Carter Roy (3:44)

Maybe you haven't heard of the Johatsu, but you've probably heard of seppuku or harukiri, a form of ritualized suicide where someone disembowels themselves before having their head cut off by a friend with a katana. The practice dates back to at least the 12th century and Japan's elite samurai warrior class. The proper etiquette for conducting the ritual was kept hidden for hundreds of years, but some how to manuals were translated into English in 2025, so we have new insights into how everything was supposed to work. The practice is even more involved than you might think, down to what the person doing the decapitating should wear, how much sake should be consumed, and what materials the box that stores the head should be made from. There's even a part of the ritual where the doomed samurai writes death poetry as a way to capture their final thoughts or distract them from an incoming execution in case they can't carry out the self mutilation. Seppuku has been outlawed in Japan for hundreds of years. The formalities of the ancient ceremony might seem strange to us now, but they underscore how Japanese culture once viewed the ritual with respect. It was considered honorable for samurai to choose death over disgrace or capture. Better to die with honor, better than to live in shame. Of course, Japanese culture has changed a lot over the years, but the past has a way of infiltrating the present. The stories we'll tell throughout this episode come from firsthand accounts documented by others that includes journalist Laina Mauger, documentarians Andreas Hartman and Arata Morey, and reporter Joseph Hincks at Time magazine. To protect subjects identities, the stories they documented don't always include dates or locations. Many of the names used are pseudonyms. With that, we're touching down in Kyoto, Japan in an unknown year to meet a young man named Hashi. Hashi works as an engineer, often late into the night and on Saturdays. He's married and lives with his wife in a two room apartment half paid for by his father. According to Hashi, his father is critical of the apartment along with every other aspect of his life. One day, two men dressed in suits ring Hashi's door and tell him that he and his wife need to leave. A public works company wants to knock down their apartment building and replace it with something bigger and better. The men threaten that all homeowners have to vacate. They return the next day with a similar message. Then Hashi says he finds his mailbox smashed in. The threats get to the point where he and his wife decide to move in with her parents. Hashi's wife leaves first. Hashi stays behind to work and manage the details of selling the apartment. He says everything feels difficult during this time. His life feels like a failure. He counts the stains on his ceiling. One morning from bed, when he gets up, he cleans a bit and writes a note to his wife. According to Hashi, their marriage was happy. He earned good money. But he could never shake the fear that she might up and leave him for a better life. His note reads, quote, I feel guilty. I'm leaving. I'm sorry for putting you through this. Don't wait for me. I will never forget you. He leaves his keys and money behind and takes a train to the foot of Mount Fuji. He finds himself walking through Aho Kigahara Forest, AKA the sea of trees, sometimes known as the suicide forest. A sign at the entrance reminds visitors that life is a precious gift. It tells them to think about their family and friends and reach out to someone if they need help. Hashi walks for two days. He says the forest at night is a terrible thing. He has visions of himself hanging from one of the trees. He imagines the person who will have to find his dead body. His life flashes before his eyes. He fights through the cold. He fights off sleep. Then one day, he wakes up to an old man standing above him. The stranger takes him in. Hashi suspects he's not the first wayward soul the old man has pulled out of the forest and taken into his home. The man feeds Hashi soup, rice and grilled fish. He gives him a little cash and washes his shoes for him. By the time he leaves, Hashi says he feels like no one. He boards a return train to Tokyo and he says, as if a voice told him to go. He arrives outside a shed around dawn. When a van shows up. He doesn't ask Questions. He gets inside. He's taken to a construction site and performs hard manual labor for reasonable pay. At night, he sleeps in camps. He eventually gets a job under the table, working for a dry cleaner and can rent a room. But the dry cleaner closes. He becomes homeless again. He still finds odd jobs. This one time, a boss even convinces him to check in on his old life. He's too afraid to track down his wife. But he knocks on the door to his brother in law's apartment. It's been years since they last saw each other. Hashi's teeth are now falling out. And for both men, wrinkles have set in. But they still recognize each other. Hashi's brother and sister in law can't believe it's really him. Hashi sits with them for a while inside. It's awkward, but he finally asks the questions he most wants answers to. Turns out his parents are both dead. As for Hashi's wife, she spent years looking for him. She couldn't stop crying. After he left. She finally declared him dead. After a decade, she remarried to a university professor. They have two kids together. Ever since finding out that information, Hashi says he's been slowly dying. He's lived for more than 25 years as a johatsu, or an evaporated person. Someone who voluntarily cuts all ties to their old life and disappears into a new one. Kazufumi can relate. In 1970, he works as a broker in Tokyo. He holds a degree from a prestigious university and is one of the top sellers at a firm that manages high risk transactions. He's on top of the world. Then one day, a bad investment turns everything upside down. After he loses his clients 400 million yen, or around US$3 million in 2025, he basically becomes a pariah. Ashamed of his fall from grace, Kazufumi wakes up one morning and walks away from everything without telling anyone. In his life, he boards a train and disappears. He takes a new name and works odd jobs for cash under the table. He eventually rents an apartment anonymously and begins his own small business disposing of city waste. He starts with dead animal corpses and graduates to human remains and industrial and electronic waste. Kazufumi's family doesn't forget about him. His father, a cop, leads an investigation into the wilderness to look for his missing son. They hand out flyers on the streets and even hire a personal investigator. They're not the only one searching. Kazufumi's debt collectors are also on his trail. But there's not much they can do other than give up if no one ever finds him. By the time he launches a new business venture, it's been more than a decade since he vanished from his old life. His company becomes a yonigaya, which has been translated to fly by night shops or night movers. In Japan, people pay these businesses to make them disappear. Imagine calling a moving company not to transport your furniture across town to a new residence, but to make sure no one ever finds you again. That's the concept behind Yonigeiya, or night movers. They're surprisingly not very difficult to find. A quick Internet search will lead anyone to their very public websites. Some night movers have even sat down with news outlets to share some details of their operations. In 2017, Time magazine spoke to the CEO of a night moving company named Saita. At the time, she said her team services cost between 450 to 2,600 US dollars. Factors that influenced their pricing included how far a client wanted to travel, how much stuff they planned to take with them, and if there were any kids involved. Estimates for other companies have been as high as US$20,000, and that was back in 2003. Saita told Time that her company received five to 10 inquiries a day and helped between 100 and 150 people disappear each year. Logistics vary based on the individual client's means and needs. In some cases, night movers might empty the person's entire home. In others, the client escapes with a bag and little else. With crews of movers on hand, jobs can take as little as 15 minutes. Owners of a Yonigaya say speed and efficiency are key to not attracting unwanted attention. So is discretion. In certain cases, companies won't tell their clients what the escape plan is until the day before. More involved moves, though, require participation and careful planning ahead of time, with teams of agents conducting stakeouts and arranging pickup locations that won't raise any eyebrows. One job could look like a client slipping out of their house and into a getaway car while their spouse takes a bath. Another could involve night movers posing as secondhand shop workers and buying a bunch of furniture off a client and then returning under the COVID of night. In really serious cases, they might sweep the person's home for surveillance tools like wires and bugs to ensure they're not followed. And leaving home is just one part of the process. Most night movers also consult with their clients on how to stay hidden. They have access to their own collection of leases, cell phones, and cars registered under different names. To make their clients more difficult to find, they may take out dummy cell phones or redirect mail to fake addresses. Some work with the government to make sure all new information stays private. They'll even handle the paperwork to ensure all strings are cut to their clients past lives. That includes divorce filings. Night moving saw a boom in the 90s when Japan's real estate market burst and the country entered an economic crisis. While nightmovers can make it easier for someone to vanish from their lives without a trace, not all jouhatsu use their services. Some simply take matters into their own hands. Japan has multiple how to guides on the subject, including one book titled Perfect Reset yout Life and another called the Complete Manual of Disappearance, which has the tagline abandon your sad, pathetic reality. There are no official numbers for how many people go missing in Japan each year. In 2015, their National Police Agency said they registered 82,000 missing persons in their databases. Numbers have apparently remained pretty consistent since then, with between 70 to 90,000 reported disappearances every year through 2024. But according to one nonprofit, those numbers may be misleading due to chronic underreporting and other factors. They suspect the actual number is closer to a few hundred thousand people every year. And generally speaking, Japan as a country makes it surprisingly easy to vanish into thin air. In most places, when someone disappears, alarm bells ring, missing persons posters go up, the police launch a search, the family pleads for answers on national tv. In Japan, that's not always the case. If police even suspect the disappearance was voluntary, they have no obligation to investigate. And in many cases, even if they want to investigate, there's not much they can do. Japan has notoriously strict privacy laws. The only time police, or anyone else for that matter, can legally gain access to someone else's personal data is if they can prove a crime has been committed. Which means normal methods of tracking down missing persons, like using CCTV footage, ATM transactions, or phone records are off the table. Personal information is also intentionally decentralized. In Japan, there's no easy way for the government or anyone else to access a comprehensive record on any one person. Local municipal offices act as the primary custodians of people's basic resident register, an official document that contains personal information like birth, sex, and home address. When someone moves, they submit a moving out notification to their municipal office and then a moving in notification wherever they relocate. That's supposed to happen within 14 days, but if someone moves out and unregisters from one municipality and never moves into another, they effectively go off grid. Yes, the law says they're supposed to, but it's an elective act and even if they do register a new address in a new municipality, the only way someone else could find them would be if that person blindly contacted, one by one, every constituency in a country of almost 125 million people. Japan's My Number program, the equivalent of the United States Social Security program, only launched in 2016. They've historically used what's called a koseki, a family registry that records births, deaths, marriages and divorces. Families are supposed to make declarations themselves as major milestones come and go. It's against the law to falsify information on a koseki, but if someone disappears and stops updating theirs, a major part of their official paper trail ends. There are no photos attached to kosekis, so if you manage to get your hands on someone else's, you can steal their identity with relative ease. In 2023, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that in cities like Tokyo and Osaka, desperate people might sell theirs for the equivalent of US$3,000. As far as new identities go, that seems pretty inexpensive to us. Japan's culture of privacy also means it has historically been easier to get by without documentation. Anonymity is more respected, and unlike countries like the United States, there's less of a reliance on photo IDs. Japan's strict privacy laws have their upsides, but they often leave families of the Johatsu feeling powerless. After her 22 year old son suddenly disappeared overnight, one mother spoke to the BBC under the condition of anonymity. She said her son went missing after he quit his job for the second time. He must have felt miserable with his failure, she told reporters. According to the woman, police told her they couldn't intervene unless they suspected suicide and her son hadn't left a note. There wasn't much she could do but wait and hope her legal rights as a mother didn't change. When her child went missing, she told the BBC, quote, all I can do is check if a dead body is my son. Not only did she lose her son, she has to live with the stigma associated with having a family member voluntarily disappear. One Johatsu relative put it this people treat you like you did something wrong, like you chased them away. But sometimes they just leave and you're the one cleaning up. Cleaning up could look like a lot of things. Raising kids, dealing with angry landlords, handling debt collectors. Some accounts actually suggest the first night moving companies were created almost exclusively to help people escape loan sharks before the scope of their work eventually evolved. The volume of voluntary disappearances in Japan, combined with the country's strict privacy Laws could explain why in 2015, the country had 5,667 registered detective agencies, some of which had upwards of 100 private investigators on staff. But for families of the missing, hiring a private investigator can be prohibitively expensive, and there are no guarantees. PIs are subject to the same laws as everyone else. There are even non profits that have stepped in to try and help families of Johatsu find their missing loved ones. Now, we've covered two Johatsu cases so far. Hashi, the overworked engineer who felt he could never live up to expectations. He left after two threatening men in suits told him he needed to sell the apartment he shared with his wife in Kazufumi, the successful broker who lost his company millions with one bad investment. Neither one disappeared with the help of a Yonigeiya. But Kazufumi eventually started his own night moving service. And though he says he erases all of his clients from his memory after he finishes helping them, it's largely thanks to people like him that we have accounts of. The evaporated. Night movers have served as middlemen, selectively connecting reporters with Jouhatsu willing to share their stories if the right conditions are met. We now have a clearer picture of who they are. Though they're sometimes described as ghosts, they're not. They're regular people with pasts and motivations all their own. Mikio's journey to an alternate life began when he was very young. He grew up on the island Hokkaido, with two sisters and an abusive mother who worked in a local factory. His father was out of the picture. His mother always seemed unhappy, and Mikio says he was unhappy, too. When one of his sisters was 9 and he was 11, they made a pact to die by suicide together. But they never went through with it. Mikio left shortly after. He was 12 years old, and according to him, he wasn't afraid. AI's journey started much later in life. She was married with a son, when one day her husband's boss showed up on her doorstep. His name was Hiroshima, and they'd known each other since they were both kids. Hiroshi, Aie claimed, was her childhood love. When she answered the door that day, Hiroshi looked emotional. But he didn't really say anything, just that he happened to be walking by and decided to ring the doorbell. She never told her husband. Hiroshi dropped by, and eventually his visits became more frequent. Aiei and Hiroshi continued to meet in private. According to her, they barely spoke and they never touched. They mostly just sat together in AI's home while she served him tea and sweets. Then one day, Hiroshi blurted out something Aie will never forget. I have always loved you. He burnt his tongue on hot tea as the words fell out of his mouth. The reason he hired her husband, he said, was to be closer to her. After Hiroshi left that day, Aie said, she entered a fog. Fear took over her life. She didn't know what to do. Her marriage had been arranged by her parents. Her husband wasn't someone she would have known chosen. She remembered feeling disgust on their wedding night. But she had grown accustomed to him. She didn't want to run into Hiroshi, so she stopped going outside. She knew entering a relationship would be impossible. Her husband would surely find out. They lived in a small town. She knew it was only a matter of time before Hiroshi came back for another reason Visit. So she left before he could. Because she managed her family's finances, she had access to their savings. She withdrew everything. Then she left the house while her son was at school, without even locking the door behind her. Some Johatsu run from debt, others from gang violence. Some simply fall in love with the idea of a life without strings. We mentioned Saita earlier. The CEO of one of the most popular night moving companies in Japan. She also happens to be a jouhatsu. She didn't disappear to die. She disappeared to survive. She fled in abusive marriage, took her dog and their car and left. There are many Johatsu with similar stories. A 2015 study found that one in four Japanese women experience some form of spousal abuse. Victims of domestic violence make up a large percentage of Nightmover's clients. Saita says her business fills in where law enforcement and other other social services have historically fallen short. Of course, her company handles much more than just domestic violence cases. Saita says it doesn't matter what drives her clients. Fear, shame, Ego, Self interest. It's not her place to judge. Everyone has their own struggles. She has rules, though. She insists she never takes on clients who are involved in criminal activity or are trying to run from the law. But occasionally there are night movers who, despite their best intentions, end up in serious trouble. One man agreed to help a woman and her six year old child escape an abusive relationship. But he didn't know she had also stolen the equivalent of US$660,000 from the mob. He only found out after he was kidnapped. Members of the gang beat him and held him hostage for four days. He escaped by jumping out of a car when it stopped on a highway and running down an embankment. There are some who believe there are night movers that have their own personal connections to organized crime. Yonigeya apparently have a terrible reputation. One nightmover described their public image as very bad and almost like garbage. That's maybe not surprising considering their line of work and that their image is shaped by those left behind, not by those they help. Imagine someone you loved disappeared. How would you feel about the company that helped them do it? How do you trust a business that intentionally operates in the shadows? That's the thing about night movers. Their business is secrecy. And when you're paid large sums of money, often in cash, to make someone disappear, and the most industry appropriate response to someone looking for them is sorry, we can't help you, the door is wide open for bad behavior. Say a night moving company had ties to organized crime. Like the notorious and widespread yakuza who have a history of inserting themselves into businesses and are known for extortion, blackmailing and all kinds of illegal activity. The whole mission and premise of night moving could be the perfect cover story. A night mover could just as easily hand a client over to their debtor as they could help them escape. Or imagine if they wanted to assist in labor trafficking. When the goal is to erase someone from society, the possibilities can be chilling. Of course, if there are criminal night movers, they probably aren't talking to reporters anytime soon, so we can only really speculate. But even just the ease and speed with which police accept voluntary disappearances can be a cause for concern. In 2010, a Tokyo woman filed a sexual harassment complaint against her supervisor. Two days later, she vanished and her disappearance was classified as voluntary. Friends believed she was silenced or worse. But no investigation ever took place. Police considered it an open and shut case. Her friends and family can only hope that she's still alive and well. Which brings us to a question that's probably on your mind at this point. If there are so many jouhatsu, where do they all go? There's no one answer. Night moving companies can set clients up with new living arrangements that are ready to go when they finally leave. Others have to chart their own path. According to journalist Lena Mauger, though, there are neighborhoods that have become hotbeds for Johatsu. And much like the people who call them home, they no longer officially exist. They've disappeared from Japan's maps. Mager was specifically referring to a Tokyo neighborhood with a dark and bloody past. In the 17th century, Sanya was a state run execution ground for criminals. Hundreds of thousands of people were put to death by beheading. Its Roads still carry names like street of Bones and Bridge of Tears. In her book on the Johatsu, Mauger described Sanya as a forgotten place filled with nameless people, somewhere no one dares to go. And the implication is it's somehow secret or hidden. A society under no a society. Some have taken issue with those characterizations. They say there's nothing secret or hidden about Sanya. Yes, the neighborhood disappeared from maps in 1966, but there's nothing ominous or supernatural about the erasure. City lines were redrawn and its land was incorporated into surrounding districts. The move was likely made by city officials who who wanted to avoid any stigmas associated with the name and encourage new investments. If you've lived in a major city long enough, you've likely seen something similar. Sanya also isn't unique. In Osaka, there's a neighborhood called Kamagasaki. In Okahama, there's Kotubukicho. They're impoverished areas with large, unhoused populations, places where it's easier to pop participate in Japan's thriving underground economy. People can find work without identification and rent a room by the day, week or month. That's why many jouhatsu do end up in these neighborhoods. Life can be incredibly difficult, but many don't see another option for themselves, given the choice they made to disappear. According to one nightmover interviewed by South Morning China Post For a 2023 documentary, cases of voluntary disappearances were on the rise after the COVID 19 pandemic. He estimated two to three times higher. Now you can make the argument that there are Johatsu all over the world. Voluntary disappearances certainly aren't unique to Japan. Neither are the neighborhoods many jouhatsu end up in. But there are particular cultural factors some say act as driving forces, like the value the country places on social uniformity. There's an old Japanese adage that goes the nail that sticks out, gets hammered down. As a society, some claim there's little patience for stepping out of line and few opportunities for second chances. Some also point to the value the Japanese place on academic and career achievement. Work hours are long and vacation days are limited. There's actually a phenomenon in Japan called karoshi, or death by overwork. According to reporting by time magazine, about 200 people officially die from overwork and every year, and some estimates suggest the number may actually be closer to 10,000. Then there's Japan's relationship to propriety, shame and failure. We started this episode with ritual suicide. Better to choose death with honor than live life in shame. Evaporating is kind of like a third option. Better to disappear. It's the death of a life. And what really makes the jouhatsu so unique to Japan is how easy the country makes taking that option. They've quite literally built a commercial pipeline to facilitate the process, protected by their dedication to privacy. It's a societal escape hatch there in case anyone wants or needs it doesn't matter their reason. Vanishing can cause chaos for those left behind, heartbreak, confusion. And there's certainly no guarantee that a new life will be any better or easier. In fact, many accounts suggest just the opposite. But the thing is, the agency and autonomy exists for people to make that choice for themselves when reflecting on their decision to disappear, here's what some Jouhatsu I was sick of the world, but I didn't have the courage to die. I left an impossible love. I fled a label. I wanted to get some air. When happiness is lost, it is never recovered. Leaving was the first time I chose myself. Fleeing is a fast track toward death. I'm not afraid of anything. That last one is from Michio, the boy who left home when he was 12. He said those words after he allowed his picture to be taken. His life, he said, was filled with highs and lows. He lived on the street until wartime military police caught him and made him work in a plane factory. Then he worked construction sites for no pay. Then as a garbage man for meager pay, he witnessed battles, death, slept on cardboard, oscillated between having shelter and not. He eventually found a community in a small boarding house. With the help of a friend, he tracked down his sister, the one he once made that suicide pact with. They reconnected, walking along a beach, holding hands. It had been 65 years since they last spoke. Not all Johatsu stay missing forever. Thank you for watching Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram, he conspiracypod and if you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. For more information on the Johatsu, we recommend checking out the book the Vanish, the Evaporated People of Japan, documentaries by the South China Morning Post and Undercover Asia, as well as coverage by BBC and Time magazine. Among the many sources we used for this episode, we found them extremely helpful to our research. Until next time. Remember, the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth. Truth this episode was written and researched by Connor Sampson. Edited by Miki Taylor Fact Checked by Sophie Kemp engineered by Sam Amezquah and video edited and sound designed by Ryan Contra. Special thanks to Nick Johnson, Paige Ransberry, Andrew Byrne and Jonathan Ratliff. I'm your host, Carter Roy.