Tokyo Vice (29 page)

Lucie was positively identified on the tenth. In early April, Obara was officially charged with raping her, causing her death, and then mutilating the body and abandoning it in the cave. In his first trial he was found not guilty of the charges involving Lucie. Sometimes Japanese courts simply baffled me. On the other hand, he received life imprisonment for eight rapes and other charges. The case is in appeal, where it will probably be for years and years to come.
^4*

A lot of people in Japan would like to shrug off the Lucie Blackman case as just some sort of freak crime in one of the world’s safest countries. Although it was an unusual crime, it raises questions. The biggest question for me was always this: how did this man get away with allegedly raping woman after woman for more than a decade, and why didn’t the police catch him sooner?

It’s not that the police have a bad attitude toward crimes against foreign women—it’s all women. They still don’t seem to anticipate how stalking behavior such as the kind demonstrated by Obara can lead to serious injury and even death.

I think—and since I’m not writing for the newspaper, I can actually express my opinion here—that sexual assault against women was always a low-priority crime for the police. The penalty for rape is so negligible (usually two years maximum) and the possibility of a suspended sentence for a first offender so great that it hardly seems like a felony at all.

Hostesses aren’t seen as victims by many of the police; they’re seen as victimizers, greedy, manipulative prostitutes. Especially the foreign
hostesses. I don’t know how you can change that frame of mind. Even if the victim is a prostitute, she’s still a victim. Prostitutes are entitled to say no. Women who are drugged against their will can’t say anything at all.

In the last five years, the TMPD has started putting female officers in charge of investigating sexual assault; it’s a good start. Male officers have tended to treat the victims like criminals in the past, asking questions such as, “How did you egg him on?” or “Why didn’t you say no?” I’ve talked to three women who have had very unpleasant experiences with the police after being raped. Each of them was made to wait between three and eight hours before being taken to a hospital for examination. During that time, all of them were allowed or encouraged to go to the bathroom, thus, of course, destroying the physical evidence.

Rape kits are not a standard item at police stations, and very few officers know how to use them, though I’ve been told that rape kits themselves do exist. In a country where rape is not considered a serious crime, it’s not surprising that people like Obara flourish.

A source in the British Embassy told me that there had been complaints filed with the police about Obara many years before Lucie vanished. I don’t know if that’s true; I can’t find anyone in the TMPD who will confirm that officially. I know this much: if someone had taken those complaints seriously, not only would Obara have gone to jail long since but Lucie Blackman would still be alive.

I awoke in the sleeping quarters on the third floor of the Yomiuri Building, tired and sweaty. I’d had to stay at the office so late the night before that I’d missed the last train home.

There were two sleeping quarters on the third floor: one for the political beat and economic beat, the other for the national news and delivery. Our quarters had lumpy mattresses, bean-filled pillows, and a heating system that made you feel as if you were sleeping in a sauna. Other features: an
EXIT
sign that cast a flickering light over everything and a phone next to the bed that you were expected to answer at all times. Of course, the political beat had a room that was dark and temperature-controlled, with new beds and no phone.

I shaved, hopped into the company car, and headed off to Saitama, my old beat. I was working on a piece about a string of spectacular ATM robberies. There had been about fifty-seven in the last year. It works like this: The ATM robbers break into a construction site or a construction company near a lonely ATM in the suburbs. They steal a power shovel; if a forklift is available, it’ll do (and it’s easier to heist one than you might think). They go to the ATM, rip the entire machine out of the ground, and take off with it. In a more secluded location they whack open the ATM, remove the safe, transfer it to another car, and split. The crime usually takes about four minutes, and the average police response time to an alarm is about six minutes, so the robbers have to be pretty fast. About half the time they can’t get the safe out fast enough and they have to leave the dough behind.

I talked to Scotland Yard, which had been called in to investigate a
series of similar incidents in the late 1990s (it was known as ram raiding). The police in Britain had urged the banks to bolt their ATMs to the ground or floor, and that had virtually eliminated the problem. It can’t stop a power shovel, but it adds a couple minutes to the demolition time, making it easier for the cops to catch the thieves. The other solution was to insert ink packs into the machines; whenever a machine was shaken or knocked over, ink would spurt onto the bills, thus marking them. In Japan, however, the banks have insured all their ATMs so that they don’t lose a yen if they get robbed, and they’d rather pay the insurance than go to the expense of reinforcing their machines. As regards the ink pack option, it was vetoed by the Bank of Japan, which didn’t want to have to exchange clean bills for inked-up ones. So the cops are stuck with the mess.

My first stop was the Saitama police headquarters to ask questions about the seven ATM robberies in the area. The people I had pestered ten years before, including some of my good sources, had risen up the ladder, which would make it easy to get answers. In a way, they still knew about me because I’d been sending New Year’s cards to them since I’d left. In Japan, you send New Year’s cards every year. It’s a ritual. If you don’t, you’re considered an outcast. Personally, they drive me crazy, but I dutifully sent those cards out every December, so that the guys would know where I was, what I was doing, and how old Beni was.

The minute I walked onto the seventh floor, I ran into the former head of the railroad police—“Jake, thanks for the New Year’s card. Your son is really cute.” I chose not to point out that the cute little thing was a daughter. Then people passing by stopped in their tracks to say, hey, hello, long time. It was like having a mini–fan club for a couple minutes. I then headed over to see Chiba, who used to head the Organized Crime Task Force and was now the head of the Vice and Crime Prevention Bureau. This means he actually had an office to himself, complete with a big desk, two sofas, and a marble table with a crystal ashtray and a crystal lighter. Plus he could smoke
in
the building. That was about as good as it got in the Saitama Police Department.

Chiba gave me a warm welcome. The ATM robberies, he said, were helped by the fact that most construction equipment in Japan is designed to run with a generic key. This enables anyone at a construction site to use any machine on the lot without having to search around for a key. Even machines made by different manufacturers can be run
with the same key. This means that anyone with the key can walk onto a lot and steal a machine. No one wants to go to the expense of changing the locks on machines. Plus, the machines are rarely stolen by the criminals; they are just borrowed and then left behind.

Chiba and I then walked across the hall to pick up Yoshimura, who was now the head of the Theft and Stolen Property Division. His second in command, Kohata, used to be vice police chief of Omiya police station. I knew all three of them. We went out for eel over rice and shot the breeze. They asked about my family, and when I showed them pictures of my daughter and wife, they gawked. Sunao is considered quite beautiful by contemporary Japanese standards; they couldn’t believe she’d have anything to do with me. Then there was the usual fight about who would pay the bill. I was hoping to pay so that I would be one up on the you-owe-me-I-owe-you scale that is important in dealing with older Japanese, who still have a sense of honor. However, I had to concede because Chiba had already handed cash to the proprietor before we ate.

Kohata, who looks like John Malkovich but with more hair, filled me in on the latest trends in both ATM robberies and housebreaking. Recently, Japan had had a huge surge in break-ins by Chinese nationals, some of whom, it turns out, are adept at picking locks. Japanese locks are pretty easy to pick. But after a wave of these thefts, people installed stronger locks, so now the crooks walk around carrying power drills, corkscrews (which are effective in turning the lock), and cute little stickers of happy faces, Hello Kitty and the like. Why stickers? They’re used to cover up the drilled hole in the lock so that while the thief is inside pilfering the place, nobody walking by will notice anything amiss.

I traveled to Yoshikawa, in east Saitama, to check out the latest scene of an ATM robbery, near a Home Depot–like store. I tried finding a witness, but everyone just slammed the door in my face and told me they didn’t need a paper. It was very déjà vu. One lady complained that the
Yomuiri
wasn’t giving her movie tickets when she renewed her subscription and she was tired of getting detergent. I couldn’t get in a word. Some things never change.

It was pretty easy to see why this ATM had gotten knocked over. It was plopped down like a little shed in a corner of the parking lot, next to a bus stop, very visible from the road, with absolutely nothing to obstruct an oncoming power shovel. A cursory look at the remains
revealed that the machine had been bolted down in three places with thin sheets of metal. The crooks had made off with 6 million yen (about $60,000 at the time).

I finally found an eyewitness across the road, little Mrs. Ishikawa, who opened the door only after I showed her my business card, my photo ID, and an article about me in a
Yomiuri
brochure. Her story went like this:

“I heard a big noise that sounded like
gon gon gon
, and I thought it might be an earthquake or something. I could feel the ground shake. But then I remembered that construction had been going on down the road and thought maybe they were just starting very, very early today. But then I heard this
gan gan
sound, and my husband got up to look out the window, and I looked out too, and we could see these two men working a big power shovel, ripping the ATM out of the ground and smashing it into little pieces. My husband called the police. Of course, by the time the police came, there was only a big pile of rubble and the men had driven the safe off in a white station wagon and were nowhere to be seen.

“I was a little surprised, but my husband, who reads the newspaper every day—although we don’t take the
Yomiuri
, sorry—had read about those ATM robberies. As a matter of fact, he said to me just last week, ‘I think it’s just a matter of time before they get that machine across the street.’ And what do you know, they did! I think the criminals were very smart or very lucky because everyone in the neighborhood thought it was just more construction work and we were all a little slow to call the police.”

Local color, quotable, good.

The police chief of the city of Yoshikawa was someone I knew well; he used to be the second in command of the Saitama Homicide Division. After we greeted each other, he expressed great embarrassment about the robbery happening on his turf. Police had marked fifteen sites as potential ATM robberies, but the one that had gotten hit wasn’t even on the list. As a matter of fact, police had been staking out another site when this robbery occurred. The Yoshikawa Police Department is responsible for 30 square miles that comprise two cities and a town, so it isn’t surprising that with its limited manpower the crooks had gotten away, but still he didn’t feel good about it.

•    •    •

Having done my job, I figured that since I was in Saitama I shouldn’t waste the chance to visit Sekiguchi-san and his family. I called to warn
him I’d be coming, then gave directions to the driver, and off we went to northernmost Saitama. It’s so remote there that occasionally the local schools had a problem with wild boar running loose in the schoolyard. It’d been ten years since I was a young reporter in Saitama, but Sekiguchi was still my mentor and his family treated me like one of their own. It would be good to see them.

We pulled up to the house about seven in the evening, and it was sort of like old times again. Everyone greeted me warmly. Sekiguchi-san and Mrs. Sekiguchi looked great, but the two daughters sure had changed. They were no longer little elementary school girls.

Despite having recently being diagnosed with cancer, Sekiguchi was in good spirits, going on about the pleasure of being back doing real detective work as his wife laid out well-remembered junk food for me. Yuki-chan had a giant Hello Kitty pillow that she and her sister wanted me to give Beni. We laughed and nibbled and talked some shop, Sekiguchi relating the details of his latest case, which prosecutors had removed him from. The investigation had been halted for political reasons, having to do with the governor. Some things never change.

Sekiguchi and I didn’t smoke that night. He was trying to quit.

I got back to Tokyo at 10:30 and went straight to Edogawa Ward, where I was scheduled to meet a North Korean Japanese who was president of an industrial waste management company.