Yoshie Shiratori’s Remarkable Prison Escapes

At the foot of Mount Tento in Hokkaido stands the Abashiri Prison Museum, a place where Japan’s harsh penal past is preserved in timber and iron. The open-air museum—once an actual prison—now houses the original cell blocks, administration offices, and chapel, all of which were relocated and restored to show what life was like behind its cold wooden walls.

Wandering through its dim corridors, visitors often stop short at a startling sight: a life-size mannequin dangling overhead, seemingly caught in the act of wriggling to freedom through the rafters. Clad in nothing but a white loincloth, the figure portrays Yoshie Shiratori, a prisoner no jail could hold. Between 1936 and 1947, the man known as the “Harry Houdini of Japan” pulled off four daring prison escapes, earning a legend’s status among escape artists.

A mannequin replicating Shiratori's escape from Abashiri Prison. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Yoshie Shiratori was born in 1907 in Aomori Prefecture. The middle child of three, his father died when he was very young, and soon after, his mother abandoned him and his sister, taking only the eldest son to live with a farmer in Akita. The two younger children were left in the care of an aunt who ran a tofu shop, where Shiratori grew up helping with deliveries and other shop duties. Restless and burdened by his late father’s debts, Shiratori left his aunt’s home at eighteen to work on a Russian crab-fishing vessel. With steady work and income, Shiratori married a few years later and had a child. But soon he was plunged into financial trouble.

Desperation drove him into gambling and then into theft. In 1933, he joined a small gang that broke into a merchant’s storehouse in Higashitsugaru. The heist went horribly wrong. The merchant’s adopted son gave chase and was fatally stabbed. Two years later, when one of his accomplices was caught, Shiratori turned himself in. Though he denied committing the murder, police interrogators reportedly beat and tortured him to get him to confess.

In 1936, Shiratori was sent to Aomori Prison, where the conditions were brutal and the guards even worse. When he protested the filth and cruelty, his punishments only grew harsher. Shiratori began watching the guards, studying their movement and memorizing their routines. He noticed that in the morning there was always a fifteen-minute lull between patrols. It was a small window, but enough.

In June that year, he made his move. Using a thin piece of wire stripped from a bathing bucket, Shiratori picked the lock of his cell. He then slipped through a cracked skylight, leaving behind a decoy of floorboards arranged under his blanket to resemble a sleeping body. When guards passed, they assumed he was still in bed. By the time they realized, he was gone.

Yoshie Shiratori

Shiratori’s freedom lasted only three days. He was caught stealing supplies from a hospital and was dragged back in chains. This time, the court gave him a life sentence for escaping and attempted theft. In 1941, he was transferred to Akita Prison, a place even harsher than the last.

Shiratori was treated even worse than before. He was kept handcuffed day and night in a cell built specifically to deter escape artists with high ceilings and a small skylight. Every night, Shiratori would wriggle his hands out of the cuffs, scale the smooth copper walls of his cell and work on the rotting wooden framing of the skylight. After months of effort, he finally pried it open. He waited for a stormy night, when wind and rain would drown out the sound of his footsteps on the roof, and vanished once more into the darkness.

Three months later, he made the mistake of showing up at the house of head guard Kobayashi to ask for help, as he was one of the only people who had shown kindness and respect to Shiratori during his stay in the Akita prison. However, Kobayashi called the police and Shiratori was arrested and sent back to prison. This time Shiratori was sent to Hokkaido’s notorious Abashiri Prison, a place no inmate had ever escaped from.

At Abashiri, the prison that prided itself on being escape-proof, the guards made sure Yoshie Shiratori would never see daylight again. He was thrown into an open cell, where he was left to endure Hokkaido’s brutal winters in nothing more than thin summer clothes. When officials learned how he had once slipped out of his handcuffs, they ordered a custom-made pair that was heavy and supposedly impossible to remove.

But they underestimated his resourcefulness. Each morning, Shiratori spat some of his miso soup onto the metal cuffs and the metal frame of the narrow food slot on his cell door. The salt in the soup slowly ate into the iron, corroding it day by day. Then, on the night of August 26, 1944, under the cover of a wartime blackout, he made his move. According to legend, he dislocated his shoulders to squeeze his body through the tiny food slot and disappeared once again into the frozen wilderness.

Abashiri Prison Museum. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Like much of Shiratori’s legend, the exact details are shrouded in folklore, embellished over time by storytellers and admirers. What’s certain is that he survived in the mountains, finding refuge in an abandoned mine. For nearly two years, he lived like a ghost, subsisting on nuts, berries, and whatever game he could catch.

When the war finally ended, Shiratori descended from the mountains and wandered into a nearby village, where he learned of Japan’s surrender. Hungry and weak, he stole a few tomatoes from a field, but the theft was discovered and a confrontation with the farmer ensued. Shiratori later claimed he acted in self-defence when the man attacked him. The farmer was fatally wounded and Shiratori was captured once again. This time he was sentenced to death and sent to Sapporo Prison to await execution.

At Sapporo Prison, Yoshie Shiratori was placed in a cell designed to deter escape. The ceiling was high and the windows no larger than his head. Convinced that no one could break free from such a fortress, the guards grew complacent. They didn’t even bother to keep him handcuffed.

But while the prison’s designers had obsessed over the walls and the ceiling, they had overlooked the ground beneath their feet. With nothing but a few soup bowls, Shiratori began to dig. Night after night, he quietly chipped away at the packed earth beneath the floorboards, hiding the evidence so well that even today, no one knows where the dirt went. Sometime in 1947, after months of patient work, he slipped through the tunnel and vanished once more.

After a year on the run, however, Shiratori did something unexpected: he turned himself in and confessed to being an escaped convict. The Sapporo High Court, however, overturned his death sentence, accepting that the farmer’s killing had been in self-defence. His punishment was reduced to twenty years, of which he served fourteen before being released for good behaviour.

Shiratori eventually returned to Aomori, to reconnect with his daughter. His wife had died while he was imprisoned. In the years that followed, he lived modestly, taking odd jobs to survive. Yoshie Shiratori, the man no prison could hold, died of a heart attack in 1979 at the age of seventy-one.

Shiratori came to be regarded as a kind of antihero—a symbol of defiance against injustice. His remarkable escapes captured the public imagination, and in 1983, acclaimed author Akira Yoshimura immortalized his story in Hagoku (“Prison Break”), a novel inspired by his life.