18 March 2009 :

a 43-year-old Japanese man convicted of murder was given the death penalty by Presiding Judge Joji Igarashi.
The Kobe District Court's Himeji branch handed down the sentence to Kazuya Takayanagi, of Aioi, Hyogo Prefecture, for murdering and abandoning the bodies of two 23-year-old women. According to the ruling, on January 9, 2005, Takayanagi killed his girlfriend, Himeji resident Mika Hatafuji, by beating her to death with a hammer over an argument about money at his home in Aioi.
He then killed her friend Yoshimi Tanigawa, who witnessed the murder. He left the dismembered bodies around Shikama Port in Himeji, and in the mountains near the town of Kamigori.