Authors: Jake Adelstein
All of us in the Japanese media at the time were taking one case of a mentally ill person performing a horrible crime and extrapolating it to imply that all mentally ill patients were capable of or likely to commit similar crimes. In many ways, the coverage reinforced many old prejudices about the mentally challenged and encouraged discrimination.
However, that wasn’t the mood of the public, it certainly wasn’t the tone of the newspaper, and Hamaya had too much integrity to back down or change her articles to fall in line with an unstated company policy.
This got her labeled as a troublemaker. A radical. “She’s as crazy as the nuts she’s defending.” That was when things started to get hard for her.
On June 8, 2001, a thirty-seven-year-old male, Mamoru Takuma, charged into the Osaka University of Education Ikeda Elementary School and stabbed twenty-three children, killing eight. Takuma was believed to be mentally ill, but under the course of the investigation it became apparent that it was a premeditated crime committed out of spite and that he had deliberately been faking mental illness in the hope of not being charged. Once again, the incident made people associate mental illness with violent crimes, and Hamaya continued to voice her opinion that our coverage should not support that prejudice and one incident should not be a vehicle to make blanket statements that all mental illness is faked to avoid punishment. It was a reasonable
approach, certainly, but it created unreasonable reactions within the department.
Hamaya’s writing on the subject did not go down well with some of the senior editors. Her integrity and passion for her subject were seen as defiance.
On September 12, at a meeting, it was announced that she was being more or less kicked out of the National News Department and assigned to Human Resources. The department chair, Kikuchi, had requested her transfer on August 29. Hamaya was allowed to make her parting greetings, and her voice cracked so badly that she was hard to hear. She almost cried, but she managed to hold herself together.
I don’t know what it is about the department that makes people want to stay so much. Maybe it’s like a bad marriage: the more years of your life you’ve invested in the damn thing, the harder it is to get a divorce. You don’t want to feel that you wasted your time. Maybe it’s the feeling of knowing you are the elite of the news reporters. Maybe it’s that the job becomes your identity, your life, and your reason for getting up in the morning. If you take that away from someone, it’s going to hurt.
Hamaya and I went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant in Aoyama that night. The department chair had called her a month before and told her that he was going to move her to the
Yomiuri Weekly
, a
Yomiuri
-owned publication. Hamaya told him, “I want to stay in the National News Department. If I leave, there is nobody who can properly handle reporting on the mentally and physically disabled.” She said that the boss had not been happy with her reply; he’d regarded it as insubordination.
A few days before the department meeting, he called her to his desk and told her point-blank, “You are leaving the department and being assigned to Human Resources. You either accept this or resign or be fired. You will never work again as a reporter while you are in this company. That’s all.”
And he dismissed her without another word.
She wasn’t given a reason or an explanation. All I knew was that it was as if someone had beaten her up. We were sitting in the restaurant, and after she repeated those words, “You will never work again as a reporter,” she totally broke down. She cried so hard I thought she was choking. She put her head on my shoulder, and I let her cry until she couldn’t cry anymore.
I think it helped.
“Look,” I said in the most comforting voice I could muster, “the department head is a jerk—he won’t be around forever. You just have to wait it out. You’re a good reporter. You’ll write again. It’s just a matter of time.”
She asked me if I thought that was really true. I didn’t, but I lied. I reassured her that it was just a matter of time. I didn’t know that things wouldn’t change. I strongly suspected they wouldn’t, but you want to leave people some hope. Maybe I should have told her what I really thought. Maybe I should have told her to get the hell out of the
Yomiuri
and work for another newspaper where she might be appreciated. I don’t know.
It’s hard to keep in touch with people at the
Yomiuri
. You may be working at the same company, but when you’re on the police beat, you’re a stranger to your own department. You live, eat, and sleep in the TMPD headquarters. The head office becomes a distant memory. It was especially hard to see Hamaya because now she wasn’t even in my department. But we kept in contact.
The chief editor of the IT coverage section held a lavish dinner party at his apartment, inviting former reporters as well, and we got to sit around and trade gossip and talk shop for a few hours. I took some good photos of Hamaya pretending to punch out various people. We were supposed to go out for dinner and catch up later that week, but I was busy covering a story and had to cancel on her. She seemed a little disappointed. I promised to reschedule a few days later.
I called her but didn’t get an answer.
I don’t remember the exact date anymore. I had to copy some materials in the company library, and I stopped by the head office. The department was unusually somber as I passed through. Kikuchi, the department chair and boss, was at his desk with some senior management having a conference in hushed tones. I went into the hall to get some coffee, and another female reporter came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around. She looked excited, as if she had a juicy secret to tell me. She was smiling.
“Hey, how’s it hanging?” I asked her, trying not to burn my tongue on the coffee.
She leaned in and whispered, “Have you heard the news about Hamaya?”
“No. Good news, I hope. Is she coming back to the shakaibu?”
“You really don’t know?”
“I haven’t talked to her since last week. No, I really don’t know. She’s getting married? She’s got a boyfriend? Enlighten me.”
“She killed herself,” she said, almost tittering.
“Right. What, did she commit
seppuku
in the cafeteria?”
“No, she really killed herself.”
“What? How?”
“They say she hanged herself in her apartment. Her parents found the body today. The weekly magazines are already nosing around asking questions. You should be careful.”
I didn’t have a single thing to say. It felt as if I had been sucker-punched in the stomach.
“Are you okay?”
She must have asked me three times before I could answer.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks for telling me.”
“I’m sorry. I thought you knew.”
“I didn’t, but thanks.”
I politely made my exit, and I went to the bathroom and puked.
I wished that a weekly magazine had called me. I would have told them that Hamaya hadn’t killed herself, she’d been driven to suicide by one carelessly cruel sentence, “You’ll never work as a reporter again.” To a serious, dedicated journalist, those words are already a death sentence.
I went to the funeral. It was a miserably hot day. I showed up late and left early. I saw Kikuchi there and although I knew it wasn’t his fault, I wanted to slug him. I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t want to even begin thinking about whether I’d failed her as a friend. I’d been so high on having a good run of scoops that I think I probably only half listened to what she had been saying a few days earlier. Maybe if I had paid attention or called her back sooner, maybe it would have made a difference.
The next day I had lunch in the police headquarters cafeteria with my police-beat partner and gave her a summary of the funeral. She and Hamaya had gotten along well.
She told me, “You know, Hamaya was really good to me when I started in the City News Department. She showed me the ropes, told me the unwritten rules. She was the most enthusiastic, dedicated reporter I know.”
I told her it had been the same for me.
“Yeah, and she knew her stuff. Environmental problems, mental health issues, and the problems of the handicapped. The Environmental Agency even sent a telegram expressing their condolences that was read out loud at the funeral.
“That’s the one thing I remembered most about the funeral. So many people, all of them influenced, affected, impressed by this woman. She had been a good reporter.”
“Well,” she said, “the reward for her hard work was getting dumped in the Human Resources Department. It must have been tough.”
“Tough?”
“Well, here she is, a good reporter, a great reporter even—and the company strips her of her position and removes her from reporter work. Now when hiring time comes around she has to deal with all these idealistic young women who just got into the department and tell them what a great company the
Yomiuri
is. I was there at one of these pep talks we give to the new recruits before they start working, and some of the girls didn’t even realize Hamaya had once been a reporter. As far as they were concerned, she was just some middle-aged woman in HR.”
The day after the funeral, I checked my company e-mail account, something I rarely did. I had an unopened e-mail from Hamaya.
It was sent about two days before she killed herself. I have never opened it. I’ve never had the courage. I don’t want to know. I think I have a copy backed up on a hard disk somewhere. I’m not going to look for it.
What’s yarusenai?
It’s that one e-mail you never replied to and will never open. It’s the bad advice you gave and the phone call you should have made and everything that came out of it. It’s thinking about the friends that you suspect you might have been able to save.
After covering IT crime, I was eager to get back onto the streets, and on August 1, 2003, I showed up at the gates of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department at 9:55 A.M. in my new suit from the Suit Factory. The officer at the gate eyed my ID suspiciously, then waved me through. The press club hadn’t changed much. The same clutter, the same earnest, hardworking, tired souls. Only the cast had changed, a little.
Okubo-san—aka Harry Potter, owing to his baby face and round glasses—was stretched out on the couch. He waved hello to me, sat upright, and had one of the junior reporters bring us canned coffee from the vending machine.
“Welcome back, Jake. Good to see you made it here in one piece. No gaijin alarm with the guard?”
I laughed. “Nope, but I wasn’t so sure for a second there.”
“We were worried too, but we figured nothing would be able to stand in your way,” he said, laughing back. “All right, you’ll be working with Chuckles here. She covers the Community Safety Bureau, and you’ll back her up, plus cover part of the Organized Crime Control Bureau. When she gets back, she’ll brief you on what’s going on.”
“Okay, got it. Where’s my desk?”
Harry Potter kind of grimaced. “Real sorry, Jake, there’s no desk for you. But you do have the bottom bunk,” he said, pointing toward the bed against the wall. “TMPD reorganized with the creation of the Organized Crime Control Bureau, so we definitely need an extra reporter. We just don’t have extra space. Please endure the situation.” As a faithful Japanese employee, I had no choice.
• • •
I was glad to have been partnered with Chuckles Masami—real name Murai.
She was a tough reporter and had a good sense of humor, two things that counted. She had a husky voice and a slight lisp, and when she laughed, you could hear her across a baseball field. There was nothing meek about this woman.
We had worked together before, two years ago. I had been sent to Ishikawa Prefecture to write a “fun” feature about harvesting rice on tiny fields along the slope of a mountain. Chuckles was at the local bureau, and when I challenged her to join me on the slopes cutting rice, she took me up on it on her day off. She was much better at it than I was. She also kicked my ass as a reporter.
When she greeted me, she seemed pleased to see me, if a little awkward. Japan, as every two-bit Japanologist will tell you, is a vertical society. In the company hierarchy, I was technically her superior by virtue of my seniority, but in the small world of the TMPD press club, she was top dog. Those distinctions were subtle but important and were compounded by the fact that she was the only woman on the police beat.
As we talked, she’d call me “Jake-san,” which indicated respect, but then slip into “Jake-kun,” suggesting equality, familiarity, or disdain; it was as if she couldn’t make up her mind where I stood in relation to her. On the other hand, I kept addressing her as “Chuckles-chan,” an affectionate honorific that others might have thought bold and brazen. Finally I said, “Just call me Jake. Everyone does.”
“But if I did, that would be disrespectful.”
“Not to me.”
“Okay, Jake-san.”
“Good. Now please show me around.”
My second day on the job, I worked the night shift. I tried to get a few winks in at two in the morning, but that of course was an impossible dream. Midmorning there was a TMPD press conference to announce a warrant for the arrest of the leader of a loan-sharking operation that stretched efficiently across the country.
Now, this was more like the kind of crime I knew and loved. It was also Chuckles’s story—she’d been following it for months—but as she
was out of the office, I tried to pick up what bits of information I could in her stead. Two things struck me: first, that this loan shark, a bigwig in the Yamaguchi-gumi, was on the wanted list on suspicion of violating, curiously, the Investment, Deposit, and Interest Rate Control Law; and, second, that the Community Economic Safety Division was handling the case, not the Organized Crime Control Bureau.
As has been noted, the Yamaguchi-gumi is the largest of the three main yakuza groups in Japan. It is also the most violent and the most active in infiltrating the stock market and high finance. Extreme loyalty is demanded; anyone caught snitching on his boss may be forced to sacrifice an appendage or even be murdered. In terms of expansion and methods, it is like the Wal-Mart of organized crime. It has its own financial division and maintains strong ties with politicians, including former prime ministers.