Authors: Jake Adelstein
If you think this system creates a very cop-friendly, biased reporting style, you are absolutely correct. The Japanese police are extremely adept at manipulating the press, and we were extremely willing to submit to this manipulation for the possibility of getting a scoop.
For a reporter, dating is impossible. My budding relationship with my first serious Japanese girlfriend effectively ended with a phone call. Not from her but from Yamamoto, at nine in the evening. It was the first day I’d had off in three weeks, and I-chan and I were on my futon, catching up on some long-missed sex, when the phone rang. I had no choice but to dismount and pick up.
“Adelstein, we got a probable murder in Chichibu, and we need you to go to the scene. Get your ass down here in ten minutes. The car is running.”
I started pulling on my clothes, and I-chan pouted.
“I’m sorry, hon,” I said. “I’ve got to go to work.”
“You bastard! You’ve gone, but I haven’t gone yet.”
(If you thought that was a typo, let me explain: In Japan, the act of achieving orgasm is referred to not as “coming” but as “going.” This lends itself to the joke that Japanese-American couples have so much trouble communicating that they can’t tell whether they’re coming or going.)
“I-chan, I hate to leave you high and dry, but duty calls.”
In perfect English, she replied, “Work, work, work. Make them wait five fucking minutes!”
I had already put on my shirt and was hunting for my
Yomiuri
armband, camera, wrinkle-free necktie, and pen. “I’ll make it up to you. You can be on top next time,” I said earnestly.
We’d been going through a rough patch in our romance lately. I was working nonstop, forgetting to call, and usually so tired, drunk, or
hungover on my day off that I was far from entertaining. Things had not been good for a while, but I was hoping she’d get used to an absentee boyfriend. In a passive-aggressive way, I hadn’t been helping by neglecting to make a determination about “our future.”
“Look, I’m really sorry. People are waiting for me.”
“If you walk out that door, you walk out of this relationship,” she said.
“I have to go,” I said.
I got on my bicycle and pedaled to the office in record time. Yamamoto was waiting in the car, I hopped into the driver’s seat, and off we sped toward Chichibu.
Yamamoto filled me in. The victim ran a snack bar
1*
in Chichibu. She’d been found in her bedroom, in her pajamas, in a prefectural public housing development at 7:45 that evening by an employee who’d gone to her apartment when she didn’t show up at the bar and who then called 119 (Japan’s version of 911). Initial reports made it sound as if she’d been hit on the right side of her head with a blunt instrument.
Yamamoto dropped me off at the crime scene with instructions to find a photo of the
mama-san
and to find someone who had nice things to say about her. He was heading to the Chichibu police station for the briefing. I was usually the reporter on the scene because the newspaper was reluctant to have me cover a police briefing. They were afraid I’d miss something important—a fear that was probably well founded then.
The victim lived in a dismal apartment complex—row upon row of uniform beige buildings typical of public housing in Japan. They were all faced with balconies with metal railings that had been rigged with clotheslines that always had laundry hanging from them, rain or shine, night or day. The place was ill lit, and the only sound of life within was the vague din of television sets bleeding through the thin walls of the apartments.
The police had cordoned off the entire building where the mamasan
had lived. I played the stupid-gaijin card and ducked under the
KEEP OUT
yellow tape. I was able to talk to two people before an officer approached me and said sternly, in English, “Go away. No can be here.”
I tried to make conversation with some folks who were hanging around the edges of the police barrier, looking up at the building. I walked into the adjacent beige building, ringing doorbells, asking about the mama-san, until I found a foreman at a concrete plant who’d been a regular at the snack bar.
He even had a picture of her—Snack-mama was surprisingly chubby—and he was willing to let me borrow it.
“Do you have any idea who would want to kill her?” I asked, deep in reporter mode.
“Hmm, I don’t know. Maybe some deadbeat customer who ran up a huge tab. She could really ride your ass if you didn’t pay your bill on time. I’ve known loan sharks who were more easy-going.”
This wasn’t exactly a quotable comment about the deceased. “What about her husband?” I asked.
“Not around. She lived with her daughter. People said they weren’t getting along. Something about the daughter’s boyfriend.”
“Was he a yakuza or just some kind of badass?”
“Nope. Worse. He was a foreigner.”
“What kind of foreigner?”
“Don’t know. I can’t tell the difference,” he said sheepishly. “Looks kind of like you.”
All right! I thought. We’ve got a suspect! I rang Yamamoto and gave him the news.
He complimented me on my investigative skills, then filled me in on what he’d learned at the briefing. The Chichibu police had declared it a murder and set up a special investigation headquarters, calling it, unofficially, “The Chichibu Snack
-
mama Murder Case.”
Snack-mama had been running her snack bar for close to fifteen years. She usually went to work at five in the afternoon, but when she didn’t show up that day, one of the hostesses went to her apartment. She’d knocked but gotten no answer. The door was locked. Worried, the hostess had the building manager open the door with a key.
The apartment was orderly, no signs of struggle or burglary, but Snack-mama was dead, lying on her futon, facedown, blood soaked
into the mattress. The house was otherwise in order, and nothing appeared to have been stolen.
A preliminary autopsy suggested that she’d been killed sometime between midnight and early morning that day. The injury suggested that she’d been hit by a rodlike object, maybe a baseball bat, with enough force to kill her instantly. There was one blow to the skull, causing her to bleed to death.
The last time she’d been seen alive was at 1
A.M.,
when an employee had dropped her off after work. A friend from high school had telephoned her at 10
A.M.
but gotten no answer, corroborating the estimated time of death. The daughter, age twenty-eight, had been seen leaving the house with a man around 2:30
A.M
.
Yamamoto then asked me, “Is the forensic team around?”
“How would I know that?”
“They’re wearing blue uniforms that cleverly say
FORENSIC DEPARTMENT.
They’re looking for the weapon. If you can get a picture of them with the weapon, we’ll use it. I’m sending Frenchie out to help you. Chappy will pick up the picture of the vic.”
By the time Chappy showed up, it was getting close to dawn. He had brought me some
kairo
, instant heating pads that would, when pounded and exposed to air, impart the illusion of warmth. I stuffed them into every pocket I had and waited, looking around and hoping to catch something worthwhile.
The building was still cordoned off, but I could see the forensic guys poking around bushes on the far end of the crime scene, which abutted a field. Other reporters on the scene were canvassing the parking lots in the complex, hoping to talk to people on their way to work.
I was looking for another angle when I noticed, in the bushes, what appeared to be a drainage ditch and a culvert in an embankment adjacent to the housing complex. I guessed it would lead out to the field and under the yellow tape. Impulsively I decided to see if I was correct.
I crawled into the culvert and emerged, smudged, right beneath the embankment. I had a great view of the investigators digging through the bushes and brush. I got out my humongous camera with a telephoto lens and started snapping away. Suddenly, I felt a large presence looming over me.
“You must be Mr. Adelstein,” a voice said.
I looked up nervously. It was Kanji Yokozawa, the head of the Forensic Department, a veteran homicide detective who commanded
wide respect. He was wearing a modified baseball cap and square-cut frameless glasses, and he was clad in the dark blue scrubs of the forensic team, white latex gloves rolled down to his wrists.
I couldn’t tell if I was in trouble or not. Technically, I was behind the police line. “Ahh, yes, that would be me,” I said conversationally.
“Mr. Adelstein, I’m wondering how you got past that yellow tape over there.”
“Well, I crawled through the drainage tunnel.”
“I see. And are you getting any good photos?”
“Usable stuff. I was hoping for the magic moment when you find the murder weapon.”
“If we find it, I’ll let you know. I’ll even pose for the picture. But I don’t think it will be that easy. By the way, as you are scurrying through the fields, if you happen to find something that looks like a murder weapon, a bat, a metal rod, or some blunt object—please don’t touch it. Leave it where it is, but let us know.”
One thing about Yokozawa, he was always a gentleman, even when he had cause not to be. In homicide, most detectives have pretty short fuses, and they don’t like reporters. Yokozawa was the exception. So I decided to see how far I could go. “As long as you’re here and I’m here,” I began, “do you think I could ask you a few questions?”
“Yes, you can ask. I may not be able to answer all of them, but I’ll answer what I can.”
“Thank you, Yokozawa-san,” I said. “First question: The coroner says Snack-mama was killed with a single blow to the head. Lucky shot?”
“Good question. My guess is that the killer knew exactly what he was doing. Most criminals screw it up and strike again and again, even if the skull was smashed on the first blow. In the tension of the moment, sometimes they whack the shoulders, sometimes they break the victim’s back. Not in this case. In a way, this was a professional job.”
“A hit man?”
“No, not like that. Whoever killed her knew how to dispatch someone efficiently. He or she knew how to kill.”
“So you’re thinking the daughter’s boyfriend?”
“I can’t answer that. But I will tell you something, and I want you to think about this. The daughter’s boyfriend, he’s Iranian. A lot of the Iranians who are in Japan are ex-soldiers; many fought in the Iraq-Iran War. They know how to kill—with knives, guns, hands, blunt objects.
In fact, although you may not quote me on this, many police officers are more afraid of Iranians than they are of the yakuza.”
“Who do you think locked the door?”
“Well, it would have had to have been somebody with a key. It’s possible that someone got into the apartment, killed Snack-mama, stole her key, and then locked the door to delay the finding of the body. It’s possible but unlikely. First of all, it’s doubtful Snack-mama would leave the door unlocked or greet someone in her pajamas. So whoever locked the door after killing her probably had a key in the first place.”
With that Yokozawa nodded and returned to the apartment building. As he left, he mentioned that he thought the case would be wrapped up fairly shortly.
I stuck around for another hour. I got one out-of-focus shot of a CSI guy in the parking lot, holding a plastic bag with what looked like a bloody sweatshirt inside. I didn’t see anything else of interest.
Back at the office, we compared notes. According to Yamamoto, the cops were pretty sure that the daughter’s boyfriend had killed Snack-mama. What they didn’t know was if the daughter had put him up to it. The daughter was in shock, questioning was not going well, and the Iranian boyfriend was not to be found.
In the late 1980s, when the Japanese economy was at its peak and construction was rampant, an agreement between Japan and Iran gave Iranians the opportunity to work in Japan without a visa. Essentially this was part of an unofficial policy of the Japanese government to provide the country with much-needed cheap manual labor, and many Iranians came and stayed (and overstayed).
At the time, young Japanese were above what was known as 3K jobs:
kitanai
(dirty),
kitsui
(difficult), and
kurushii
(painful). In 1993, when the Japanese bubble deflated, the agreement was canceled, but Chichibu was still a place with enough heavy industry and factories to provide the Iranians with places to work.
Now, with this murder, the response of the Saitama police was to round up every Iranian working in Chichibu they could find. This was going to take time.
I did the allotted three days in Chichibu, following leads, talking to Iranians and factory workers, using the
Yomiuri
expense account for drinks in seedy hostess clubs with Chappy, and going to press conferences
where there was less and less information to be disseminated. And I got stuck covering the funeral.
Articles about funerals, with minor variations, follow the same pattern: funerals are carried out “quietly and somberly.” You can always hear “muffled sobbing” from the crowd. Even if the relatives of the deceased were having a fine time at the wake the night before, laughing and remembering good times with the deceased and getting rip-roaring drunk, that’s never what appears in the paper.
I really dreaded going to this one, and I had a legitimate reason. By now, everyone in the town knew that the chief suspect was the daughter’s Iranian boyfriend. I’m Jewish, with typical Jewish features—dark hair, olive skin, big nose. I could pass as an Iranian. I had visions of being mistaken for the suspect and trampled to death in front of the funeral pyre.
I protested to Yamamoto, but to no avail.
The turnout was huge. The victim’s daughter was there (we were told to get her picture since she was still a suspect), along with relatives and customers. All in all, about ninety people, all dressed in proper funereal black.
After the services had been conducted and everyone had placed incense on the charcoal brazier and bowed to the photo of the victim, the victim’s younger brother spoke on behalf of the relatives. “She was a wonderful sister. She always looked after people with dedication and attention. When I think about what happened to her, I’m just so angry. What am I supposed to do with this anger? Who can I take it out on?”