Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Conviction Spiritual healing, divination, and mediumship Exorcism, deliverance, and spirit-extraction practice Fukushima Prefecture, Japan · 2001

Japan: self-professed exorcist executed for beating six believers to death in demon-expulsion rites

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Disposition and response

Material that narrows or disputes the record

Appellate history

  • 2008

    Conviction and death sentence affirmed.

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

self-professed exorcist and faith healer leading a small group of believers

Organization

No organization assigned

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

CORE: every victim was one of her own believers, submitting to violence they had been taught was spiritual treatment — the doctrine is what made the beatings possible and unrefusable.

  • Exorcism or deliverance
  • Spiritual healing or treatment

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 2001-01-01 · conviction affirmed at every level; executed

    Fukushima District Court; Sendai High Court; Supreme Court of Japan. Sachiko Eto, a self-professed exorcist and faith healer, was convicted by the Fukushima District Court in 2001 on six counts of murder for beating believers to death with taiko drumsticks in rituals staged as demon expulsion. The Sendai High Court upheld the conviction in 2005 and the Supreme Court of Japan in 2008; she was executed on 27 September 2012. Co-defendants Hiroshi Nemoto, Yuko Eto and Mitsuo Sekine received life and twenty-year terms.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • beatings with taiko drumsticks staged explicitly as demon expulsion
  • followers' belief that the violence was spiritual treatment

Cited record

Sources

national broadcaster court reporting execution report CBS News: 'Japan hangs cult leader convicted in exorcism deaths'.

International report of the execution and conviction history.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japan-hangs-cult-leader-convicted-in-exorcism-deaths/ Corpus classification: national-broadcaster-court-reporting; evidentiary role: execution-report. SHA-256 b3b6afd1d4aa44e57a994375ff659e78e26e0c3caa7cb12a009841e5a401707e
Retrieval
2026-07-20 · Preserved
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