a demon and performed a ritual. Days later, Hiroko's health genuinely seemed to improve — likely coincidence or a placebo effect, but to Kaori it was proof. From that point, she developed total faith in the group's teachings and began obsessing over becoming a medium herself.

"I'll Kill You"

Kaori's online presence shifted entirely to praising Kamibito's lectures. She skipped meals to focus on "spiritual studies," stopped exercising, and grew alarmingly thin — coworkers described her standing frozen during Zumba classes, staring into space or muttering to herself. When Hiroko tried to intervene — "Kaori, you need to snap out of this!" — her once-obedient daughter turned hostile: "Who do you think you are, Mom? How dare you get in the way of my training. I'll kill you." Mother and daughter grew completely estranged.

On June 23, 2023, Kaori posted online: "When you have a realization, you act. Make it a habit. Your true character is shown through your actions." Four days later, on the night of June 27, she watched her mother go to bed, waited outside the door for an hour until Hiroko was asleep, then went in and began strangling her. Hiroko fought back harder than expected; Kaori put her full body weight into it until her mother stopped moving.

Final Thoughts

What followed was ritualistic. Kaori dragged the body to the bathroom and spent hours dismembering it with a kitchen knife, packing the remains into ten bags left in the bathtub and on the balcony — all except the torso, which she cut open to remove the organs and began to eat, believing that abandoning her lifelong vegetarianism and absorbing her mother's "life force" was the final step to becoming a complete spirit medium. Hours later, having apparently unraveled completely, she called a relative and calmly confessed everything. The relative, stunned, urged her to turn herself in — and Kaori walked into the police station without resistance, seemingly convinced she had already achieved whatever goal she'd been chasing.

Police contacted Kamibito directly, suspecting cult involvement, but he denied ever hearing of her, noting his organization had thirty thousand members he couldn't possibly track individually — and no evidence surfaced that he'd given Kaori specific instructions. Three years after the murder, her trial still hasn't begun, delayed by an extended psychiatric evaluation exploring a possible diagnosis of severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia — raising the real possibility she could be found not criminally responsible by reason of insanity. Kaori still insists that by consuming her mother's body, she achieved her goal. Whether the courts ultimately see her as simply deranged, or as someone shaped by years of unsupported caregiving and a predatory spiritual message amplified by an algorithm, remains unresolved.