Episode 142:
Japan's Recent "Pretty" Teen Killer, Her Tools of Torture Were Hot Sauce and Toothbrush
At 3:25 p.m. on January 9, 2022, a frantic call reached a Tokyo police station: "My ex-girlfriend just stabbed me. I'm bleeding out. Please help me." Officers found a man collapsed in his apartment parking lot, pressing his abdomen as blood seeped through his fingers. Fighting to stay conscious, he handed over his house key and told them, "She's still there, inside the apartment." Officers went up and found a woman standing motionless in the middle of the living room, making no attempt to run or hide. She was 19-year-old Rina Sakuraba. The victim, 25-year-old construction worker Yusaku Sato, died after seven hours of surgery. What began as an attempted murder call became a homicide investigation — and a relationship far stranger than anyone expected.
During questioning, Rina immediately admitted to the stabbing, but what she said next confused investigators: "I just wanted to get away from Yusaku. I was trying to leave, but then I got scared. I never actually meant to kill him." The two had actually met two years earlier in their shared hometown of Aomori, when Rina was still a 17-year-old high schooler, and moved to Tokyo together as soon as she graduated so she could chase the city life she'd always dreamed of. They'd broken up six months before the stabbing — yet Rina was still living in Yusaku's apartment when police arrived, unable to afford her own place or sign a lease as a minor. An attacker claiming she was the one trying to escape from her victim made no sense on its face, and the full story would only get stranger from there.
Torture Behind Closed Doors
After the breakup, Rina had already moved on to a new boyfriend, an American man she'd met while clubbing — but she stayed in Yusaku's apartment anyway, turning him into a guest in his own home. Whenever she needed to call her new boyfriend, she'd order Yusaku to leave, sending him to wait in the parking lot or a nearby park, sometimes for so long that his coworkers took pity on him, feeding him dinner and letting him stay over rather than send him home to more harassment. Rina spiked his drinks with hot sauce, cleaned the toilet with his toothbrush, and ruined his favorite clothes with bleach, all while going out clubbing, using drugs underage, and staying out until morning. Yusaku endured it because Rina had told him she was moving to the United States with her new boyfriend within the month — he believed if he could just hold out that long, the ordeal would end on its own.
The Video She Couldn't Let Go Of
Early in the relationship, Yusaku had filmed an intimate video of the two of them, and even after the breakup, he kept it on his phone despite Rina repeatedly asking him to delete it. With her departure for the U.S. approaching — a point after which she'd have no way to stop him from doing anything with it — her anxiety over the video kept building.
The Night It Boiled Over
On January 9, 2022, as Yusaku lay in bed looking at his phone, Rina's anxiety over the video spiked into terror: what if he was uploading it right now? She went to the kitchen, grabbed a six-inch knife, and stabbed him in the stomach as he lay there. Yusaku managed to make it down to the parking lot and call the police himself before collapsing.
Final Thoughts
When the case first broke, outlets ran with Rina's account almost verbatim, and early reports listing Yusaku's occupation as "unknown" fueled speculation that he'd been abusive or exploitative — for a while, the actual victim was being treated online like the perpetrator, until his own friends stepped in on social media to set the record straight about who had really been tormenting whom. At trial, Rina pleaded guilty and her defense argued for a reduced sentence based on diminished capacity from extreme anxiety over the video, while prosecutors sought 13 years, arguing she'd continued living a normal life with no clear signs of impaired judgment. The court ultimately ruled the killing wasn't premeditated and acknowledged that Yusaku's refusal to delete the video had caused her real distress, but still held her fully responsible for taking a life, sentencing her to nine years. Police later confirmed the video had never actually been shared online — meaning the fear that drove Rina to kill Yusaku was never realized in the first place. In the end, neither Rina's months of cruelty nor Yusaku's refusal to delete the video excuses what happened between them; both simply made a bad situation worse until it became fatal.
Yusaku kept a private video Rina repeatedly begged him to delete, and that fear is what ultimately pushed her to kill him — but Rina had also spent months tormenting the man who moved her to Tokyo and supported her, even while openly dating someone else in his own home. Do you think it's possible to hold both of them accountable for their own wrongs without it turning into picking a side?
WE DOCUMENT.
YOU DECIDE.
Our interpretation is only one possible perspective.
