People Who Eat Darkness (54 page)

My fifth question
: Letter from the author to Joji Obara, June 23, 2005.

“
To tell the truth about Lucie’s character
”: 42nd hearing, July 27, 2005.

“
What’s the significance of buying postcards and drugs?
”: Ibid.

“When Obara asked A,” it would later be explained
: From
The Truth About the Lucie Case
, p. 293.

the inspector had inadvertently kicked the blanket-wrapped corpse
: Ibid., p. 300.

He was “surprised,” according to the book
: Ibid., p. 301.

“
She’s having fun taking drugs
”: Ibid., p. 303.

His name was Satoru Katsuta
: Information on Katsuta is from the trial of Joji Obara, 47th hearing, Tokyo District Court, December 22, 2005.

SMYK

Obara’s lawyers attempted to shore up his defense
: The examples that follow are from the 49th, 50th, and 51st trial hearings, February 8 and 24, and March 8, 2006. The exchange about Obara’s charitable activities occurred in the 51st hearing.

Then, in March 2006
: 52nd hearing, March 2, 2006.

Jane Blackman, Tim Blackman, and Carita Ridgway’s mother, Annette, flew out
: They appeared at the 53rd and 54th hearings on April 20 and 25, 2006.

CONDOLENCE

“
I have received the offer from the accused
”: E-mail reprinted in
The Truth About the Lucie Case
, p. 73.

“
The accused has shown contrition
”: E-mail reprinted in ibid., p. 75.

He explained in a telephone call
: Transcript of telephone conversation, ibid., pp. 78–79.

“
The terrible, terrible acts played out on my beautiful girl
”: 54th hearing, April 25, 2006.

“
In cases of this kind, ¥1.5 million
”: Johnson,
Japanese Way of Justice
, p. 202.

“
I did not know that the cause of death of my daughter
”: In
The Truth About the Lucie Case
, p. 97.

“
blood money
”: Glen Owen, “Now Father of Murdered Lucie Accepts £450,000 ‘Blood Money,’”
Mail on Sunday,
October 1, 2006.

“
I have rejected all and any payments
”: Natalie Clarke and Neil Sears, “An Utter Betrayal of My Dear Lucie,”
Daily Mail,
October 2, 2006.

a two
-
thousand-word character assassination
: “A Father’s Betrayal,”
Daily Mail,
October 7, 2006.

an on-the-record interview to the
Mail: Kathryn Knight, “He Is Immoral,”
Daily Mail
, April 23, 2007.

e-mailed one journalist
: Roger Steare to Indira Das-Gupta, May 17, 2007.

the information found its way to the
Daily Mail: Daniel Boffey, “Lucie’s Father in Trust Fraud Probe,”
Mail on Sunday,
April 29, 2007.

THE VERDICT

I sent repeated letters through his lawyers
: Author to Joji Obara, January 25 and June 23, 2005, February 23, 2006, and October 27, 2008; to Tomonori Sugo, lawyer to Joji Obara, July 8 and 20, 2005; to Shinya Sakane, lawyer to Joji Obara, November 17, 2005; and to Akira Tsujishima, lawyer to Joji Obara, December 5, 2008.

asking me to get hold of Lucie’s health records
: Letter to the author from Tomonori Sugo, lawyer to Joji Obara, July 19, 2005.

he accused me of “delivering copies to Scotland Yard
”: Letter from Kiyohisa Arai, lawyer to Joji Obara, May 17, 2006.

Obara’s lawyer Shinya Sakane wrote indignantly
: Shinya Sakane to the author, November 14, 2005.

“
There is no decisive evidence
”: 61st hearing, December 11, 2006.

one of his lawyers had hired British private detectives
: Jason Lewis, “Lucie Murder Suspect and a Sinister Plot to Smear Her,”
Mail on Sunday,
May 13, 2007.

a website materialized in cyberspace
:
http://lucies-case.to.cx
. The English version of the website is at
http://lucies-case.to.cx/index_e.html
.

publication of
The Truth About the Lucie Case: In February 2010, the publisher of
The Truth About the Lucie Case
, Asuka Shinsha, sued Joji Obara and his lawyer Akira Tsujishima for ¥13,146,481 (at that time about $148,000) in unpaid fees. According to the complaint filed with that court, the book was a vanity publication, “part of a campaign to give an advantage to Obara.” It was commissioned in December 2006, soon after the judges in the Tokyo District Court withdrew to consider their judgment. As well as the Japanese edition, there was to have been an English translation published in Britain. The agreement signed with the publisher was in the name of the “Team Seeking the Truth About the Lucie Case,” and their agent, Obara’s lawyer, Kiyohisa Arai.

On the face of it, then, the book was the work of independent third parties campaigning on Obara’s behalf. “The truth seekers,” the book explains, “are composed of persons such as journalists, law school staff and members of the legal community, including former prosecutors” (p. 31). But there seems to have been no one working on the project who was not paid to do so. Asuka Shinsha and Yorishige Fujita, the freelance editor responsible for the book, received their instructions from lawyers employed by Joji Obara.

“In order to pretend that the campaign is a neutral activity, the defendants pretend that those in charge of the campaign are a specific organisation composed of third parties,” the publisher’s complaint reads. “But needless to say, the truth seekers are neither a corporate body with a judicial personality, nor … an unincorporated association. In reality, they are no more than individuals, such as the defendants.”

Hidetoshi Okuhara, an editor at Asuka Shinsha, described to me the confusion that followed when different, and sometimes contradictory, instructions were given by Mr. Arai, Akira Tsujishima, Yasuo Shionoya, and another of Obara’s lawyers, Katsura Maki.

“The instructions varied from lawyer to lawyer, and the plantiff [Asuka Shinsha] was often left baffled,” the company’s complaint says. “It is presumed that the reason behind such a situation was that these lawyers were seeing Obara in regards to the content of the manuscript for a point-by-point confirmation, and on these occasions, Obara’s story often changed.”

The result, according to Asuka Shinsha’s complaint, was delay as well as confusion. After what should have been the final version of the book went into production, Katsura Maki complained that it contained errors. The publishers proposed inserting an errata slip, to which Mr. Arai agreed—but then Mr. Shionoya ordered that the print run be stopped. Thus the book did not appear on the shelves until just before the verdict of the Tokyo District Court in April 2007. The English-language edition was canceled, and the costs of the translation, which had been largely completed, were never paid by the “truth seekers.”

Tanya Nebogatov is a pseudonym.

HOW JAPANESE

He sued, and won damages from
: Information on Japanese magazines and
Time
magazine from two separate sources close to those cases.

The answer was his family
: Interviews with lawyers representing Joji Obara and source close to the Obara family.

a twenty-two-year-old British woman named Lindsay Hawker
: For an overview of the Lindsay Hawker case, see Richard Lloyd Parry, “Police Catch Fugitive Suspected of Killing British Woman,”
The Times
, November 11, 2009. In July 2011, Tatsuya Ichihashi received a life sentence for the rape and murder of Lindsay Hawker.

“
Japanese Men, Smoky Bars and the Obsession with Beautiful Western Girls
”: Richard Shears,
Daily Mail,
March 31, 2007.

Japanese masturbators are greater consumers of porn
: The greatest consumer and producer of pornography is the United States. Duncan Campbell, “With pot and porn outstripping corn, America’s black economy is flying high,”
Guardian
, May 2, 2003.

The book was one
I recognized
: Ben Hills,
Princess Masako: Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne
(New York: Tarcher, 2006). Translated as
Purinsesu Masako
(Tokyo: Daisan Shokan, 2007).

WHAT I REALLY AM

Even Carlos Santana
: I put Obara’s claim about his friendship with Carlos Santana to the musician’s representative, Susan Stewart. She responded, “Carlos Santana will not be able to assist in this.” E-mail to author, August 18, 2007.

“
a self-centered, callous, and remorseless person
”: Robert D. Hare,
Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us
(New York: Guilford Press, 1999), p. 2.

I have my doubts about such diagnoses
: This point is made by Janet Malcolm in
The Journalist and the Murderer
(New York: Knopf, 1990), p. 75. “The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil—it is merely a restatement of the mystery—and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by psychiatrists, social workers, and police officers, who daily encounter its force.”

“
His pain will be twofold
”: Amanda Platell, “A Betrayal That Will Haunt Lucie’s Dad for Ever,”
Daily Mail,
April 28, 2007.

one reader of
The Sun: “Lucie’s Dad Has Sold Out,”
Sun,
April 27, 2007.

Missing Abroad
:
www.missingabroad.org
.

The image came to his mind of a bulging black rubbish bag
: Dee O’Connell, “What Happened Next?,”
Observer,
January 12, 2003.

“
To violate the dignity of so many victims
”: 7th appeal hearing, Tokyo High Court, December 16, 2008.

There was almost no wind
: Blog entry on
Infanta
website,
http://infanta.square-space.com/log/2008/12/15/winch-handle-sniffer-outed.html
.

Obara appealed again
: On his Supreme Court appeal, see Richard Lloyd Parry, “Lawyers Will Use Lucie Mannequin in Attempt to Win Killer’s Freedom,”
The Times
, December 15, 2009.

on average the term served before parole
: “Mukikei, kari shakuhou made 30-nen … gembatsuka de nagabiku” (30 Years Before Parole for Life Imprisonment … Increased by the Trend for Stricter Punishment),
Yomiuri Shimbun
, November 22, 2010.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people helped me in researching this story, but none gave more than the Blackman/Steare and Ridgway families. In repeated meetings, telephone calls, and e-mail exchanges, they submitted uncomplainingly to interviews that must at times have been unbearably painful. This book could easily have been subtitled
The Fate of Carita Ridgway
, and I’m sorry that I didn’t have the space to devote more of it to Carita and the endurance and tenacity of her family. I thank Rupert Blackman, Sophie Blackman, Tim Blackman and Josephine Burr, Annette Ridgway, Nigel and Aileen Ridgway, Jane and Roger Steare, and Samantha Termini (née Ridgway). I also thank Louise Phillips and Robert Finnigan, who did so much for Lucie and Carita, in life and death; and Lucie’s friends Valerie Burman, Gayle Cotton (née Blackman), Jamie Gascoigne, Samantha Goddard (née Burman), Caroline Lawrence, and Caroline Ryan.

Some of those to whom I owe the most have chosen not to be identified, but I am grateful to all of them, particularly to the surviving victims of Joji Obara. Among those I can name, I thank the following for recollections, documents, contacts, support, ideas, research, proofreading, translation, interpretation, and hospitality: Kozo Abe, Jake Adelstein, Peter Alford, Kiyohisa Arai, Nahoko Araki, Mikiko Asao, Ian Ash, Charles Boundy, Alex Bowler, Everett Brown, Josephine Burr, Chris Cleave, Jamie Coleman, Rob Cox, David Seaborn “Dai” Davies, Tomomi Deguchi, Michael Denby, Toby Eady and all at Toby Eady Associates, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, the Foreign Press in Japan, Dan Franklin and all at Jonathan Cape, Wataru Fujisaki, Benjamin Fulford, Ben Goodyear, Ben and Sarah Guest, Samar Hammam, Thomas Hardy, Atsushi Hosoya, Hideo Igarashi, Noriyuki Imanishi, Stuart Isett, Shoshin Iwamoto, Lea Jacobson, Jenn Joel, Eric Johnston, Colin Joyce, Kentaro Katayama, Velisarios Kattoulas, Hideo Kawaguchi, Taeko Kawamura, Lee Hyon Suk, Leo Lewis, the Lloyd Parry family, Hamish Macaskill and the English Agency, Justin McCurry, Sean McDonald and all at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Toshio Maeda, the late William Miller, Vanessa Milton, Manabu Miyawaki, Giles Murray, Chika Nakayama, Shingo Nishimura, Katsuro Nitto, Hidetoshi Okuhara, Akihiro Otani, Tsuyoshi Otani, David Parrish, David Peace, Dave Russell, Julian Ryall, Issei Sagawa, Hiro Saso, Masato Sato, Junzo Sawa, Matt Searle, Huw Shakeshaft, Alex Spillius, Mark Stephens, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Hiroko Tabuchi, Yuki Takahashi, Gillian Tett, Chika Tonooka, Michiko Toyama, Adam Whittington, Fiona Wilson, Shigeru Yamamoto, and Yuji Yoshitomi.

My former employer,
The
Independent
, sponsored much of the early research for this book; my present one,
The Times
, generously gave me time off to research and write, and unhesitatingly defended me against accusations of libel. At the former, I thank especially Leonard Doyle, and at the latter, Richard Beeston, Pat Burge, Martin Fletcher, Anne Spackman, and Roland Watson, as well as Keiji Isaji and Matthew Whittle of Clifford Chance in Tokyo. Friends and colleagues at
The
Yomiuri Shimbun
have also been a reliable source of information and support.

Although this book is critical of the Japanese police, the officers whom I met in the course of writing it were, with rare exceptions, kind, honorable, and hardworking men, justifiably proud of their service. My criticisms are not of their work as individuals but of a system which many people believe to be in need of reform. I thank Fusanori Matsumoto, Toshihiko Mii, the late Toshiaki Udo, and all those others who have chosen not to be named here.