How did Obara react to all this? He was “surprised,” according to the book commissioned by his lawyer. He contacted Mr. A, who told him that Lucie was “traveling with a man.”
A and Obara were supposed to meet again on July 15 to make Irene’s grave. But again A called to cancel. When Obara asked him once more about Lucie, he was told, “She’s having fun taking drugs at the home of my acquaintance.” When Obara mentioned all the fuss about her disappearance, A said, “It’s ridiculous—she’s just doing what she wants to do.”
It was an extraordinary story. It was difficult enough to believe that Lucie was a drug addict; it was harder still to accept Obara’s failure to go straight to the police. Who was Sato, the errand boy of the errand boy? And who was the “rich man” with whom Lucie had allegedly been enjoying her debauch? One man was in a position to answer these questions. So who—and where—was Mr. A?
* * *
His name was Satoru Katsuta, known to his acquaintance by the diminutive “Kacchan.” In 2001, he had been living in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka. He was about five six, with long hair and a mustache. He had been born in the southern island of Kyushu in 1953, a year after Joji Obara. In his twenties, for reasons unspecified, he had once attempted to disembowel himself in the ritual suicide known as seppuku or hara-kiri. He had survived but had contracted hepatitis C from the transfusions of blood used to save his life.
The Tokyo District Court learned all of this in December 2005 from an old man named Issei Mizuta, who was called as a witness for the defense. Mizuta knew Katsuta and employed him regularly as a driver and odd-job man. One of Katsuta’s various occupations, Mizuta confirmed, had been as a dealer in crystal methamphetamine, or shabu, which he sold around Shinjuku Station. One day, early in December 2001, the two men were sitting in the car together when Kacchan said, “I’m very anxious. I need to ask your advice.” He said that it was to do with Lucie Blackman and the man on trial for killing her, Joji Obara.
Kacchan said that one day the previous summer he had been called by Obara and asked to pick up a foreign hostess and drive her to Tokyo. The woman had been Lucie. She was already high on drugs, and when Kacchan arrived to take her home she begged him for more. He gave her shabu, not just once, but repeatedly. Under oath, Mizuta stated, “Katsuta told me, ‘Lucie took too many drugs and died.’ He said that she died in front of him … He said that he took her body somewhere, but he didn’t say where … He didn’t tell Obara about Lucie’s death.”
Mizuta continued, “I was the only one he told about Lucie’s death and the abandonment of the corpse—no one else knew.” After Katsuta told him the story, Mizuta remembered something else: the previous summer, at the time when Lucie’s disappearance was being most intensely reported by the newspapers and television, Katsuta had appeared “restless and unsettled,” and all his hair had fallen out. “I told him that I wanted to hear about it in more detail,” Mizuta told the court. “I was planning to ask him about it at our New Year party. I was thinking about whether or not I should take him to the police, after he told me the story in detail.” But he lost the chance.
A few days later, Katsuta went into the hospital, suffering from advanced liver cancer. Two weeks later, in a state of terminal illness, he called Mizuta, crying and shouting deliriously, “I have set Lucie on fire! Lucie is burning!”
The story told by Mizuta exactly corroborated what Obara had previously said in court. But there were two difficulties. The first was that Katsuta, who had been so tormented by guilt for causing Lucie’s death, was not around to attest to the truth of the story. He had died a few days after Mizuta’s last, anguished conversation with him.
The second problem was Mizuta himself. As he readily stated when he identified himself after taking the oath, he was an oyabun, the boss of a gang that formed part of the notorious Sumiyoshi-kai yakuza syndicate. Obara’s star witness, in other words, the man on whose testimony his hopes of acquittal rested, was a self-confessed leader of the Japanese mafia.
* * *
“It doesn’t fill us with dread,” Tim Blackman said, when I asked what it felt like to be back in Japan. “I don’t know why it doesn’t, but it doesn’t. It’s the same process that takes people back to a grave even though they know it will make them unhappy. But it’s part of the process, it’s part of keeping in touch. Would we just not want to have anything to do with it? The answer is no. We do it because we have to do it and we want to do it.”
Tim operated his business out of a two-story wooden office in the garden of his home in the Isle of Wight, where I visited him repeatedly over the years. Since 2000, his work as a property developer had been pushed to one side. “I’ve spent months on matters relating to Lucie’s death,” he said. “Something crops up almost on a daily basis. An entire section of the office is given over to it—filing cabinets, files, the Lucie Blackman Trust. It’s like a little industry. It occupies fifty percent of my life.” Tim had hoped that with the trial under way, it would become simpler and easier to keep abreast of events in Tokyo. But the opposite was true. The proceedings were so slow and dense that they were difficult enough to follow inside the courtroom in Tokyo. From Tim’s garden shed, they were hopelessly remote and opaque.
A few days after each hearing, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police would forward a brief, baffling summary of the proceedings, which went into Tim’s extensive filing system. “The amount of information we get is minute,” Tim said. “We read very carefully the few words we get. Obara making a statement—those are huge words for us. Whatever mind-set he’s developed, we very much believe that our presence there—Sophie’s presence, my presence—ups the stakes for him. It’s one thing sitting in a cell, it’s quite another to stand up in front of the sister and father. If he’s not being straight, he’ll be under pressure.”
It was impossible to tell whether this was true and whether Joji Obara did indeed feel the weight of Tim and Sophie’s presence in court. But as he stood to take the witness stand at the next trial hearing, he did something that he had never done before. He turned towards the public gallery, and to Tim and Sophie, and gave an expressionless bob of the head—more than a nod, less than a bow, not an expression of courtesy but an acknowledgment. Sophie passed the long hours in the hearing by executing a sketch of him in ink, which captured this unexpected moment of noncommittal intensity.
Later, in one of many long conversations with Tim, I asked him about Obara and what it was like to see him face-to-face. Tim paused, which he rarely did in conversation. He said, “It’s been quite a revelation to me, and whether or not I’m a bit odd—well, I could easily be a bit odd, I’m prepared to admit that.” There was another pause, and Tim sighed. “The emotion I get is … I see somebody who is the same age as me, and who has by their actions produced the most terrible, terrible trouble for themselves, and done something so appalling to someone else’s life. And in a very strange way, there’s a degree of … pathos that tends to neutralize what might be more natural anger.”
I asked, with more surprise in my voice than I intended, “Do you feel sorry for him?” and Tim said, “I do feel sorry for him. I do. I do feel sorry for him.”
Tim and Obara had been born just eleven months apart. They both owned boats; both of them made their money in property. Nothing better caught the complexity of Tim’s own character, his stubborn unorthodoxy, which to me was so likable and admirable but which to many people was repellent. Almost on principle, he refused the obvious point of view and the temptations of conventional morality. The high ground was his for the taking, but instead of marching ahead to claim it, he dawdled and skirted around it, finding shades of pathos and ambiguity where others could see only black and white. Onlookers were not merely puzzled by this—they were appalled.
If Lucie Blackman’s killing was not a straightforward example of good against evil, then what was? To be told by none other than her father that there was complexity here, to see Tim striving to be fair and sympathetic to his own daughte
r’s killer, undermined people’s certainty in their own sense of right. They took Tim’s lack of orthodoxy as an affront to their own. They identified him as a transgressor, almost a blasphemer, against acceptable ways of feeling.
21. SMYK
In its evasive cunning and squirming, acrobatic dexterity, Obara’s defense would have been extraordinary in any courtroom. In Japan, where it was rare for the defense to challenge the prosecution seriously, it was unprecedented. At times, it was bafflingly foggy and vague; at others, it was baroque in its detail and ornamentation. It was also an obvious farrago of distortions, omissions, and libels on the dead. Plenty of Obara’s own lawyers did not believe that it would do him any good. “The story told by Mizuta about Kacchan has no significance as evidence,” one of them told me. “It’s hearsay, apart from the fact that both of them are gangsters. The judge kept asking, ‘Why didn’t you mention this earlier?’ which shows he didn’t trust what he heard. Why didn’t Obara say from the beginning that Lucie was on drugs? In the first four years of his defense he made no mention of it at all. When he started talking about her like that, I found it a little offensive. Why start shaming the dead?”
Like men plugging the leaks in a dissolving dam, Obara’s lawyers attempted to shore up his defense by putting to him some of the obvious questions hanging over his story.
Why didn’t Obara go to the police immediately after it was announced that Lucie had gone missing?
Because he had accepted three Ecstasy pills from Lucie and was afraid of being prosecuted for using illegal drugs.
What about the woman who had heard Obara say over the telephone that he had “done something terrible, but I can’t tell anyone about it”?
He was simply referring to the traffic accident that he had been involved in.
What was Obara doing with all those bottles of chloroform?
They did not, in fact, contain any chloroform. Obara had emptied out the original contents and replaced them with vodka, and it was this which he held below the noses of the girls in the videos.
Several of the exchanges were comic in their self-serving artificiality.
LAWYER: You donated a lot of money to charity. Will you tell us about it?
OBARA: I have donated money since I was a high-school student. I did not use my real name, though. In total, I must have spent several tens of millions of yen on donations. I had a special sympathy for children. UNICEF was one of the organisations I sent money to.
LAWYER: On 16 April 1991, you met the emperor and the empress at the Hotel Okura. Is this true?
OBARA: Indeed, yes. We met at a charity event there. They invited me to become involved in several charity events.
LAWYER: Will you tell us about your childhood? Is it true that you had an IQ of 200?
OBARA: Yes … etc., etc.
Then, in March 2006, it was the prosecution’s turn to cross-examine Obara. Face-to-face with the prosecutor, his self-assurance deserted him.
The prosecutor, whose name was Mizoguchi, began by asking about the various letters that had been received by the police, including two signed in Lucie’s name, the drafts of which had been found in Obara’s properties.
“Some letters were written by me, after messages from Katsuta,” Obara admitted.
“What kind of messages?” Prosecutor Mizoguchi asked.
“The messages were messages,” Obara answered. “I can’t say more than that.”
“Did Katsuta explain why you had to write a letter to Azabu Police Station?” the prosecutor asked.
Obara said, “There was a message about it.”
“What was the purpose of the letter?”
“May I refrain from commenting?”
“You mean you don’t want to answer the question?”
“I did it because there was a message.”
“You can’t explain in any more detail?”
“At the moment I can’t.”
As always, Obara held in his hands the small blue hand towel that he used to dab at his perspiring face and neck. Even viewed from behind, his unease had become obvious in his physical stance. His shoulders were slumping, and his head was angled towards the floor. Prosecutor Mizoguchi continued. “On July third, after leaving Zushi Marina at midnight and coming back to Moto-Akasaka Towers, what did you do that morning?”
Obara gave no answer.
“Do you remember doing a search on the Internet using your home computer?”
“No,” Obara said. “I don’t remember.”
“You have a computer at home, don’t you?”
“Yes, I have one at Moto-Akasaka Towers.”
“In the report on the use of that computer on July third, there is mention of an Internet search done on that day from around eight fifty. Do you remember that?”
Mizoguchi was holding up a sheaf of papers, densely printed. It was impossible to see Obara’s reaction, but evidently he registered surprise. “Let me show this to the defendant,” the prosecutor said, “as he seems not to have seen it before.”
Obara took the document.
“This is a list of searches performed using that personal computer from the middle of June,” Mizoguchi explained. “On July third, two thousand, between eight forty-four and eight fifty-seven, six searches were performed. Looking at those searches now, do you remember anything?”
Obara paused. The sentences that followed were fragmentary and difficult to follow, even in Japanese. “From around late midnight of the first, taken drugs,” he began falteringly (it was unclear who was supposed to have taken what drugs). “On July second with Lucie, we were talking about a Japanese woman who’d gone missing in Britain. She had been kidnapped and was still missing. Lucie said it was a well-known story, and I suggested that she might already have been killed then, although I didn’t know the story. That story was in my mind. I mean that kidnap case in Britain.”
The prosecutor listed the Internet searches that Obara had made that morning. The first was for Datura metel, the herb known as devil’s trumpet, which causes hallucinations and even death if eaten. The second was for Nachi Harbor, a place from which elderly Buddhist monks approaching the end of their lives would set sail on a final, fatal journey. The third was “how to get chloroform.” The fourth was “synthesis of GHB,” the date-rape drug. “Why were you looking at such sites?” asked Mizoguchi.
“You ask why—it’s like asking why someone watches crime films,” Obara said. “You don’t watch a crime film to commit a crime. You watch it just to reduce your stress. Actually, you’ll see that I looked at various sites of this kind.”
Mizoguchi pointed out the final searches that Obara had made that morning. “You accessed other websites about the process of producing sulphuric acid, and how to buy sulphuric acid. You were searching with a view to making a purchase, weren’t you?”
Obara made no response.
The prosecutor flicked through the document and pointed to another page. “This one here says ‘a possible method is to use a high-temperature furnace to burn even the bones to ashes, but this is too difficult.’ And also, ‘one way to melt down even bones is by immersing the bones in concentrated sulphuric acid.’ This is about disposing of a dead body, isn’t it?”
“I [also] looked up pages like that in June,” Obara said. “It wasn’t from the motive that Prosecutor Mizoguchi suggests.”
“Then why did you look at such sites again on that day?”
“It’s just because, as I told you, I chatted with Lucie about the kidnap case in London.”*
“Do you remember those two methods [incineration and dissolution in acid] being described as ‘too difficult’?”
“I don’t remember.”
This was a rare thing in a Japanese court: a psychological contest, a struggle of wits between accuser and accused. Obara dabbed at his perspiration. How his heart must have turned over in his chest when Mizoguchi presented the next piece of evidence, a heavy folder containing yellowing pages.
This
was where Obara had recorded his sexual adventures, the logbook of his “play.” Having quoted from Lucie’s diary, Obara was now being confronted with his own.
“Here is a book in which you made notes, from around 1970,” the prosecutor said.
Obara had no difficulty remembering this document. He said, “I wrote about my relationships with girls five years after they actually happened. Waiting five years made the stories more interesting. So I wrote it after five years had passed, and made the stories more pornographic.”
“So the stories written here are fiction?”
“Not all of them are. The girls mentioned exist, but the stories are fables.”
The log of sexual encounters was numbered and in some cases dated, from 1970 to 1995, from 1 to 209. “Take a look at number sixty-three, line three,” Mizoguchi asked Obara. “What do you mean by SMYK?”
“This is just something I wrote to make it more interesting, five years later.”
“What does it mean?”
A pause, then: “I won’t answer that.”
“Number four—‘I gave her sleeping drugs.’ Number twenty-one—‘Today, I gave her sleeping drugs.’”
The Japanese word for sleeping drug is suiminyaku.
“That is what you wrote,” the prosecutor said. “Does SMYK mean sui min ya ku?”
“I don’t want to answer that.”
“Number one hundred forty—‘Gave too much SMY and CHM. I was very shaken up.’ What is the meaning of this CHM?”
“I forget.”
“In number one hundred fifty, you write about ‘CRORO.’ What does this mean?”
“I don’t want to answer that.”
“It means chloroform [in Japanese: kurorohorumu, pronounced “crororo-hormu”], doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
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