Killer Cuts Off Her Lover’s Genitalia

How did the youngest daughter of an upper-middle-class family living in Tokyo become a national sensation and one of the most well-known perpetrators of a sexual crime?

Sada Abe, born in 1905 not only became a geisha, sex worker, and then mistress to a variety of influential men but then went on to murder and then mutilate her lover Kichizo Ishida, before going on the run. She was later arrested in a hotel room with her murdered lover’s penis and testicles which she removed as a keepsake.

What led her to strangle and mutilate a man she loved so dearly?

“There were men I liked, and with whom I slept without accepting money, but none made me feel the way I did toward him.”

Sada’s Childhood

Sada Abe was born into a family of eight children but only four survived into adulthood, with Sada being the youngest daughter. Both her parents were upstanding citizens of Tokyo’s upper class and the family was well off.

Sada’s father owned a business selling tatami (which is used as flooring in Japanese homes) and her mother was a caring housewife who enrolled Sada into various music lessons like singing and the shamisen, which is a Japanese banjo type instrument popularly used by geishas when performing for their guests.

Although her childhood started off normal, it soon started taking a turn for the worse when her siblings and Sada herself became entangled with the wrong crowd. Sada’s sister Teruko was known to be quite promiscuous and was sent to work at a brothel by her father as punishment. Sada’s older brother married and ran off with a lot of the family’s money.

Sada was often left to herself and ended up mixed in with the wrong crowd and admitted to police during interrogation that she was even raped when she was 15 years old by an acquaintance at her friend’s house.

In Japanese society at the time, wearing make-up, fashionable clothes, and staying out into the late hours of the night was considered the signs of “loose women” or “fallen women”. As Sada became more entrenched in the “disgraced culture”, her parents decided to send her to Yokohama to join a geisha house.

Geisha To Sex Worker

Although generally, geisha are respected female entertainers who dance, sing, and accompany men during drinking parties, sex work is not necessarily part of their job description.

Geisha women who train from a young age are treated as a higher class and therefore usually entertain only. Unfortunately for Sada, since she was not trained classically from a young age, she was forced to serve as a lower geisha meaning she was used mainly as a sex worker.

Suffering abuse from both clients and other geisha and contracting syphilis, Sada decided to leave the geisha life and become a government licensed legal sex worker which was common in Japan at that time.

As a legal sex worker, Sada operated in both Osaka and Tokyo brothels servicing men and making enough money to support herself and her lifestyle. Occasionally she tried to leave the sex industry by waitressing but always came back to sex work because of the pay.

Unfortunately, in one of those slips back to sex work, she was not a legally registered worker and was arrested. Luckily a friend of the illegal brothel where she worked helped her get released from prison and made her his mistress.

“She is a slut and a whore. And as what she has done makes clear, she is a woman whom men should fear.”

Mistress Life

As a mistress, she was given a place to stay, an income, and an escape from the brothel life. But the mistress gig quickly came to an end as she quickly outstayed her welcome. Kasahara Kinnosuke, the man who made Sada her mistress admitted in his testimony,

“She was really strong, a real powerful one. She wasn’t satisfied unless we did it two, three, or four times a night. To her, it was unacceptable unless I had my hand on her private parts all night long … At first, it was great, but after a couple of weeks I got a little exhausted.”

He also claimed that Sada wanted him to leave his wife or to let her take other lovers besides him to satisfy her needs. He refused on both counts and their relationship came to an end. They ended on bad terms and both Kasahara and Sada held ill will towards each other. But unlike Kasahara, her next lover, Ishida wouldn’t be able to escape so easily.

Starting Over

Leaving Kasahara and the sex industry behind, Sada decided to move to an industrial town called Nagoya and became a maid in a restaurant. While working there, she met a customer named Omiya who became her lover and helped her leave the restaurant and encouraged her to start her own restaurant. To help her learn the ropes of the restaurant industry, Omiya, an up-and-coming successful politician was able to fetch her an apprenticeship at an upscale restaurant in Tokyo.

The owner of the restaurant was the womanizer and her future lover, Ishida Kichizo. The man she would murder and castrate.

Ishida owned a popular specialty eel restaurant in Tokyo which his wife ran while he courted a variety of women. Known as a playboy and often seducing many women, Ishida seemed to enjoy his extramarital life more than his career or restaurants.

As Ishida started showing interest in Sada, she reciprocated those feelings as being with Omiya was not enough to satisfy her sexual needs.

Sexual Play

Ishida and Sada seemed to be well-matched, as both had an appetite for extreme and obscene sexual activity. For a two-week period at the beginning of May 1936, the couple would visit establishments similar to the modern love hotel and partake in days of fornication. The more they made the love, the more intense and violent the interactions became.

Their sexual encounters were so intense that even when hotel staff came to pour drinks or geisha were called to sing and perform, the couple did not stop their lovemaking.

However, after a two-week stint together, Ishida had to go back to his wife which made Sada angry, jealous, and she turned to alcohol. Increasing fits of jealousy and rage started overwhelming Sada and she decided to sell some of her possessions and buy a kitchen knife.

When the two were reunited again on May 16th, 1936, the lovemaking and sexual play increased in roughness and choking became a part of the ritual. At first consensual, both Sada and Ishida used erotic asphyxiation on each other to increase pleasure. However, with increased pressure and constant choking, Ishida’s face became distorted and he needed medication to soothe the pain.

On May 18th, 1936 while Ishida was sleeping, Sada wrapped her kimono sash around Ishida’s neck and strangled him to death.

“After I had killed Ishida I felt totally at ease, as though a heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders, and I felt a sense of clarity.”

The Final Cut

After lying with Ishida’s corpse, she finally took the knife she had bought and used it to remove Ishida’s penis and testicles and wrapped them in paper, and took them with her.

The media got a hold of the homicide story and a nationwide search was on for Sada with various sightings of her at a movie theater and shopping. She also decided to check into a hotel where she had a massage, drank beers, and wrote farewell letters to her friends and family. All the while she had Ishida’s penis and scrotum next to her.

“I felt attached to Ishida’s penis and thought that only after taking leave from it quietly could I then die. I unwrapped the paper holding them and gazed at his penis and scrotum. I put his penis in my mouth and even tried to insert it inside me … It didn’t work however though I kept trying and trying. Then, I decided that I would flee to Osaka, staying with Ishida’s penis all the while. In the end, I would jump from a cliff on Mount Ikoma while holding on to his penis.”

When police found her and apprehended her she later confessed to the murder and gave reasoning of why she took his penis. “I wanted to take the part of him that brought back to me the most vivid memories.”

Her love and jealously for Ishida were so strong that she felt that if she couldn’t have him all to herself no one could.

“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 …”

Despite the bizarre crime and details of the case, Sada was found guilty of second-degree murder and mutilation of a corpse and was sentenced to 10 years. She only served 5 though before being released.

After her release, rather than remembering the victim, Ishida, Sada was celebrated with many movies, books, television shows, and erotic novels based on her incident. She even released her own autobiography talking of her life and the murder.

Whether her crime was out of love and passion or was the outcome of a sad, abusive, and vicious relationship with society and the men around her, it is without a doubt one of the most bizarre and exceptional crimes committed by a woman in Japan.

This article also appears here: https://s-a-ozbourne.medium.com/killer-cuts-off-her-lovers-genitalia-388c1e8dcd4