The 300 million yen robbery: 110,000 suspects, no arrest

What happened

The 300 million yen robbery took about three minutes. At around 9:20 a.m. on 10 December 1968, a cash car belonging to Nihon Shintaku Bank was driving through Fuchu, in western Tokyo, when a man in the uniform of a Tokyo police motorcycle officer waved it down. Inside were four employees of the bank's Kokubunji branch. The car, an ordinary black Nissan Cedric, was carrying three duralumin cases holding the winter bonuses for workers at the Fuchu factory of Tokyo Shibaura Electric, now Toshiba: ¥294,307,500 in cash.

The man told them their branch manager's house had been blown up and that police had been warned of dynamite under their car. While the four searched inside and underneath, he shouted that he had found it and threw out something burning, which turned out to be an ordinary flare. The employees ran for cover. The man got into the car and drove away.

About ten minutes later the staff, realising they had been tricked, called the police emergency number. The white motorcycle left at the scene was not a police machine at all: it was a stolen civilian motorcycle painted white. The cash was worth about US$817,500 at 1968 exchange rates, and reporting in 2026 put it at the equivalent of about ¥3 billion today.

What investigators found

The hunt that followed was enormous. Over the 2,555 days between the robbery and the legal deadline for prosecution, police put a cumulative total of about 170,000 officers on the case and spent roughly ¥1 billion. About 120 items of evidence were collected at the scene. The list of possible suspects grew to about 110,000 names; reporting on a 2026 NHK documentary put the number of people investigated at 120,000.

The best-known clue became one of the case's problems. Police circulated a photographic montage of the suspect across Japan, and it became the image people remember. Hachibei Hiratsuka, a celebrated Tokyo detective who pursued the robber and wrote a memoir for the magazine Shukan Shincho in 1975, the year the time limit ran out, held that the famous montage did not look like the robber. A journalist who has followed the case for more than 45 years went further on TV Tokyo in 2021, saying the montage was really a photograph of a real man who had died a year and a half before the robbery.

The only arrest linked to the case came a year later, and it was not for the robbery. On 12 December 1969 investigators questioned a man for more than ten hours and then arrested him on a warrant for a trivial intimidation complaint more than a year old. He was released. On 20 December the Japan Federation of Bar Associations condemned the detention as an unlawful separate-charge arrest, made purely to further the robbery investigation, and said it would examine how his release came about and how the press had reported the case. No one was ever charged with the robbery itself.

The main theories

Who were the 300 million yen robbery suspects? Apart from the man held in 1969, the names that circulate belong to theories, not charges.

The most persistent concerns a 19-year-old who died of cyanide poisoning on 15 December 1968, five days after the robbery, and whose father was a police officer. On TV Tokyo in 2021, the journalist who has followed the case for decades presented him as the robber. He pointed to a scrap of newspaper found under white paint on the fake police motorcycle, identified as part of a heading printed in the Sankei Shimbun four days before the crime, and to soil on a cash case that he said matched soil near the teenager's home. The teenager was never charged, and none of this has been tested in court.

The Sankei Shimbun thread also runs through a 2025 Daily Shincho retrospective, which describes a legendary detective on the case working through Sankei Shimbun subscribers. The same piece notes that people have even come forward claiming to be the robber. None of those claims has solved the case.

Where the case stands

Was the 300 million yen robbery solved? No. The seven-year limit for prosecution under Japan's Code of Criminal Procedure expired on 10 December 1975 with the robber still unidentified, so no one can now be tried for it. Civil liability for the theft lapsed in 1988.

Interest has not faded. At the 50th anniversary in 2018, a new tour of key locations in the robbery was heavily oversubscribed, and the South China Morning Post reported the view among people who follow the case that if the robber had not been identified by then, he probably never would be. In January 2026 NHK devoted an episode of its Unsolved Cases series to the robbery. The team obtained a large body of investigation material and approached more than 180 people connected with the case, many of them investigators and reporters who had been in their twenties and thirties at the time. A woman who watched the robbery as a high-school student agreed to be interviewed for the first time, and reporting ahead of the broadcast said it would reveal an initial investigation that could fairly be called sloppy.

What is still missing

So what happened to the 300 million yen robbery? Explained in brief: a man posing as a police motorcyclist frightened four bank employees away from their car with a bomb story and a flare, drove off with ¥294 million in bonuses, and was never identified, despite a list of about 110,000 names and a cumulative 170,000 officers.

What is missing is evidence that has been tested against a named person. The teenager theory rests on material a journalist has presented, and the claim that the montage showed a dead man has not been confirmed by police in any source cited here. It is also widely repeated that none of the stolen cash ever surfaced; the sources checked for this file do not document what became of the money either way.

With every legal deadline long past, an answer now would settle the history rather than lead to a prosecution. Real or Legend files the 300 million yen robbery as unsolved.