Major spoilers follow for the counterfeiting scheme, both deaths, the culprit and the rescue. The discussion also uses Conan’s and Amuro’s established identities.
Soichi Kitamura, the Nagano printing plant’s security guard and a former banknote engraver, is behind Ultra 30. He causes Takushi Amano’s death during an argument, then poisons Shizuo Wadayama and fabricates a suicide note to place the blame on him. The first death is not established as a murder planned in advance, and the unidentified fingerprint is not shown to be a confirmed match to Kitamura. Those distinctions matter even after the culprit is exposed.
The Counterfeit Case of Ultra 30 is an original two-hour television special for Detective Conan’s thirtieth anniversary, presented in Japan’s Friday Road Show slot. It sits between Japanese episodes 1213 and 1214 and has no ordinary Japanese episode number or corresponding manga volume or File. Its scale comes from a case spanning Tokyo, Osaka and Nagano, rather than a new revelation about the Black Organization.
What does Ultra 30 mean?
The number refers to the thirtieth counterfeit identified in Japan within the story, not to thirty murder victims. The investigation is called Case 30, and the exceptionally convincing counterfeit is known as Ultra 30. The anniversary number therefore also has a specific function inside the mystery.
The new 10,000-yen note in this story features Tohto Tower. Conan Edogawa, Professor Agasa, Ran Mouri, Sonoko Suzuki and the Detective Boys visit the Nagano plant of the Japanese banknote-printing bureau as excitement over the new currency builds. The setting initially seems to offer a cheerful look at how trusted money is made.
The tour introduces manufacturing processes, including expanding ink, and a wartime underground shelter beneath the plant. Both details become important later. The ink is tied to the final danger, while the shelter becomes a place the visitors can reach when the factory is no longer safe.
A body in Tokyo turns a factory visit into a national investigation
Takushi Amano’s body is found in Tokyo with an unfinished counterfeit hidden in his shoe. Document examiner Toko Satomi, of the National Research Institute of Police Science, identifies the note as a forgery despite its close resemblance to genuine currency. Her examination connects a death investigation to a threat to confidence in the new notes.
Amano is not merely someone who happens to possess counterfeit money. He is a paper-making engineer, while Wadayama is an ink engineer. Their skills account for two parts of the unusually high-quality forgery. An equally capable engraver is still needed to explain the printing plate, leaving a third technical role unaccounted for.
The counterfeits are also being used in a fraud against Seiko Seta, whose savings at home are targeted by people posing as bank employees. This makes the harm tangible: Ultra 30 is circulating as a means to steal from an ordinary person. Seta is a fraud victim, not one of the people killed in the case.
The paper, ink and engraving draw the inquiry toward people familiar with the bureau’s own techniques. Tokyo’s body, Osaka’s later death and Nagano’s production facilities appear to be separate threads, but each exposes another part of the same counterfeiting operation. The note gives the large cast and shifting locations a common object to investigate.
Why Wadayama’s locked-room death seems to end the case
Conan and Heiji Hattori investigate the Osaka plant and find Wadayama dead inside. He has locked the door himself. A note on his smartphone appears to admit responsibility for the counterfeit operation and Amano’s death, making suicide seem to resolve both the closed room and the wider case.
That account is convenient because it leaves no outsider needing to enter the locked room and no surviving organizer to find. Conan and Heiji instead ask what happened before the door was locked, whether the note reflects Wadayama’s own language and whether the poison actually entered his body inside the room.
Their cooperation builds on an existing partnership. Neither needs to turn the inquiry into a contest. Each suspicious detail found in Osaka can be compared with Amano’s death in Tokyo and the evidence surrounding the Nagano plant, allowing their local investigation to change the explanation of the whole case.
A repeated misuse of a word challenges the suicide note
The note misuses the Japanese word subekaraku as though it means everything. In standard usage, it expresses that something ought to be done; it does not mean “all” or “everything.” Conan recognizes the same usage in Kitamura’s speech. This suggests that the apparent confession may have been written by Kitamura rather than Wadayama, reopening the question of who is trying to assign responsibility for the crimes.
The point is not that an unusual word automatically proves murder. It gives Conan a reason to distrust the note as Wadayama’s own account. A carefully arranged confession can reproduce what the culprit wants a victim to say while still revealing the writer through an unconscious verbal habit.
The third fingerprint has a precise limit
Test prints carry a third person’s fingerprints in addition to Amano’s and Wadayama’s. That evidence undermines the idea that the two dead engineers alone explain the manufacture of Ultra 30. It supports investigating another participant and putting pressure on Kitamura to submit to comparison.
The special does not show a completed comparison definitively matching those prints to Kitamura. The distinction is between evidence of a third participant and a confirmed identification of that participant. The fingerprint belongs in the cumulative deduction, without being upgraded into a test result the story does not establish.
The Tokyo discovery conceals a death in Nagano
Amano died at the Nagano plant, not where his body was discovered in Tokyo. His head injury, the plant’s surroundings and a selectively missing section of security footage redirect the investigation. Kitamura’s job as a security guard gives him an opportunity to interfere with that record.
The underlying confrontation began as an argument. Kitamura shoved Amano, causing his death, and then concealed what had happened by arranging for the body to be found elsewhere and removing relevant footage. Kitamura causes the death; a plan to kill Amano from the outset is not established.
Moving the body changes the apparent geography of the crime, while the missing footage obscures its actual setting. These acts need to be distinguished from the shove itself. Uncertainty about premeditation does not make the later cover-up accidental or remove Kitamura’s role in it.
The locked door is real; the suicide is not
Wadayama was exposed to poison before he completed the locked room. The story describes poison absorbed through the skin, with a delayed effect that leaves him able to enter the plant and lock the door himself. The closed door therefore does not require a killer to have escaped from inside.
Poison residue associated with his fingerprints points back to contact at the entrance rather than to his voluntarily drinking poison inside. The physical clue changes both the route of exposure and its timing. His ordinary act of securing the door becomes part of the false suicide scene Kitamura wants investigators to accept.
The note and the locked room must thus be challenged on different grounds. The language raises doubt about who wrote the confession; the residue and delayed exposure explain how a person can be killed and still close his own door. Neither line of reasoning has to make the observed lock disappear.
Kitamura’s former profession explains the missing skill and his resentment
Kitamura once worked as the engraver responsible for the new note. While absorbed in that work, he missed the final moments of his son Ayumu’s life. In mourning, he engraved the boy’s name in microlettering within the Tohto Tower design, breaching the rules and leading to his removal from the assignment.
He interprets this as the state abandoning him after he put its work ahead of his family. He also regards his successor’s design as inferior. By circulating notes indistinguishable from the genuine issue, he intends to demonstrate the superiority of his own skill and force a recall of the new currency.
Amano’s paper-making and Wadayama’s ink expertise give that ambition a production team. Kitamura’s concealed engraving background fills the third technical role. His security job explains access to the plant and its records, but it should not be mistaken for the full extent of his abilities.
The plan fractures when the other two use Ultra 30 for their own profitable fraud. Kitamura’s argument with Amano ends in Amano’s death. Wadayama then intends to go to the police, so Kitamura kills him to silence him and uses the false note to transfer responsibility for both the counterfeit scheme and Amano’s death. Kitamura plans to escape abroad after making that account look complete.
His grief makes the initial memorial engraving understandable as a personal act, but it does not justify counterfeiting, silencing another person or endangering the factory visitors. Amano and Wadayama are both criminal participants and victims of Kitamura’s actions. Their wrongdoing does not make their deaths cease to matter.
A broad cast connects the regions without creating a new alliance
The investigation brings together the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, the National Police Agency, Public Security and regional police. Familiar figures include Juzo Megure, Wataru Takagi, Miwako Sato, Ninzaburo Shiratori and Kazunobu Chiba, alongside Hyoue Kuroda, Yuya Kazami and Tooru Amuro, whose established identity is Rei Furuya. The wider cast also includes the FBI’s Shuichi Akai. Their presence does not establish a new institutional alliance or a fresh identity revelation.
The regional grouping is part of the appeal. Kansuke Yamato, Takaaki Morofushi, Yui Uehara and Misao Yamamura are associated with the plant near the Nagano–Gunma border; Sango Yokomizo and Jugo Yokomizo are linked to the Shizuoka–Kanagawa border. The Osaka and Kyoto cast also includes Ginshiro Toyama, Inspector Otaki and Fumimaro Ayanokoji, with Kazuha Toyama among the familiar faces surrounding Heiji.
Conan’s closer circle includes Kogoro Mouri, Azusa Enomoto and the children Ai Haibara, Ayumi Yoshida, Genta Kojima and Mitsuhiko Tsuburaya. Satomi adds a specialist’s role to that familiar ensemble: voiced by Elaiza Ikeda, she makes document examination the doorway into the larger mystery. The range of characters is meaningful because the same banknote connects places and professions, rather than because every appearance must signal a new long-running plot development.
The arrest does not remove the danger at the plant
Conan delivers the full explanation through the sleeping Kogoro, exposing Kitamura’s part in the counterfeits, both deaths and the fabricated note. Kitamura is arrested. Yet explosives hidden in the expanding ink leave a separate emergency: the plant can still explode after the culprit has been identified.
Conan uses Shinichi Kudo’s voice to direct Ran and the others at the Nagano plant toward the wartime underground shelter. Ran trusts his instructions and brings Haibara and the Detective Boys to safety. The factory explodes, but the evacuation allows the group to survive without further deaths.
The shelter is a payoff to the apparently incidental tour information at the start. Knowing the building is not only background knowledge for the deduction; it becomes a way to protect the people still inside it. Identifying the killer and resolving the physical danger are two separate achievements.
Using Shinichi’s voice does not reveal Conan’s identity to Ran or move their romance into a newly confirmed stage. It makes their existing trust active under pressure: he finds a way to reach her, and she acts on the voice she believes in. The emotional force comes from the rescue, not from an identity disclosure the special does not contain.
Why the anniversary story leaves a bitter aftertaste
The most satisfying reversal is the double failure of Wadayama’s apparent suicide. A small habit of language challenges a large confession, while a trace of poison changes how the locked room is understood. The plot is expansive, but its decisive questions remain specific: who wrote this, where did this happen and when did the victim come into contact with the danger?
Kitamura’s skill also gives the story its central irony. Someone entrusted with helping create confidence in money turns that same expertise toward destroying it. The grief behind his son’s name remains painful, while the fraud, deaths and attempted destruction reveal how far his need to prove himself has displaced concern for other people.
The special is directed by Nobuharu Kamanaka and written by Takeharu Sakurai, with Mai Kuraki’s Hallelujah as its theme song. The companion book by Shima Mizuki is a novelization of the television story, not the manga or novel source from which this case was adapted. Its completed mystery can be followed as an independent anniversary story.
The ending offers relief through the shelter and the survivors without turning Kitamura’s motive into an excuse. A factory visit, an unfinished note, a false confession and a threatened group of visitors all return to the same question of trust: how it is manufactured, how it is exploited and what the characters do to protect it.
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