Authors: Jake Adelstein
He paused, and it sure as hell seemed as if he were staring at me. In fact, except for the daughter, it seemed as if all ninety mourners were staring at me. I nervously pulled on my
Yomiuri
armband, hoping it would deflect some of the fury aimed my way. Then some little boy’s voice broke the silence: “I have to go to the toilet! I can’t wait! I’m going to pee on the floor if I don’t go now!” Nervous titters filled the room, and everyone’s eyes slowly left me.
I would have liked to have gone home and crashed after that, but three days of sports records, event blurbs, and birth announcements had to
be written up. I stayed at the office until one in the morning, checking to make sure we’d inputted the records correctly. I got a migraine from two hours of reading the scrawled cursive Japanese of the mothers who’d sent in pictures of their little whelps for publication. Chappy and I amused ourselves by making up rude captions such as, “I’m not slobbering because I’m an infant, I’m slobbering because Mom has great tits!” or “If you think I have a hairy face, you should see the hair on my tongue!” But eventually we had to finish the work.
I bicycled home at two in the morning. The apartment was empty. A note from I-chan lay on the futon: “It’s over.”
Her stuff was gone. She’d made up the futon and washed the dishes in the sink, even cleaned out the bathtub and taken out the trash. It was the most considerate breakup I’d ever experienced. I lay down on the futon in my suit and thought about calling her. I was still thinking about it when I fell asleep. And that was that.
Yamamoto decided that I needed to start doing the night rounds at Yokozawa’s home. Yokozawa seemed to like me, he’d shared some information with me before, and Yamamoto was hoping he’d do it again—that is, leak something, anything, that would put us ahead of the competition on this story.
When I knocked on the door of Yokozawa’s apartment, his wife answered. It was early evening, but he was home, lounging on the sofa in his bathrobe. He told me that most reporters knocked on his door only after ten at night, and he asked me not to tell anyone that he actually came home earlier than that. I laughed and agreed.
We chatted about the weather and my life in Japan and finally got around to the Chichibu case. He implied that a weapon had been found, but he wouldn’t be pinned down. I kept mental notes; it’s taboo for a reporter to take notes with a cop on the night rounds. That would dismantle the illusion that you are just two professionals making small talk, that you’re not really trying to get some information. The rules aren’t hard and fast, but generally speaking, what you pick up from a cop over drinks is never something that you can attribute to that person by name. If there’s enough material to write an article, it’s always “sources close to the investigation” or “the Saitama police.”
Drinking is important for the police, too, because it gives them plausible deniability. The cop can say, “No, I never told that reporter
anything. Well, we were drunk and maybe something slipped out. I can’t remember.”
Yokozawa and I discussed the fine points of the case for about half an hour, after which I went to the nearest telephone booth and called Yamamoto. I repeated the conversation as best I could, word for word. He told me I’d done great work and that he’d pass on the information. I had no idea if anything I’d said was important, but I guess Yamamoto understood the subtext, the bigger picture. I was too ashamed (yes, ashamed) to ask him exactly what had been useful.
The next morning at the press club, Yamamoto and Ono came in early and scrambled to get an article in the evening edition. We had the scoop, and the headline read, “Snack-mama Murder: Saitama Police to Arrest Iranian Boyfriend of Victim’s Eldest
2*
Daughter.”
The article noted that the police were about to arrest an Iranian who had already been prosecuted for immigration violations. Forensics had determined the culprit’s identity through a bloodstained sweatshirt, a pair of pants with a key to the apartment in a pocket, and a bloodstained metal tool that had been found in the general area of the crime scene. The police had requested an arrest warrant and were expecting to serve it within the day.
It was a clean scoop. Not the investigative journalism kind of scoop, but the much-esteemed “we-wrote-it-before-the-police-announced-it” class of scoop. The police did arrest the boyfriend within the day, and the
Asahi
, our natural enemy in the newspaper world, was forced to follow up later.
I spoke that night with Yokozawa, who congratulated me on the scoop. I was duly modest; the fact was, I still didn’t know what I’d done. According to the forensics chief, the boyfriend had killed snack-mama because she didn’t want him to marry her daughter. He refused to admit his guilt, however, and claimed, “This is a police trap—I’ve been framed.”
But as far as I was concerned, the case was finished. I didn’t think about it again until almost a year later.
I was eating
yakisoba
at Omiya station when Takahashi, the newbie, rang me. It was a hysterical call, the same kind I used to make as a freshman when I was overwhelmed by unfolding news and three people were barking different commands at the same time. I finally got him to read me the press release.
The gist of the first bulletin was this: The body of a young Japanese female had been found in Maruyama Park in Ageo. She’d been strangled with a lady’s scarf. Color of scarf? Not yet released.
I could hear Yamamoto yelling in the background for me to get to the crime scene. So off I sped to Maruyama Park.
Typically, parks in Tokyo and Saitama urban areas are giant parking lots with a couple of swing sets, teeter-totters, and sparse vegetation struggling to survive. But Maruyama Park was the real thing, with wide expanses of grass and groves of trees. The victim had been found in some bushes behind a gazebo in the center of the park.
The police had attempted to cordon off the entire park but had been thwarted by mothers angry that they had no place to take their children to play. So the off-limits area was confined to the area immediately surrounding the crime scene. By the time I got there, the yellow tape was flanked by a crowd of curious housewives, park workers, loafing salarymen, students with nothing better to do, and senior citizens out for a stroll. Of course, reporters were already roaming around the park, looking for anything that would help make the story more coherent.
Since getting close to the crime scene was out of the question, I decided to join my fellow journalists in canvassing the parkgoers. Any suspicious activities? Did local gangs hang out in the park? Was the park a popular place for kids to make out? Was the park safe?
One toothless older man dressed in a golf shirt, jeans, and sandals said a lot of Iranians had been hanging out in the park recently. He figured they were out of work and killing time or maybe exchanging information about where to find work. When the first police car showed up this afternoon, he had watched them vanish. It was the best piece of information I had after an hour of work.
I called Nakajima and told him what I’d just learned.
“Shit! Try to find someone who saw something. Yamamoto is heading to the press conference. We’ll keep you posted.”
I walked around the park talking to people but came up with nothing further. I could see police officers doing the same thing, but the usual army of blue-uniformed forensic guys wasn’t present. The police were so sure the scarf was the murder weapon that they didn’t bother scouring the park for anything else.
When I next checked in with the office, Yamamoto wanted me to go with him to the press conference at the police station. My job would be to take notes and relay them back to people putting the story together for the next edition. (They’d begun trusting my ability to comprehend Japanese—or maybe they’d run out of personnel. My Japanese skills were up to junior high school level.)
Saeki, the head of Saitama homicide, was running the press conference. He had bad skin and thick glasses, and even though he was at least twenty pounds overweight, he still managed to find suits that were baggy on him. He was growing bald, so he combed his hair, grown long on the sides, over the bald part on top, producing the hairstyle known in Japan as a “bar code.” Saeki also had a reputation as an extraordinary cop. I annoyed the hell out of him, for reasons I never understood, so I was glad Yamamoto was along to ask questions.
The conference started with a biography of the twenty-three-year-old victim, followed by a barrage of extremely precise but not necessarily important questions that reporters have to ask. Where was the body located? Which way were the feet pointed? Was the body faceup? Which direction was her head pointed toward? (This last question is actually relevant. Japanese usually lay out corpses with the head facing north, so if the body was laid out that way, it might indicate a Japanese murderer feeling remorse.)
Saeki told everyone to shut up and listen.
The body was found on the north side of the Summer Pavilion, in the bushes. Her head was pointed toward the pavilion while her body was laid out parallel to the shrubbery. She was found faceup, both hands spread out. She was wearing dark blue overalls with a striped blouse. She was wearing shoes and socks. (Another telling sign: if she didn’t have her shoes and socks on—and if they weren’t part of the crime scene—that opened up the possibility of a double suicide attempt in which her partner chickened out. The reason: typically Japanese remove their shoes and socks before killing themselves. Just as
it is a terrible faux pas to walk into a Japanese house with shoes on, it is considered rude, however unconsciously, to enter the afterlife without such decorum.)
Her blouse was pulled up slightly, and you could see her underwear. She was wearing the same clothes she been wearing the day before.
And she had been strangled to death with a pink scarf.
In her pockets were car keys and a handkerchief. The car had been located nearby; under the driver’s seat was a drawstring purse containing 6,000 yen (about $60) in cash, potentially ruling out the motive of robbery, and the victim’s ID. Her family name was Nakagawa.
There was nothing more.
Yamamoto sent me back to the park to join the police seeking any eyewitnesses. Other reporters were dispatched to the victim’s home.
After a few hours, we met and reviewed our notes: Saitama police had found the victim’s address book, and among the forty names listed were several foreigners. Police were questioning each of them. The pink scarf, supposed to be the murder weapon, did not belong to the victim; her family members had never seen it before. But the critical thing (again) was: the victim had a foreign boyfriend. On the day she was killed, she had gone to meet him. His name was Abdul, but he went by “Andy.” Apparently, he was an Iranian pretending to be French. According to a friend of the victim, the couple had originally met at a gym in Ageo.
Hearing that, Nakajima and Takahashi took off for Ageo, hoping to learn something at the gym. Instead, they were promptly turned away by staff who had been warned by the police not to speak to the press.
Enter the gaijin’s great idea: I would try my luck at the gym by posing to be a buddy of the Iranian boyfriend. As expected, Yamamoto thought it a clever tactic but Nakajima thought it was nuts. But finally all agreed: what the hell. I changed into jeans and a polo shirt. I hadn’t shaved that morning, so I had a nice growth of stubble. I was sure I could pass.
Once I got in the door, I went to the reception area and, speaking in my made-up Iranian-accented Japanese, mentioned that Andy was my friend and countryman and asked how much membership at the gym would cost me (it wasn’t cheap). The staff looked wary but slowly warmed to my pushiness. They talked about what a cute couple Andy and Nakagawa had been. That was my chance to say, ever so casually, that since membership cost so much I needed to borrow some money
from Andy. I knew where he worked, but did they know where he lived?
They were very accommodating. With the address in my hand, I walked out of the gym feeling like Jim Phelps in
Mission: Impossible
.
Jumbo and I immediately went to Andy’s address, a run-down, two-story wooden structure with a washing machine in the hallway for common use. We learned from the surly landlord that police had raided the place a few hours after the body had been found and hauled off a dozen so-called foreigners for overstaying their visa. This little discussion was interrupted by two police officers who just happened to come back to the apartment building, and they kicked us out.
Meanwhile there was havoc at the police station. The gym staff had called the station within minutes of my being there, and a sketch artist was dispatched to make a composite drawing of the “suspicious friend of Andy.” Several detectives were assigned to find this friend, a potential accomplice, and began pounding the pavement for clues, showing the composite drawing to people in the park. Another two detectives were assigned to surveillance at the gym, in case the suspicious friend came back.
It was the next morning when I learned what had happened. Around midnight that night, the forensics chief, Yokozawa, was studying the composite drawing when the realization hit. “You idiots!” he yelled at his detectives. “This is no Iranian! This is the
Yomiuri’s
gaijin reporter pretending he’s an Iranian!”
The gentlemanly Yokozawa was sorely pissed off, and the detectives were ready to lock me up. Yamamoto got an irate phone call and apologized profusely, bowing unseen as he did so. He had the decency not to yell at me but politely suggested I get down on my knees and beg the forgiveness of Saeki and Yokozawa. I’d wasted an entire day of the police department’s time, sending several detectives on a fool’s errand.
The next day, before the press briefing, I walked up to Saeki and, feeling a little queasy, stuttered an apology. Saeki was not amused. For a second, I thought he was going to hit me. He glared at me for two seconds, then said slowly, “You know, Adelstein, I have half a mind to haul your ass to jail for interfering with an investigation. But you’re a young, green, clueless barbarian, so I’ll let it slide this time. Don’t do it again.”