Who was the mysterious motorcyclist behind infamous Japanese heist? After 50 years, the case remains unsolved

It has been 50 years since one of Japan’s biggest and most brazen heists, and mystery still surrounds the identity and fate of the perpetrator. Yet such is the fascination with the nation’s most notorious cold case that a new tour of key locations in the robbery is massively oversubscribed.

Those with an interest in the robbery – and in the man who committed it – suggest that if he has not yet been identified, he probably never will.

Early on the morning of December 10, 1968, a man in the uniform of an officer in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police’s motorcycle unit waved down a car owned by the Nihon Shintaku Bank as it was transporting slightly more than 294 million yen – worth about US$817,500 at 1968 exchange rates – in winter bonuses to the employees of Toshiba’s factory in Fuchu, a suburb of west Tokyo. Adjusted for Japanese inflation, the sum would be worth almost US$10 million in 2018.

The young motorcyclist told the four bank employees in the car that criminals had blown up the home of their branch manager and dynamite had been planted in the car they were driving. The alarmed bank staff stepped out of the car as the “police officer” crawled beneath the vehicle in search of the bomb. Smoke and flames suddenly belched from beneath the vehicle and the patrolman emerged, shouting that it was about to explode. As the bank staff fled, the thief calmly stepped into the car and drove away.

The bank employees later told investigators they had accepted the motorcyclist’s story because the manager had received threatening letters, while the smoke and flames were caused by a flare dropped beneath the car.