Hey everybody welcome back to cold case murder mysteries. I'm your host Ryan Kraus returning for another foray into the madness of the true crime genre.

In today's episode, we're headed overseas to Japan to examine the infamous murder of the

Missyawa family whose bodies were discovered inside their Tokyo home on the morning of December 31st, 2000.

The Missyawas were located in the city's most densely populated of 23 wards, a place known as Sedagaya.

The four-member immediate family consisted of husband and father, Meekio, wife and mother Yasuco, eight-year-old Nina, and her six-year-old brother,

Ray. Meikio and Yasuco met in a personal development class in the 1980s and married shortly thereafter.

They moved into their home in Sedagaya around 1990 when there were still

approximately 200 homes crammed into the neighborhood.

Over the course of that decade, however, the Japanese government, along with third-party wholesale

homebuyers, began cutting deals with residents to buy back their homes and demolish them, making

way for numerous construction projects.

What was then a residential area started to become increasingly repurposed toward public space.

The homes surrounding the Missyawas disappeared, slowly but surely, and by the year 2000 only four remained. The city and

developers with whom they were working continuously applied pressure by

offering deals to relocate these residents, but as is normally the case, the last of them don't want to go.

This isn't an unfamiliar situation. In fact, it's been a regular occurrence all over the world since property ownership flourished in major cities that continue to grow and change.

And when people refuse to move, sometimes the situation gets ugly.

The strategy, if you're one of these third party companies, is to go in lowballing people with a cash offer and the notion that the wrecking ball is coming,

no matter what resistance is provided.

Over time, most people go, but as they do, those remaining are provided an increasing sense of leverage that equates

to the rule of quote unquote last man standing on the battlefield. The longer you can hold out against these advances,

the more desperate your opponent can become.

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