2 men get 30 years for murder of couple whose burned bodies were dumped

A Japanese court on Friday sentenced two men to 30 years in prison for their role in the murder of a married couple and the damaging and abandoning of their corpses, which were found burned in Tochigi Prefecture, north of Tokyo, in 2024.

The Tokyo District Court found Hikaru Sasaki, 30, and Ryoken Hirayama, 27, guilty of colluding in the murder of Ryutaro Takarajima, 55, who managed restaurants in the capital's Ueno area, and his wife Sachiko, 56. Prosecutors had sought life in prison for both men, while the defense sought 20-year prison sentences.

In handing down the ruling, Presiding Judge Masataka Nakagawa said the two men were instrumental in carrying out the crime and "bear equally heavy responsibility."

Prosecutors argued that Sasaki received instructions for the crimes from Seiha Sekine, 34, the common-law husband of the couple's daughter, and that Hirayama acted as an intermediary with the people who carried out the murders.

A total of seven people have been arrested in the case, including the couple's 33-year-old daughter and Sekine.

Sasaki and Hirayama both acted for financial gain and "took the lives of innocent strangers," the prosecutors said.

Nakagawa noted that although the defendants had no prior relationship with the couple, they became principal actors in the crime, rejecting Hirayama's claim that his role was limited to aiding and abetting.

The judge, however, said that as neither man had planned or masterminded the crime, the maximum fixed-term prison sentence was appropriate.

According to the ruling, Sasaki and Hirayama conspired to make the couple drink coffee laced with sleeping pills in a car in Tokyo before strangling them with electric cords in the garage of a vacant house in Tokyo's Shinagawa Ward and smashing Sachiko's head with a hammer between April 15 and 16, 2024.

They are then believed to have been involved in carrying the bodies to Nasu on April 16, where the corpses were burned with gasoline. The couple was discovered early in the morning on the same day.

© KYODO