by Kotaro Isaka
Needless to say, a victory by a young unknown over the man who had been the face of the Liberal Party was big news, but in terms of the larger campaign, it was just a single, local win. Still, this local win proved decisive in Kaneda's victories in both the primary and general elections, victories that were driven in large part by almost accidental media attention.
Quite by chance, the victory in Sendai occurred just at a moment when there were no other newsworthy events. Fhus, the morning talk shows and the noon news hours were hapj:)y to have Sadayoshi Kaneda to fill their slots. Of course, once T V latched onto the story, Kaneda's name recognition shot up and he won the next local election. As the wins piled up, the media dubbed him "a breath of Iresh air," the coverage became still more intetise, and ultimately it had a siKm'ball elfect. T he best analogy is perhaps Jimmy Carter's (jvernight ascent in American |)olitics. You could say, in eltect, that it was the comlnnation ot the early win in Sendai and the power ol the mass media that were behind Sadayoshi Kaneda's rise to the ollice ot |)rime minister.
Kaneda's principal t)ackers in the Sendai priniiiry were the Physicians Asso-ciatifui and a grouj) ot piit)lic casino owners. And lliougli llu* point was never
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emphasized, it is common knowledge that the leadership of the doctors group consisted of a number of men who had known Kaneda in college, while the casino owners included several who had been at middle school with him. An interview in a weekly photo journal given just before Kaneda announced his candidacy by one of the casino owners attracted a lot of attention. The man had insisted that while his middle school teachers had given up on him early on in life, his classmate, Kaneda, had always been there for him. Ironically, the combination of the sober, mannerly Kaneda and the roughneck casino owner struck voters as refreshing rather than unsavory.
But a third and widely credited theory is that these two groups of supporters, the doctors and the casino owners, turned against him after the election and arranged his dispatch. The theory gained particular currency when it came out that shortly after becomirig prime minister, Kaneda had begun studying health-care reform with his Liberal Party colleagues in parliament and that he had discussed budget reductions for public casinos with Katsuo Ebisawa in the same period.
This was certainly not a question of Kaneda betraying former allies. Well before the campaign, he had focused public attention on issues such as the deplorable working conditions in emergency medicine and the shortage of gynecologists; and he may genuinely have felt the need for more centralized control over issues ranging from the location of regional clinics to doctors' salaries. At the same time, business at public casinos had been on the increase and they had begun to show substantial profits. Thus, he seemed intent on cutting budget support to the casinos and using the savings to fund health-care reforms.
Still, it is possible to imagine that those special-interest groups who supported him in the primaries might—fairly or unfairly—have felt used and betrayed, arid decided that Kaneda had bitten the hand that fed him. A writer who interviewed one of the casino owners some six months after the assassination quoted him as saying that the prime minister "just didn't get it."
There were a number of other theories as well. One holds that Kaneda's girlfriend, Hikaruko Kobayashi, went to the Labor Party and begged them to make an example of him for refusing to properly acknowledge her. Another maintains that he was eliminated by a group that saw him as hopelessly
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unsympathetic to gay causes. In the end, however, other than the fact that Kobavashi committed suicide after the assassination and that Kaneda did once fire a secretary who was known to be gay, there is no credible evidence to support either notion.
Ultimately, however, our inability to get to the truth of the case after all this time is due in large part to the fact that so many of those who were involved are now dead. As the years have gone by, a number have died of natural causes, but several—too many, some would say—died in other ways.
Most notable, of course, is the suicide of his lover, Hikaruko Kobayashi. Two months after the assassination, she was found hanged in a hotel room in Fukuoka. There was no note. Later it was revealed that her apartment in Tokyo had been ransacked, and her sister maintained that the diary she'd kept was missing.
Hideo Okura, who was covering the parade on the day of the assassination, was stabbed to death in broad daylight on a busy street less than a year later. A broadcast reporter for a local TV station, he was the one who first insisted he'd seen someone on top of the textbook warehouse. The Ukai Report concluded later that it was Masaharu Aoyagi on the roof of the building flying the remote-controlled helicopter, but Okura had told a local magazine that the man he'd seen bore no particular resemblance to Aoyagi.
Yuzo Ochiai, the owner of the model shop, has also died. A nondescript man in his late fifties, he owned a small store on the south side of town that sold various remote-controlled gadgets, including, it was said, the one Aoyagi had used. In the wake of the assassination, the networks broadcast the surveillance tape from his shoj) suj:)posedly showing Aoyagi purchasing the helicopter. Six months after the incident, Ochiai struck a divider on the freeway and was killed instantly. The investigation revealed that his blood alcohol level was elevated, though Ins family insisted that he did not drink. In the c(jurse of my own research, 1 have learned that Okura's description of the man he saw on the root closely resembles Yuzo Ochiai.
Junko Kusumi, a waitress at Nokkin, a chain restaurant in Sendai, is another witness who died soon alter the incident. A man robbing a convenience store where she was shopping was accnsetl ol hilling her on Ihe head with a hammer, though when he was arrested later Ik* denied any knowledge
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of her murder. At the time of Kaneda's assassination, junko Kusumi had appeared on T V saying that Aoyagi had broken a window and threatened the customers at her restaurant. But according to a friend who was interviewed after her death, Kusumi had regretted making her statement. She had apparently said it was the police who had used violence and made threats.
Tsuyoshi Kubota's name should certainly be included in any list of interesting players in the case. He was in his mid-thirties at the time, and busy committing a series of robberies in homes around Sendai. Two years before the assassination, he happened to have chosen a budding young celebrity named Rinka as his next victim but was caught in the act and apprehended by Masaharu Aoyagi, who had been making a delivery to Rinka. Given his extensive criminal record, Kubota was sentenced to seven years in prison but was paroled after five. It was barely a footnote in the weeklies, but Kubota was killed in a fight on the street less than two weeks after he got out of prison. It was said that he spent much of his sentence, however, boasting that he would kill Aoyagi when he got the chance.
Ai Kurata also died less than two years after the assassination. Around the time of the incident, reports surfaced that Aoyagi had molested a young woman by that name on a commuter train in Sendai. She died in a drunkdriving acciderit along a mountain road on the Oshika Peniiisula, going over a cliff after failing to negotiate a curve. Another woman, Koume Inohara, was in the passenger seat and was also killed, but strangely there seemed to be no previous connection between the two. The only thing they had in common was the fact that they were both heavily in debt.
T here have also been persistent and intriguing rumors regarding Tsuneo OkoLichi, a college friend of Kaneda's who was said to have supported him behind the scenes during the election. Twenty years ago, Okouchi was director of the Sendai Hospital Center, and it was learned later from an internal complaint filed at the hospital that he'd had some sort of dealings with the police during the incident. The reason for this was never revealed, but there were rumors that the bodies of two people who had died under suspicious circumstances were processed in the hospital's morgue as though they had
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been patients. Okouchi had clearly tak
en measures to conceal these activities from public scrutiny. There was, in addition, a magazine report that two of the doctors who had assisted in the disposition of the bodies committed suicide soon afterwards. Okouchi later became head of the Physicians Association but died recently of liver cancer.
If we give any credence to the conspiracy theories, then there is no doubt that these deaths form an interesting pattern. Ichitaro Sasaki, the assistant division chief in the Security Bureau who coordinated the search for Aoyagi at the time, has also died by now. He retired shortly after the incident and effectively disappeared. It is said that he opened a flower shop in a small town north of Sendai, and that over time he came to look even more like an aging Paul McCartney. There has been, of course, considerable speculation as to why he dropped out of public life and refused to speak about the case.
The most common explanation has to do with a fact that was learned only after the commotion had died down: that his son was in a serious car accident in Tokyo during the hunt for Aoyagi. Though the son survived, it was said that the event forced Sasaki to weigh his career against his family and that he chose the latter.
T here are those, however, who contend that Sasaki stumbled across some highly sensitive information in the course of the investigation. During those three days—or, strictly speaking, two, as the chase ended on the morning of the third—the Security Pods picked up information from every corner of the city. That data has never been divulged, but there is no doubt that an extraordinary number of j)hone and email messages were recorded and analyzed and nearly as many j)ictures were taken of the general public, implying that someone gave tacit approval for a massive invasion of privacy.
Normally, this kind ot infringement of civil rights would cause a strong backlash, but given the circumstances it is |)robably understandable that lew objections were raised. .Most peoj)le would have felt insulatetl, since the data ccjllected was ostensibly focused on Masaharu Aoyagi and those associated with him. But the rumors surrounding Sasaki's retirement point out that he had access to all the data, and there is s|)eculation that somewhere in this sea of information he uncovered a national secret of some kind. T his line of reasoning holds that it was consitlered unsafe lor him to rein.iin on tlie
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police force and that he was offered early retirement and a generous pension in exchange for his silence.
There are still others who say that the strain of those few days exhausted and broke him, forcing his retirement, or even that he had his face altered with plastic surgery and is still out there somewhere pursuing the truth about the assassination. According to the latter camp, the man running the flower shop was someone else again, who had undergone an operation of his own.
CTn the face of it, these theories seem utterly absurd, but my research revealed that they were fueled by rumors about a certain plastic surgeon who died ten years ago. He had originally done work for celebrities in Tokyo but had retreated to Sendai, supposedly due to suggestions that he was not properly licensed. The rumors stemmed from reports about something he said on his deathbed: apparently a photo of Ichitaro Sasaki had appeared on the TV—perhaps as part of a special on the tenth anniversary of Kaneda's death— and he is said to have murmured that he, too, had been involved in the incident. It was inferred from this that Sasaki had undergone plastic surgery, but a more likely explanation is that he was referring to work he had done on Rinka, the actress Aoyagi had rescued two years prior to the assassination.
Mamoru Kondo, a detective who worked on the investigation with Sasaki, also retired less than a year after the incident. According to an account in his diary, which was made public on the Web by his family after his death, Kondo had objected to a gag order and suppression of evidence concerning an illegal search that had been conducted on an associate of Aoyagi's, and he had clashed with his superiors in an attempt to ensure the safety of the man in question. For his trouble he had been forced out of his job. The authenticity of the diary has been questioned in many quarters, but one can't help wondering whether Kondo's intervention didn't save Aoyagi's friend from being permanently hushed up.
Finally, there was some discussion on the Internet about the fate of Detective Taro Matsumoto of the Miyagi Prefectural Police. It seems that he had been devoting his off-duty hours to a personal investigation of the Kaneda assassination, and that his interest in the affair had been sparked by a posting he had read on an Internet bulletin board during the incident that had been
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signed "Masaharu Aoyagi." Of course, any number of people claiming to be Aoyagi had popped up on the Net during those three days, but Matsumoto felt that a few of these messages could not be easily dismissed, and he pursued his investigation based on these online leads.
Whether due to his superior skills as an investigator or his superior imagination, Matsumoto had developed a pet theory that there had been another intended scapegoat for the crime, and that Aoyagi had only been pressed into service after the original candidate suddenly died of heart failure on the Sendai subway that morning. In other words, according to Matsumoto, the plot was so elaborate that it included several possible fall guys. Matsumoto died from his injuries in a taxicab accident ten years ago.
.At present, when so many voices that might have spoken about the incident have been stilled, we can only speculate as to the true facts and wonder what we might learn if Masaharu Aoyagi could come back to tell us what happened to him. 1 must confess that 1 paid a visit to his grave in preparation for writing this report, but needless to say, the dead do not give up their secrets.
Only one thing is certain: that no one now believes what so many of us did twenty years ago when the media stirred up such a frenzy and hounded .Masaharu Aoyagi as the murderer of Prime Minister Kaneda. But we will never know what Aoyagi thought and felt for those forty-eight hours of frantic flight.
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THE INCIDENT
Masaharu Aoyagi
At 11:00 A.M.; Masaharu Aoyagi found himself walking past a line of secondhand computer shops in the neighborhood to the east of Sendai Station. When he caught sight of a truck parked by the side of the road ahead, his expression relaxed into a smile.
"What are you grinning about?" His companion, Shingo Morita, was wearing an orange down jacket. He had been sensitive to the cold ever since their student days, and there was no doubt that the November wind had a bite to it. But if you brought out the down coat now, what would you wear in February when the cold really set in?
"1 used to see that guy when 1 was driving." As they approached, the man stacking boxes in the back looked up. Aoyagi glanced at his watch. "Right on time, as usual, Maezono," he said. "Some things never change."
"Been making this stop forever," Maezono nodded. "Same time, same place." His face was wrinkled, and Aoyagi knew he must be well into his fifties, but he looked ten years younger in his dark blue uniform—perhaps because he stood ramrod straight as he lifted the boxes. "No rest for the weary."
"Can't complain about that, can you?"
"Back when you were on TV all the time, 1 thought you'd take away all my customers," Maezono said, running his hand through his short, graying hair. His eyes were deep-set, like knots in a gnarled log. The boxes under the tarp on the back of his truck were neatly stacked. "But now I've got so much work, 1 even do evening deliveries." He sighed. "Have to hurry to catch the show 1 watch at nine."
"As regular with the TV as you are with the boxes!" Aoyagi laughed.
THE INCIDENT
"Guess you could say that/' Maezono grinned. "My run is out in the suburbs. I'll drop it off early and I should still make it home in time."
"Must-see TV," Aoyagi chuckled. "See you later," he added, sensing that Morita was getting impatient.
"You should try to be less conspicuous," Morita said as they walked away.
"Why? What do you mean?"
"I mean, you should be
less conspicuous."
"Is this the voice of the forest speaking?" Aoyagi laughed.
"It is indeed. A peaceful, lakeside forest."
When they had first met at college more than ten years earlier, Shingo Morita had explained that the character in his name—"mori" for "woods"— meant that he had a special affinity for this type of scenery, and that from time to time he could hear it "speaking" to him. He'd repeated the claim often, and when his friends teased him, asking what the forest was telling him, he told them with a straight face that it revealed the future. "I know what's going to happen," he used to boast.
"You're psychic?" some girl would ask him at a party—for it was always in a crowd that he made this claim.
"Well, I suppose you could say that," Morita would answer, puffing out his chest a bit.
"So what did you want to talk about today?" said Aoyagi, changing the subject. Morita had called a week earlier to ask if they could have lunch, saying he had something important to discuss. "It's important for you.” It seemed an odd thing to say after all this time.
"Does it have to do with what happened on the train?" Aoyagi had asked. T wo months earlier, while riding inbound on the Senseki Line, a woman had accused him of groping her, though he had never laid a hand on her. Goinci-dentally, it was then that he had also run into Morita for the first time since graduation.
"It dcK-s," Mcjrita said.
Ar)yagi had all tlie time in the world to meet an okl triend, living as he was (Jii his unemployment check. Nevertheless, he couldn't imagine what Mrjrita might have to say.