People Who Eat Darkness

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  * * *

  The trial hearings were held in courtrooms of various sizes, but all of them were strip-lit, windowless inner chambers filled with dead, thermostatically regulated air. Japan passed from sweaty summer to cold, arid winter, but in court, the temperature never varied: neither cool nor warm, neither dry nor humid. The rooms were rectangular, with the public seats marked off by a wooden barrier. On the other side, the defense lawyers and prosecutors faced one another at parallel desks; between them was the upright podium for witnesses and the accused. A court clerk and a grimacing stenographer sat at the back facing the public; behind and above them were the three judges in high-backed chairs that reared over them like black halos.

  The somnolence of the hearings, particularly after lunch, was often overwhelming. One of the judges, a plump, rather young man who sat on the chief judge’s right, spent much of the trial with his eyes closed: whether he was concentrating profoundly, or simply asleep, it was difficult to tell. Obara’s own lawyers had to poke awake one of their own number when he began snoring audibly one afternoon. In a British court, such an incident would be a cause for shame and reprimand. But here, the clerks snickered, the judges smiled indulgently, and it was immediately forgotten.

  Japan had abandoned jury trials during the Second World War. Since then, exclusive power to determine guilt or innocence, and to impose sentence, lay with a panel of three judges.* Unlike Britain, where they are appointed from the ranks of senior barristers, Japanese judges form a dedicated legal class of their own. A young man, fresh from law school (and almost all are men), enters the judiciary and might do nothing else throughout his career. To Western eyes, junior judges, with their soft, plump faces and pimples, looked incongruously young. Their authority was emphasized by long black robes; the occupants of the courtroom rose to their feet as they entered the chamber. Witnesses took a solemn oath before their testimony; lawyers and judges addressed one another politely and formally. But there was none of the dignified theatricality that one encounters in a British court, and little sense of the court as a place apart from the world around it.

  Cross-examinations were pedestrian and anticlimactic. Statements were read gabblingly; legal motions were dry and unimpassioned. No one ever lost his temper or raised his voice, or displayed any personal care about the outcome of the proceedings. There was no oratory, no grandstanding, no conflict, no drama, and little display of emotion beyond occasional mild irritation. Rather than a majestic legal inquiry, the trial had about it the air of a teachers’ staff meeting at a stuffy school.

  Month after month, the voices of the lawyers droned, and the stenographer’s fingers trembled over her keys. From time to time, I nodded off myself. But beneath the shroud of bureaucratic beige was a dreamlike suspense. It was as if a mosquito was buzzing somewhere, on the very threshold of human hearing; it was like the heightened reality before the breaking of a fever, or the chord of sensation—part sound, part vibration—that comes off an electrical pylon. It seemed to originate in Joji Obara himself.

  * * *

  Obara was transported to the monthly hearings from the Tokyo Detention Center, a twelve-story fortress in the suburb of Kosuge. His lawyers must have registered an objection, because after the first few hearings, he was never again seen shackled and bound by the heavy blue rope. He sat on the right-hand side of the court, with his defense team behind him and his two guards on either side.

  He had the dignified, put-upon air of a man in regrettably reduced circumstances, who was struggling nonetheless to keep up appearances. In court, he always wore an open-necked shirt and a suit of navy blue or charcoal gray, smart and expensive-looking but wrinkled as though too recently removed from storage and inadequately sponged. His hair was soft, cut to medium length, and similarly unkempt, as if brushed and patted in a hurry: over eight years I watched grayness creep inwards from his temples, as thinness spread more slowly outwards from the crown. He wore spectacles with dark frames and always held a small blue towel with which he mopped the sweat from his face, his hands, and his neck. The court was a public space where it was unnecessary to remove outer footwear, and everyone else kept on their shoes. Only Obara had on his feet a pair of flappy plastic slippers, a further precaution, I assumed, intended to impede any attempt at escape.

  The handful of snapshots of Obara were at least thirty years old, so for the Japanese media it was a matter of urgency to get an up-to-date picture out of the trial. Photography of any kind was banned in court, but professional artists, frowning and intent with their sketch pads and pastels, pushed their way busily to the seats in the front row.

  But Obara foiled them, as he had foiled every other attempt to capture his image. From the moment he entered the courtroom, he turned his face at a three-quarter angle away from the public gallery and towards the judge. The drawings in the newspapers the next morning showed the last, and least interesting, quarter: hair, a neck, the collar of a jacket, and the rear left-hand side of Obara’s jaw. Even under the scrutiny of the court, it was impossible to look at him full in the face.

  * * *

  Hearing by hearing, the prosecutors went through their case, filling out and corroborating the story they had told in the opening indictment.

  In January 2003, a doctor gave evidence on the poisonous effects of chloroform. In April, an expert on anesthesia discussed the rape videos and explained that the pattern of breathing displayed by the victims was clearly the result of being drugged. The caretaker of Blue Sea Aburatsubo, and the police inspector who had responded to her call, described Obara’s sudden appearance and strange behavior in the days after Lucie’s disappearance. A police chemist testified that the cement encasing Lucie’s head and the cement that Obara had purchased after her disappearance were of the same type. A woman named Yuka Takino, whose family owned a boat in the nearby marina, recounted a visit to the beach close to Blue Sea Aburatsubo two weeks after Lucie’s disappearance. She had become aware of a man staring at her and her two children as they played on the sand. “He was watching my son with sharp, rather angry eyes,” Mrs. Takino said. “I didn’t get the impression that he was looking at them because he was the type who liked children.”

  Her young son was playing on the rocks: He called out to his mother and asked her if he could go into the cave. “He started running [towards the cave],” Mrs. Takino told the court. “Then the man looked startled, and he looked at my son, and he looked at me. He kept looking at us, and I thought it was very strange. So I called to my son, ‘Come back here!’ And when he was close, I told him, ‘Don’t go into the cave.’”

  They packed up and left the beach, no more than mildly disconcerted. Seven months later, after the discovery of Lucie’s body, she had remembered this strange incident and realized what a little boy with a bucket and spade might have turned up in the cave. Asked if the man at the beach was the man sitting in the court, Mrs. Takino turned to her right, where Obara was sitting with his head tilted towards her, five or six feet away. “He looks like the man I saw, but when I saw him he looked angry,” she said. “Now he has a rather gentle smile on his face.”

  * * *

  The prosecutors were keenly aware of the weaknesses in their case, and they confronted them head on. During weeks of searching, the police had stripped out carpets, tatami mats, and plumbing from Obara’s properties, but they failed to find a speck of Lucie’s blood. It was necessary to show the court that a man could have cut a body into ten pieces and disposed of them without leaving a trace of his victim’s DNA. In May 2004, the police had attempted to do this by sawing up a dead pig inside a tent.

  This experiment, a bizarre and gory operation that verged on black farce, was described by the officer in charge, Chief Inspector Nobuyoshi Akamine. He had begun by assembling the same kind of tents, mats, and chain saw that Obara had bought during his shopping expedition three days after Lucie’s disappearance, and brought them to the courtyard of the forensic-medicine section of Tokyo University. Then he went to a
butcher and procured a 150-pound pig, bisected along the spine. The carcass, of course, had been hung and bled, so the inspector and his men mixed red food dye in a bucket, and one of Tokyo University’s professors of forensics painstakingly injected it into the corpse in simulation of fresh blood.

  Of all the beasts in the butcher’s shop, the chief inspector explained, the pig possessed bones and flesh closest to that of a human. The animal’s right half was kept frozen, while its left half was thawed. On Chief Inspector Akamine’s instructions, one of his officers lifted each half into the cramped tent and hacked it up with the chain saw. When the sawing was done, he splashed red food dye onto the tent’s fabric to test its impermeability.

  As it was described, the lawyers and judges consulted a little album of documents and images that recorded the procedure. I was sitting at the front of the courtroom; and by leaning forward, I could see photographs of the glistening cuts of wet pork. The prosecutors did not know with certainty whether Obara had performed the dismemberment inside the apartment or somewhere in the countryside, and whether or not he had frozen Lucie’s body. But when the pig experiment was done, Chief Inspector Akamine reported, not a trace of red fluid had escaped the tent.

  * * *

  Few journalists took any interest in the hearings once the pleas had been entered, but the public gallery was never less than half full, with an eccentric and marginal-looking crowd, distinct as members of a different tribe from the suited bureaucrats who strode the streets outside. One old man wore a brown trilby with a white flower in its band. Behind him, plump in their sailor suits, were two truanting schoolgirls. Once or twice, I identified someone with the gray, watery look of the Japanese homeless, the smartest and most presentable derelicts in the world. The most striking character was a man in his forties with a white-flecked beard, green-dyed hair, and a calf-length skirt, who continuously took notes in a school exercise book. At any one time, two or three people in the public gallery would be nodding off.

  One of the most regular presences in the court was a small, pixielike young woman, who also took assiduous notes. Her name was Yuki Takahashi, and she was a founder and member of the Kasumikko Club, a group of friends who used their spare time to attend trials of defendants accused of atrocious crimes and published their observations on an Internet blog. There were a number of such blogger groupies—the green-haired man in the skirt, who called himself the Mighty Aso, turned out to be another. Yuki, along with her blogger friends Miki-san and Poison Carrot, was one of the most meticulous observers of Joji Obara.

  “I like the Obara hearings very much,” she wrote. “The schedule is fixed in my memory in the same place as the birthdays of my family.”

  I may be the person who knows more about the Obara case [than anyone else]. If there was an Obara quiz, I would win the Cup (rather than that, I’d like to be the one who set the questions). During the hearings, I even memorized the numbers of the mobile phones that Obara used. Sometimes, I wonder if I am a stalker! I like Obara a lot, but, to confess it honestly for the first time, I like the prosecutors very much, particularly the younger one. He’s my type: cool. I do like the chief judge, of course. He’s got a slight country accent—he sounds trustworthy. The day of the hearing is the day when all my favorite people get together in the same room, and I can’t wait. The day before, the tension reaches a climax. Even the day after, the tension remains high.

  One of the effects of Japan’s astonishingly high conviction rate is that very, very few people want to be criminal defense lawyers. Why would they? Compared to commercial cases, such work is poorly paid and brings none of the compensations of glamour or social recognition. Japanese tend to regard criminal defenders suspiciously, as people who try to justify the actions of criminals—and, because almost everyone who comes to trial is convicted, there is a logic to this belief. Based on the prevailing rates, the average defense lawyer can expect to achieve an acquittal once every thirty-one years.

  Lawyers are among the class of Japanese addressed as sensei, a word that means “teacher” but is also used as a form of address for doctors, academics, and politicians. Like a patient or student, a defendant is not expected to question the wisdom of his defending sensei. From the beginning, Obara rejected this assumption. He treated his defense as a war in which he was the general; he demanded that his lawyers accept his authority and their subordinate part in the struggle. His first legal team resigned en masse in October 2001 because they had “become unable to maintain good relations with the defendant,” one of them was quoted as saying. The trial was put on hold for a year while the court cast around for lawyers willing to represent him. One of them remembered being told by Obara, “I don’t want a reduced sentence, I want acquittal. As the defendant I’m denying all the charges. You are my lawyers, you must fight the prosecutors.” In the West, this would have been no more than common sense, but to many Japanese lawyers, such determination was unprecedented. It was as difficult to accept as a patient who demanded to supervise his own surgery. It was another indication of Obara’s singularity, and none of his lawyers had encountered anyone like him before.

  They visited him in the Tokyo Detention Center. As a man technically innocent until proven guilty, he had greater liberty there than in prison. He could send and receive letters, and meet a visitor each weekday. Once a month at first, but with decreasing frequency, his old mother, Kimiko, made the journey by bullet train from Osaka. Otherwise, it was just the lawyers, at least one of whom saw him every day. He kept a distance from his guards, and few of the other inmates of the Tokyo Detention Center lingered for more than a few months. He would spend nine years in this small locked room with a bed and a washbasin; his only significant interactions were with his lawyers; his only occupation was his defense.

  Obara’s cell was his war room. The paperwork was stacked in columns from the floor to head height: letters, faxes, law books, sheaves of evidence. Apart from the eight rapes and the two rape-killings, Obara, like many former beneficiaries of the bubble economy, was being sued by his creditors. In the eighteen months before his arrest, the courts had sequestered several of his properties; in 2004, he was declared bankrupt, with liabilities of ¥23.8 billion. Separate teams of lawyers worked on the various cases; no one but Obara knew all their names, or even how many they were. At any one time, he had at least ten lawyers on retainer; over the course of his trial he probably went through dozens.

  For a lawyer used to compliant and grateful clients, representing Obara could be a harrowing experience. It wasn’t that he was rude or aggressive; the shock was that he expected to be in charge. “He’s like a film director shooting a script written according to his own view of reality,” one of them said. “He’s clever and very suspicious. He doesn’t trust anyone, including his lawyers. It’s difficult to deal with him.” In cross-examining witnesses, his lawyers literally followed a script of questions, and their discomfort was obvious. “It must be miserable for the lawyers,” wrote Yuki Takahashi, the blogger groupie. “I watch them in court, working away with the eyes of dead fish because of all the orders he’s giving them, all those questions completely irrelevant to the case. I can laugh at it, but it must be bad for them.”

  He had an immaculate recall of dates and details, and was intolerant of any lawyer who became muddled or confused. He was full of ideas, but they were often inconsistent or incoherent. “He’s clever enough to devise many strategies, but he can’t work out which is the best,” one of the lawyers said. “So he tries to combine them all together, in a way, and I feel that it will be in vain.”

  The problem was simple: How to answer the library of evidence meticulously assembled against him? On the rape charges, the argument was obvious: the sexual acts that took place and were recorded on video may have been unusual, but they were consensual. As Yasuo Shionoya, probably Obara’s most successful lawyer, told me, “Ladies who work as hostesses or the like—I believe that if they go to a man’s apartment, they are giving their consent to se
x. That’s what Obara thought. He accepts that he caused injury by using drugs, he’ll accept the charge of causing injury. But he cannot understand [the charge of] rape. That’s his point. Logically, I think he may be right.”

  On the charge of raping, drugging, and killing Carita Ridgway, the defense was more complicated and depended on doubts about the cause of her death. Once again, Obara insisted that the sexual relationship had been consensual and that the video of him and the unconscious Carita had been made during an earlier encounter several weeks before her sudden illness. At the time, none of the doctors had concluded that the collapse of her liver had been caused by drugs. She might have been killed by inappropriate treatment after this misdiagnosis, or by a painkilling injection given to Carita by another doctor before Obara had taken her to the hospital.

  But what about Lucie? To some of his legal team, this was the most straightforward case of all, because there was no direct proof. “The important thing was that Obara and Lucie were alone—no one else knew what happened,” one of them said. “We don’t need to prove that Obara didn’t commit a crime. We just have to show that the prosecutors can’t prove it and point out how weak the evidence is. No video. Cause of death unknown. How could he carry such a large dead body out of the Zushi apartment, on his own, in midsummer, without anyone seeing him? How could he carry it into his car and cut it up in his apartment and bury it all on his own? All we had to do was emphasise all these weak points.”

  The conventional strategy, in other words, was not to defend the accused but to undermine the story told by the prosecution. But this was not enough for Obara. He wanted to tell a story of his own; he needed to fill the man-shaped hole.