Sada Abe

Name: Sada Abe

Number of victims: 1

Date of murder: May 18, 1936

Date of arrest: May 21, 1936

Victim profile: Kichizo Ishida, 42 (her lover)

Method of murder: Strangulation

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Status: Convicted of second-degree murder and mutilation of a corpse on December 21, 1936, and sentenced to 6 years in prison. Her sentence was commuted on November 10, 1940; she was released May 17, 1941. She died sometime after 1970.

Sada Abe (阿部 定 Abe Sada) was a Japanese woman convicted of murdering her lover by erotically asphyxiating him. After killing him, she severed his penis and testicles with a kitchen knife and carried them around with her until her arrest three days later.

Biography

Sada Abe (born May 28, 1905) was the seventh of eight children, born to Shigeyoshi and Katsu Abe, an upper-middle-class couple in the Kanda neighborhood of Tokyo. Only four of the Abe children lived to adulthood, with Sada being the youngest of the survivors.

Sada's siblings were known to behave questionably. Her brother Shintaro was known as a womanizer and ran away with his parents' money after his marriage. Her sister Teruko was also known to have several lovers. As punishment for this, Shigeyoshi Abe sent Teruko to work in a brothel, a common punishment for sexual promiscuity.

Katsu Abe doted on Sada and let her do as she pleased. Sada was encouraged to take lessons in singing and shamisen (a traditional three-stringed Japanese instrument), both activities which were closely related with geishas and prostitutes at the time. Geishas were considered glamorous celebrities, and Abe wanted to follow their image, skipping school for these lessons, and began wearing stylish make-up. As problems with her siblings continued at home, Sada was often sent out of the home alone; she soon fell in with a group of similarly-independent teenagers.

When Sada was 15, she was raped by one of her acquaintances. Despite the support of her mother and father, she became a difficult teen. As Sada became more irresponsible and uncontrollable, Sada's parents sold her to a geisha house in Yokohama in 1922, hoping she would gain some direction in society. Later on, Toku Abe, Sada's oldest sister, testified that Sada wished to become a geisha. However, Sada claimed her father made her a geisha as punishment for her promiscuity.

Sada's experiences with the world of the geishas proved frustrating and disappointing; to become a true geisha required apprenticeship from childhood and years of studying arts and music. She wound up a low-ranking geisha, her main duty to provide sex. After working in capacity for five years, Sada eventually contracted syphilis. This meant she had to undergo regular examinations, like legally licensed prostitutes, were required to do. It wasn't long before Sada decided to enter the better-paying profession of prostitution.

Sada began working as a prostitute in Osaka's Tobita brothel district, but soon gained the reputation of a trouble-maker. She stole money from clients, and she tried to leave the brothel several times but was tracked down by the well-organized legal prostitution system.

After two years in the prostitution industry, Sada escaped and began working as a waitress. However, Sada was dissatisfied with the wages she got as a waitress, and went back to working as a prostitute; the only difference is she was now unlicensed. She began working in the unlicensed brothels of Osaka in 1932.

Sada's mother died in 1933, and Sada returned to Tokyo to visit her father and her mother's grave. During the visit, she entered the prostitution industry in Tokyo and became a mistress for the first time. When Shigeyoshi Abe became seriously ill in January 1934, Sada nursed him for ten days until he died.

In October 1934, Sada was arrested during a police raid on an unlicensed brothel. Kinnosuke Kasahara, a well-connected friend of the brothel owner, arranged to have Sada released. Kasahara was attracted to Sada and made her his mistress; he set up a house for her on December 20, 1934, and provided her with money.

Kasahara claimed Sada wasn't satisfied unless they had sex 2-4 times a night, which he found exhausting. Sada asked Kasahara to let her take a lover, but he refused. After that, their relationship ended, and Sada left for Nagoya.

In 1935, Sada intended to enter the sex industry again, and began working as a maid at a restaurant. She soon became romantically involved with Goro Omiya, a customer who was a banker and a professor. Knowing that the restaurant would not tolerate a maid having relations with a client, Sada returned to Tokyo in June 1935. After a suggestion from Omiya, Sada accepted an apprenticeship in a restaurant owned by Kichizo Ishida.

Not long after she began working at the restaurant, Ishida began making advances toward Sada. In mid-April, Ishida and Sada began their sexual relationship in the restaurant, accompanied by the singing of a romantic ballad by one of the restaurant's geishas.

On April 23, 1936, Sada and Ishida met for a sexual encounter at a teahouse - the equivalent of a love hotel - in the Shibuya neighborhood. Although it was only planned to be a short fling, the couple remained in bed for four days.

On April 27, 1936, the couple moved to another teahouse in the Futako Tamagawa neighborhood. They continued drinking and having sex, sometimes accompanied by a geisha singing; the couple would even continue when the maids entered the room to serve sake.

On May 9, 1936, Sada watched a play in which a geisha attacks her lover with a kitchen knife. Sada decided afterward to threaten Ishida with a knife on their next meeting. She pawned some of her clothes on May 11, 1936, and used the money to buy sushi and a knife. She drew the knife on Ishida later that night and threatened him (due to him wearing a kimono to apparently please one of his favorite customers); she said Ishida backed away slightly, but he seemed delighted.

In May 1936, Ishida and Sada returned to the Ogu neighborhood, where they remained until Ishida's death. During this session of love-making, Sada placed the aforementioned knife at the base of Ishida's penis, and said she would make sure he never played around with another woman; Ishida laughed at this. Two nights into their sex marathon, Sada began choking Ishida, and he told her to continue, saying that it increased the pleasure he felt. He also performed the same act on Sada.

On May 16, 1936, Sada used her obi sash to temporarily cut off Ishida's breathing during orgasm, and they both enjoyed it. After repeating this for two more hours, Ishida's face became distorted, and he began suffering a lot of pain. Ishida ingested 30 pills of sedative (Calmotin) in an attempt to soothe his pain. Before passing out, he said, "You'll put the cord around my neck and squeeze it again while I'm sleeping, won't you... If you start to strangle me, don't stop, because it is so painful afterward."

Around 2am on May 18, 1936, while Ishida was asleep, Sada wrapped her obi sash twice around his neck and strangled him to death. She later said she felt as if "a heavy burden" had been lifted from her and she felt a sense of "clarity." She stayed lying in bed with Ishida's body for several hours, before severing his genitalia with the kitchen knife and wrapped them in a magazine cover. When asked why she severed Ishida's genitals, she replied, "Because I couldn't take his head or body with me. I wanted to take the part of him that brought back to me the most vivid memories." 

With the blood, she wrote, "Sada, Kichi Futari-kiri" ("Sada, Kichi together") on Ishida's left thigh, and on a bed sheet. She then carved 定 (the character for her name) into his left arm. She then donned Ishida's underwear, and left the inn around 8am, telling staff not to disturb Ishida. After Ishida's body was found, newspapers picked up the story, and a nationwide search for Sada began.

On May 20, 1936, Sada stayed in an inn in Shinagawa, where she received a massage and drank three bottles of beer. She spent the day writing farewell letters to friends and family. She was planning to commit suicide one week later and began practicing necrophilia with Ishida's severed penis and testicles.

At 4pm, police detectives who were suspicious of the alias Sada had used, came to her room at the inn. She greeted them with, "Don't be so formal. You're looking for Sada Abe, right? Well, that's me. I am Sada Abe." The police were not convinced, so Sada unveiled Ishida's genitalia as proof.

Sada was arrested and interrogated over eight sessions. When asked about her motive for killing Ishida, her answer was: "I loved him so much, I wanted him all to myself. But since we were not husband and wife, as long as he lived he could be embraced by other women. I knew that if I killed him no other woman could ever touch him again, so I killed him..."

The story became a nationwide phenomenon and was picked up by several branches of the media industry. After Sada's arrest, Ishida's penis and testicles were moved to Tokyo University Medical School's pathology museum. They were put on public display shortly after the end of World War II, but have since disappeared.

Sada's trial began on November 25, 1936, and crowds of people were gathered outside at 5am to attend the hearing. The trial ended on December 21, 1936, when Abe was convicted of second-degree murder and mutilation of a corpse. Although the prosecution demanded a 10-year sentence, and with Sada claiming she wanted the death penalty, she was in fact sentenced to just six years in prison. She was imprisoned in Tochigi Women's Penitentiary.

On November 10, 1940, Sada's sentence was commuted; she was released 6 months later on May 17, 1941, five years to the day after the murder of Kichizo Ishida.

After her release from prison, Sada assumed an alias. She moved to Ibaraki Prefecture and wrote her memoirs while the mistress of a woman she referred to simply as "Y." Shortly afterward, she moved to Saitama Prefecture. When Y's friends and family found out about Sada's true identity, she broke off the relationship.

For the remainder of her life, Sada Abe kept a low profile, although she occasionally gave interviews in popular magazines, and appeared for several years in a traveling stage production. Her story has been the base of both films and stage productions. She lived in Tokyo's Shitaya neighborhood for the next 20 years, and the neighborhood restaurant association gave her a "model employee" award.

Sada Abe disappeared from the public eye for good in 1970. In the mid-1970s, director Nagisa Oshima apparently sought out and found Sada while planning out his film In the Realm of the Senses. When he apparently found her, her hair was shorn off, and she was living in a Kansai nunnery.