The 'Monster with 21 Faces' behind Japan's Glico-Morinaga extortion campaign was identified and let escape
Where the evidence lands: UnresolvedThat the 'Monster with 21 Faces' can in fact be identified: that police knew or could have known who ran the Glico-Morinaga campaign, whether a stock-manipulation ring shorting the companies' shares, organized crime, or aggrieved insiders, and that the case went unsolved because of police incompetence, a cover-up, or a hidden financial motive rather than because it was a genuinely elusive crime.
Believed by: One of the largest and most notorious unsolved criminal investigations in Japanese history, drawing about 1.3 million officer-mobilizations across five prefectural police forces.
The full story
Seventeen months that terrorized Japan
The crimes are not the mystery. They are documented, and they are the fixed ground the rest of the case stands on. On the night of 18 March 1984, two masked men armed with a pistol and a rifle broke into the Nishinomiya home of Katsuhisa Ezaki, president of the Ezaki Glico confectionery company. They tied up his wife and young daughter, seized Ezaki, and demanded a ransom in cash and gold. Three days later he escaped on his own from a warehouse in Ibaraki, Osaka. No ransom was ever paid, and the kidnappers disappeared.
What followed lifted the case out of the ordinary. Through April, cars were set alight at a Glico facility and a container of hydrochloric acid was left with a threat. Then, in May 1984, the letters began. A writer calling itself “The Monster with 21 Faces” announced that Glico sweets had been laced with potassium cyanide. Retailers stripped Glico products from shelves across the country; the company reported losses topping 20 million dollars and laid off hundreds of part-time workers. No poisoned Glico candy was ever actually found, but the threat alone did the damage.
The group was only getting started. In late June it declared, “We forgive Glico,” and turned on other food firms, extorting the ham maker Marudai and later Morinaga and others. This time the poison was real. Investigators found tampered candies planted on store shelves, roughly 21 products in all, several carrying hand-lettered warnings in Osaka dialect that they contained poison, a grim taunt tuned so that shoppers would be frightened rather than killed. All the while the letters kept coming, mocking the police, correcting the newspapers, and treating the largest manhunt in the country as a game.
The case built to be solved
Here is why the belief that the case can still be cracked is not foolish. The criminals designed it that way. They gave themselves a name lifted straight from popular fiction, Edogawa Ranpo'sgentleman-thief villain “The Fiend with Twenty Faces,” adding one for flourish. They wrote directly to editors and detectives. They narrated their own crimes. A gang that performs for an audience feels like a gang that can be read, profiled, and unmasked.
And there were real near-misses, the kind that make the answer feel one insight away. At a botched ransom drop in June 1984, an investigator riding the delivery route glimpsed a large, well-built man with short permed hair and, as he put it, eyes like a fox, watching the operation. The “Fox-Eyed Man”was seen again that November at a rest area on the Meishin Expressway, and again he vanished. Police circulated his composite sketch, and a separate convenience-store image of a “video man” handling a target product. Most chilling of all, one set of ransom instructions came as an audio tape of a young child's voice, reading directions to the courier.
They named themselves after a master detective's nemesis and dared the country to catch them. It is not madness to think the puzzle they built has an answer.
On top of the near-misses sat a motive that felt satisfyingly rational. The targeted companies' share prices fell during the panic, and investigators seriously weighed whether someone was manipulating the market or profiting from the collapse. If the whole grotesque performance was really about money, then, the reasoning goes, you only have to find who gained to find who did it.
What the near-misses actually show
Each of those threads, examined closely, comes up short of an identification. Start with the Fox-Eyed Man. He was glimpsed from a distance at ransom operations and drawn from witness memory, but no one was ever matched to the sketch, and no name was ever attached to the figure at the drops. A description and a near-miss are not a suspect a prosecutor can charge. The “video man” image and the child's recorded voice were equally suggestive and equally unresolved: the child was never traced, and the tape named no one.
The financial-motive theory ran into the same wall. Yes, share prices dropped, and yes, investigators looked hard at market manipulation. But no trading account, no beneficiary, and no money trail was ever tied to the crimes, and the extortion demands themselves were never successfully collected. “Who might have benefited” is a theory of motive, not proof of a perpetrator, and a clean profit scheme sits oddly with a gang that repeatedly failed to pick up its ransoms.
Nor was this a case starved of effort. Five prefectural police forces poured in what amounted to roughly 1.3 million officer-mobilizations. Investigators questioned an estimated 125,000 people and logged some 28,000 tips across 28 linked crimes. That machinery generated leads, sketches, and a tape, and still it produced no arrest. When an investigation that large, that motivated, and that public cannot name anyone, the most economical explanation is not a cover-up. It is a genuinely careful, genuinely lucky offender slipping the net, over and over.
Two hard limits then closed the door. The mockery included real cruelty: after Shiga superintendent Yamamotodied by self-immolation in August 1985, the group sent a letter jeering at him before falling permanently silent. And the law ran out. The kidnapping's statute of limitations expired in 1995, and the last count, for the attempted poisonings, expired in February 2000. The forensic-genealogy revolution that has cracked other cold cases arrived too late to matter here: even a future match could no longer support a charge.
Why it still grips Japan
Few cases hold a country the way this one holds Japan, and the reasons are worth naming, because they are the same forces that keep generating new theories. The criminals made themselves into characters. They had a name, a literary lineage, a voice on the page, and a running taunt, all the furniture of a story rather than a case file. Stories demand endings, and this one refuses to give one, so people keep trying to supply it.
The near-misses feed the obsession. A gang really was watched at its own drops and really did leave a face in a sketch and a child's voice on a tape, so the fantasy that the answer was almost in hand is not irrational. It has simply proven empty every time. Add a public poisoning scare that touched ordinary shoppers, a corporate giant brought to its knees, and a police superintendent who set himself on fire, and the case carries an emotional charge that ordinary cold cases never reach.
It also occupies a singular place in Japanese legal memory as one of the first major crimes designated for a coordinated multi-prefecture investigation to end in total defeat. That institutional humiliation, a state that mobilized on an extraordinary scale and still lost, is precisely the kind of outcome that invites suspicion of a hidden hand. The certainty in each new theory is doing emotional work the evidence cannot do: it is unbearable to leave a case this loud unanswered, so people insist, against the proof, that it is secretly solved.
Where the evidence lands
Two things are true at once, and the discipline of this case is refusing to collapse them into one. The crimes are real and documented: a president was kidnapped, cyanide-laced sweets were planted on store shelves, and a gang taunted the country in writing for 17 months. And the identity and motive of “The Monster with 21 Faces” are unknown. No one was ever charged. Every candidate, a stock-manipulation ring, organized crime, aggrieved insiders, the man with the fox eyes, remains a theory rather than a proven answer.
So the honest label for the identity claim is unproven. That is not a statement that the crimes did not happen; they plainly did. It is a verdict on the claims made about who: that police knew their culprit and let him go, or that a hidden financial scheme quietly explains everything. Neither has been demonstrated. Repeated near-misses across an enormous, motivated dragnet look far more like a genuinely elusive offender than like a concealed solution, and pointing at a sketch or a motive is not the same as proving who did it.
What remains is a real unsolved crime that its authors deliberately dressed up as a puzzle, and then closed off for good by outlasting the law. The taunts were real, the poison was real, the fear was real, and the ending is still missing. Until evidence surfaces that could actually identify them, and the expired statute of limitations means it could no longer be used to charge anyone, the truthful thing to say is the hard thing: we do not know who the Monster with 21 Faces was.
What's still unexplained
- Who was the 'Fox-Eyed Man'? A suspect matching the description was seen at least twice at ransom operations and captured in police sketches, yet was never identified. He remains the single most tantalizing near-miss of the entire case.
- Was there a financial motive? Theories that the campaign existed to manipulate or profit from the targeted companies' share prices were investigated but never substantiated, and no beneficiary was ever traced.
- How many people were involved, and were any insiders? The letters showed detailed knowledge of the companies and of police movements, but the group's true size, and whether it included current or former employees, was never established.
- Whose child read the ransom instructions? An audio recording of a young child relaying drop directions is among the eeriest artifacts of the case, and the child was never identified.
- Why did they stop and disappear in August 1985, and why target confectioners in particular? The group's abrupt final letter and total silence afterward have never been explained.
Point by point
The claim: The operation was too disciplined and coordinated for ordinary criminals, so a powerful organization was behind it and its identity is effectively known.
What the record shows: The campaign was elaborate: multiple companies, choreographed ransom drops, and letters showing real knowledge of police movements. But no organization, yakuza, corporate rival, or otherwise, was ever tied to it by evidence. Sophistication is not identity. The same letters were also riddled with taunts and errors that read as much like self-aware amateurs enjoying the chase as like a syndicate, and after tens of thousands of tips the police never established who the collective 'we' actually was.
The claim: Police had their man: the 'Fox-Eyed Man' was seen at the ransom drops and captured in composite sketches, so the culprit was identified and simply allowed to slip away.
What the record shows: A suspect answering to the 'Fox-Eyed Man' description really was glimpsed at least twice near ransom operations, and sketches and a convenience-store surveillance image of a 'video man' were circulated widely. But a description and a near-miss are not an identification. No one was ever matched to the sketches, the man at the drops was never named, and being seen from a distance at a rest area is not evidence a prosecutor could charge.
The claim: A financial motive, driving down the companies' share prices to profit from the panic, points straight to whoever benefited, and therefore to the guilty party.
What the record shows: Share prices did fall, and investigators did examine the possibility that someone was manipulating the market or short-selling the targeted firms. But no trading trail, account, or beneficiary was ever tied to the crimes. 'Who might have benefited' is a theory of motive, not proof of a perpetrator, and the extortion demands themselves were never successfully collected, which sits awkwardly with a clean profit scheme.
The claim: The perpetrators left mountains of physical evidence, typed letters, a tape of a child reading drop instructions, trace materials, so modern forensics should have named them.
What the record shows: There is genuinely a lot of material, including an audio recording of a child's voice relaying instructions to a ransom courier. None of it produced an identification at the time. The child was never traced, the letters were never linked to a named author, and the powerful DNA and forensic-genealogy techniques of later decades arrived after the statute of limitations had already closed the case in 2000, foreclosing any charge even if a match were later possible.
The claim: The scale of the failure, and a superintendent's suicide, prove the case was lost to incompetence or a cover-up rather than to a genuinely elusive criminal.
What the record shows: There were real operational failures at the ransom drops, and Superintendent Yamamoto's self-immolation reflects the crushing weight the case placed on those hunting it. But the record reads as a determined, lucky, well-prepared offender repeatedly slipping enormous dragnets, not as a hidden solution. Roughly 1.3 million officer-mobilizations, about 125,000 people questioned, and 28,000 tips did not close it. That is the fingerprint of an unsolved crime, not a concealed one.
The claim: The literary alias reveals a single mastermind steeped in Edogawa Ranpo, a distinctive profile that should have led police to him.
What the record shows: The name was borrowed from Ranpo's gentleman-thief villain 'The Fiend with Twenty Faces' (Kaijin Niju Menso), with one added for effect. But the reference tells us only that the writer knew a wildly popular series that generations of Japanese children grew up on, not a unique identity. The letters' shifting voice and Osaka-dialect taunts suggested more than one hand, and the case was never narrowed to a lone author, let alone a named one.
Other readings
Angles that don't fit neatly into the claim or its rebuttal, laid out and weighed, not endorsed.
The grievance-and-insider read
Some accounts emphasize the group's evident inside knowledge and its choice of targets, and speculate about disgruntled former workers or a social grudge against the firms or the establishment. It is a coherent way to explain the specificity of the attacks, but it rests on the letters' tone and target selection rather than on any identified person, and no insider was ever tied to the crimes.
The 'it really was just failed extortion' read
A deflating possibility is that the point was simply money, that the elaborate theater was cover for ransom collection, and that once the drops kept failing and the heat became unbearable after Superintendent Yamamoto's death, the group quit while ahead of the law. It fits the timeline, but it leaves the group's identity and the absence of any collected ransom just as unexplained.
Timeline
- 1984-03-18Around 9 p.m., two armed, masked men force their way into the Nishinomiya home of Katsuhisa Ezaki, president of Ezaki Glico, bind his wife and young daughter, and abduct him. They demand a ransom in cash and gold.
- 1984-03-21Ezaki escapes on his own from a warehouse in Ibaraki, Osaka, roughly three days into his captivity, and the ransom is never paid. The kidnappers vanish.
- 1984-04Cars are set on fire at a Glico facility, and a container of hydrochloric acid is left with a threatening note. The campaign against the company escalates from kidnapping to sabotage.
- 1984-05-10Letters begin arriving from a writer calling itself 'The Monster with 21 Faces' (Kaijin Nijuichi Menso), claiming Glico sweets have been laced with potassium cyanide. Retailers pull Glico products nationwide; the company reports losses of more than 20 million dollars and lays off hundreds of part-time workers.
- 1984-06-26In a letter reading 'We forgive Glico,' the group abruptly ends its campaign against the company, then turns to extort other food firms including the ham maker Marudai. Two days later, at a botched ransom drop, an investigator glimpses a large man with permed hair and 'eyes like a fox' watching the operation.
- 1984-10The group targets Morinaga and others. Poisoned candies are planted on store shelves, several bearing hand-written labels warning, in Osaka dialect, that they contain poison, a taunt calibrated so that no one is actually killed. About 21 tampered products are eventually recovered.
- 1984-11-14At a ransom drop on the Meishin Expressway, police again spot the 'Fox-Eyed Man' at a rest area but lose him. A Shiga patrol separately notes a suspicious van whose driver, in a golf cap and radio earpiece, speeds off when noticed. No arrest is made.
- 1985-08-07Yamamoto, a Shiga Prefecture police superintendent tied to the failed investigation, dies by self-immolation, dousing himself in kerosene. His death becomes a symbol of the pressure the uncatchable case placed on investigators.
- 1985-08-12The 'Monster with 21 Faces' mails a final letter mocking the dead superintendent and announcing it will stop 'torturing food-making companies.' After this, the group is never heard from again. The kidnapping statute of limitations expires in 1995, and the last count, for the poisonings, expires in February 2000 with no arrests.
Unresolved. The crimes are real and exhaustively documented: a kidnapping, cyanide-laced candy planted on store shelves, and taunting letters that terrorized Japan for 17 months in 1984 and 1985. But the extortionists were never identified, no one was ever charged, and the last statute of limitations expired in February 2000 with the case unsolved. Naming a suspect or a motive is not the same as proving who did it.
Reviewed by The Conspiratory Editors · Last reviewed July 18, 2026 · How we rate
Sources
- 1.Glico Morinaga case, Wikipedia
- 2.The Monster with 21 Faces, Wikipedia
- 3.The Fiend with Twenty Faces (the Edogawa Ranpo villain the alias was drawn from), Wikipedia
- 4.NPA admits defeat in Glico-Morinaga case, The Japan Times (2000)
- 5.Clock ticking on Glico-Morinaga cases, The Japan Times (1999)
- 6.16-year police probe of Glico-Morinaga case to end, Kyodo News (via The Free Library) (2000)
- 7.How 'The Monster With 21 Faces' Terrorized Japan During The Harrowing Glico Morinaga Incident, All That's Interesting
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