Japan’s most infamous heists: ¥300 million robbery and other such crimes

TOKYO — Recent history is filled with unsolved heists that spur the imagination: The Great Train Robbery of 1862; The theft of $500 million worth of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990; the hijacking of a Northwest Orient Airlines flight out of Portland in 1971 by one D.B. Cooper, who demanded and received $200,000 ransom in exchange for releasing the passengers in Seattle, then parachuted out of the plane after takeoff over the Oregon wilderness in the dark of night and was never seen again. Just to name a few of the more famous.

Japan has its own unsolved heist, the ¥300 million robbery of Dec. 10, 1968, in which a man disguised as a police officer on a “police” motor bike stopped employees of the Nihon Trust Bank, in an armored car transporting ¥294 million in cash (the equivalent at the time of $817,520) and made off with all of it. At the time, it was the largest single robbery in the history of Japan and over half a century later remains unsolved.