People Who Eat Darkness

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  The cab I caught from the station was owned by Kokusai Takushii—International Taxis, the firm, still owned by Kimiko, on which the family fortune had been built. I went to the plot of land where Obara had planned to build his bubble tower and found it occupied by an empty multistory car park. I found the home where the family had first lived, a shabby house on an alley off a cheap shopping street. It too was deserted; around the corner, one of the family pachinko parlors was shuttered and dark. From there I went to the rich residential district of Kitabatake, where houses were still built in the traditional style, with high walls of clay-covered brick and heavy front gateways roofed in tiles. In front of one of these was a plate bearing the name of Obara’s mother. I pressed the button on the intercom, and after a long wait, the voice of an elderly lady answered.

  “Is that Mrs. Kim?”

  “She’s not here,” the voice said faintly.

  “You’re not Mrs. Kim?”

  “I’m the housekeeper.”

  “When will Mrs. Kim be back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I was fairly sure that this was Mrs. Kim.

  As I walked away, a man came out of the next-door gate. He was about fifty years old, wore a crumpled white shirt untucked over black trousers, and carried two plastic bags stuffed with rubbish or dirty laundry. He walked at frantic speed, his head tilted forward. I knew that this must be Eisho Kin.

  “Mr. Kin!” I called out as I trotted to catch him up. “Mr. Kin, may I speak to you?” He paused and turned as I introduced myself, and with the introduction he became immediately enraged. I was used to situations where my presence as a reporter was not welcomed, but Eisho Kin was one of the angriest people I had ever met. There were no preliminaries to his outburst, no buildup of irritation. As soon as I had handed him my business card and identified myself, he simply exploded with fury.

  “I am a publisher!” he snarled, apropos of nothing in particular. “You should read my books!”

  “Well, Mr. Kin, I read your story, about the Korean man and the deaf boys,” I said. “I was interested by it. Could I talk to you sometime?”

  “I haven’t seen my brother for thirty years,” he said. “If you ever come back here, I will take certain measures. I don’t want you to come any closer to me.” Mr. Kin stopped, and I stopped too. But he kept talking, placing his bags on the pavement and jabbing his finger at me with rolling eyes.

  “If these girls come to a foreign country and follow a guy, a guy who isn’t good-looking, to his apartment—what do you really think about that? Why would she do that?”

  “Well, I don’t know, Mr. Kin. If you mean Lucie Blackman, she thought that Mr. Obara was going to give her a present.”

  “You are stupid!” he said, and he was pacing ahead again with his bags, looking back over his shoulder at me as I tried to keep up. “It’s absurd. You must have bigger issues to pick up than this minor thing. What about global warming?”

  “Well, I write about various issues—”

  “How many times have you seen in Thailand a beautiful girl with some ugly guy?”

  “Quite often, I sup—”

  “It’s a waste of time.”

  “I’m sorry if—”

  “Are you doing this for money?”

  “It’s my job, if that’s what you mean. I—”

  “My father was in prison for two and a half years,” he said in English. He had stopped walking again and put down his bags. “He was resistance, fighting the Japanese. But the only thing I can blame him is, he has no time to take care of the family. But he always said the importance of education.”

  I nodded in a way that I hoped would communicate empathy and understanding.

  “I don’t go abroad, but I speak Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English.”

  I kept nodding.

  “I’m not rich,” he said. “The Japanese media say that my brother is the property tycoon of eastern Japan. Such stupid…” He waved his hand in disgust.

  “Don’t come here again,” he said. “Never come back. Never come close to me. If you come back, I’ll take certain measures.”

  “Mr. Kin, I don’t wish to bother you, I just have a few…”

  He was stamping away down the street with his rubbish or laundry, still muttering and shaking his head as he went.

  * * *

  In March 2007, a month before the verdict in the Tokyo District Court, a twenty-two-year-old British woman named Lindsay Hawker was murdered in Tokyo’s eastern suburbs. She was a teacher of English. One Sunday, she went to the apartment of a twenty-eight-year-old man named Tatsuya Ichihashi after giving him a conversation lesson and never returned home. When the police called there the following day, Ichihashi fled from them in his stockinged feet. The officers found Lindsay buried in a soil-filled bathtub. She had been beaten, raped, and throttled.

  Her father, Bill Hawker, a driving instructor from the Midlands, flew out to Japan to identify her body and bring it home. Like Tim Blackman before him, he gave a press conference, at a hotel close to Narita Airport. The circumstances were different, of course: unlike Lucie, Lindsay’s fate was immediately known, and the only mystery was the whereabouts of her killer. But in Bill Hawker I recognized the model of the grieving parent, the role in which circumstances had cast Tim Blackman, and that he had always refused to play.

  Bill Hawker was a man possessed by pain, quite incapable of calculation or control. Grief for his daughter overwhelmed anger at her killer. It was hard to look at him. It seemed shameful that he should be required to weep and choke before strangers, and heartless to ask questions. We asked them anyway, and the camera flashes illuminated the twisted mask of his face. Bill Hawker was everything that Tim had not been, and everything the world expected of a man in his situation: broken, helpless, turned inside out by loss.

  Tatsuya Ichihashi, meanwhile, had vanished in his socks: it would be thirty-two months before the police caught up with him. It turned out that he had a history of approaching foreign women and had followed Lindsay home one evening after encountering her on a station platform. The nationality of the victim and the method of disposing of the body made it an extraordinary and freakish crime, and yet, for many people, there was something naggingly appropriate about the fact that this murder had taken place in Tokyo.

  How many times foreigners—in Japan and in Britain—commented on “how Japanese” Lindsay Hawker’s death was, without ever being able to say exactly why. The case spoke to unarticulated but deep-seated stereotypes. A jumble of images and ideas were called to mind, involving stalkers, repressed and perverted sexuality, pornographic comic books, and notions about the way Japanese men regarded Western women. It was as if, far from being an appalling aberration, the death of Lindsay Hawker was an accident waiting to happen. Japanese too had an anxious sense of this, especially since Bill Hawker’s pronouncement at the press conference that the murder of his daughter had “brought shame on your country.” That weekend, Japanese television nervously sent a film crew onto the streets of London to ask passersby whether Lindsay’s death had sullied their image of Japan.

  The sense of déjà vu, of course, was a result of Lucie’s case, and as the years passed, people became so confused between the British girl buried in the cave and the British girl in the bathtub that they came to seem like a single incident. But apart from the country where they occurred, the nationality and youth of the victims were all that the crimes had in common. Two women had been killed, seven years apart—that was all. And yet for many people the compulsion to draw conclusions from their deaths, about Japan and Japanese people as a whole, was irresistible.

  In the media, much of this generalization was concerned with Japanese sexuality and particularly the imagined tastes of Japanese men. The chikan, gropers who operated on crowded trains, were cited, as were Japan’s “infamously” pornographic manga comics, with their representations of wide-eyed foreign-looking beauties vigorously violated by frowning salarymen. Former gaijin English t
eachers and hostesses were wheeled out by the newspapers to tell “horrifying” stories of Japanese stalkers. “What is the fascination that Western women seem to hold for Japanese men?” asked one tabloid reporter, who found his answers on a pub crawl through Roppongi.

  “They look down upon us, yet at the same time they look up to us, if that makes sense,” one 24-year-old language teacher from Liverpool told me as she drank with friends in a bar at the start of the weekend.

  “It makes it difficult for us to really understand them. I’ve been trying to translate their behaviour for the entire year that I’ve been here and I still don’t know how to read them.” While some British women described the attitude of the men they encounter here as strange, uncomfortable and unpredictable, others talked of the awe and mystique Western women hold for the Japanese male.

  Taller, more independent and liberated than their female Japanese counterparts, they are regarded with a curious combination of attraction, fear and disapproval … “They view the more beautiful Western women, particularly the taller ones, as goddesses,” says a British woman working for a Tokyo stockbroking firm who was with friends in Roppongi’s Hub Bar last night … “The Japanese are so very different to us that I wonder sometimes if we will ever really understand them.”

  The implication of all this was spelled out in the story’s headline: “Japanese Men, Smoky Bars and the Obsession with Beautiful Western Girls That Cost Lindsay Her Life.”

  Japan has a population more than double that of Britain, but in 2005 it recorded 2.56 million crimes, fewer than half the 5.6 million reported in England and Wales. Most remarkably, only 3.5 percent of these were crimes of violence, compared to 21 percent in Britain. How many young British women had been murdered in New York, Johannesburg, or Moscow in the years separating the deaths of Lucie Blackman and Lindsay Hawker? Nobody was interested in finding out. By the standards of any comparably developed Western nation, Tokyo is a fantastically safe place to live: break-ins are rare, car theft is virtually unknown, and women can walk the streets alone, without anxiety, at all times of the day and night. One of the reasons why Japan’s police frequently appeared so bumbling was that they had so little practice fighting real crime.

  The notion that Japanese men are “obsessed” with Western women is a racist cliché: cocky, skirt-chasing foreign men with an appetite for Japanese girls are far more in evidence than the famous gropers. Japanese pornography and manga are unique in their style, but the idea that the Japanese masturbators are greater consumers of porn than their counterparts in the West is contradicted by all the facts. And anyone who believes that this is a sexually repressed country has only to spend a Friday night among the Roppongi girls, who feed on foreign men with equal enthusiasm and appetite.

  What makes Japan “so very different”? Not merely the characters on the signs and the faces of the people. There is something far deeper, a fugitive quality, difficult to put into words, the source of so much of the pleasure, as well as the frustration, of the life of the gaijin: a drastic unfamiliarity about the atmosphere of the streets, gesture of individuals, and the emotion of the crowd. An intense and thrilling energy drives Tokyo, but it is narrowly channeled by constraints of convention and conformity. The closest most people come to identifying this is to talk of Japanese “restraint” and “politeness,” and it greatly complicates the business of reading people and understanding situations.

  Japanese men rarely make the overt displays of aggressive masculinity that Westerners deploy to impress or intimidate. They seldom preen or strut; almost all of the time, they are the opposite of menacing and sinister. To newcomers like Lindsay or Lucie, with no command of Japanese, they appeared “sweet,” “shy,” often “boring.” In fifteen years, I have seen only two fistfights in Japan. Each one exploded out of nowhere, with no preliminary shouting or goading or facing off, and came to an end with equal abruptness.

  The effect of this, for many foreigners, is to disable instincts of caution and suspicion that guide and protect them at home. This is what united Lindsay Hawker with Lucie Blackman, conventional, “respectable” Englishwomen who would not have contemplated going to the apartment of a strange British man or working as a hostess in a London nightclub. Japan felt safe; Japan was safe; and under its enchantment they made decisions that they would never have made anywhere else.

  Why did Lucie go to the apartment in Zushi with Joji Obara? Even those closest to her wondered whether she had not been foolish. “To go off with a man like that is just silly,” her brother, Rupert, said. “I’ve always thought it was a very avoidable situation. If I try to imagine myself in her shoes, there’s always a point along that journey where I would have said, ‘Enough’s enough. I’m not coming inside.’” But to Lucie herself, the events of that day would have flowed quite naturally. It was part of her assailant’s cunning, perhaps, to avoid ever confronting her with a decision that aroused doubt or caution.

  Meeting men in her own time was a hostess’s job, and Lucie, struggling to meet her dōhan quota, close to being sacked, needed regular customers more than most. Then there was the promise of the mobile phone, which would have brought ease and convenience to her work, her friendships, and, especially, to her new love affair. About Obara himself, there was nothing obviously threatening. With his good English and his visible wealth, he was distinctly more desirable than many of Casablanca’s clientele. And the original arrangement had been for nothing more than lunch, after all. It was Obara who had arrived so late and who proposed, out of nowhere, a journey to that homely, unmenacing, and comfortingly British-sounding place—“the seaside.”

  Lucie would have had little sense of how far, or in which direction, the seaside lay. By the time they reached it, after an uneventful drive, it was too late to worry about. Obara made no attempt to rush her into the apartment—first came the photographs by the sea and then, perhaps, the reasonable suggestion that, since it was so late, they might order in food rather than going to a restaurant. Once inside the apartment, the promised mobile phone was quickly handed over and activated. No one knew what happened next. The court made no detailed finding, and Joji Obara was acquitted of causing Lucie’s death. But, after such a day with such a man, would it have seemed incautious or unusual to have accepted a glass of champagne, to have raised a toast, and to have drunk?

  Many young women would have done the same thing in similar circumstances. Many more will in the future, and only the smallest fraction of them will ever come to harm. This, I began to think, was the sad and mundane truth about the death of Lucie Blackman: not that she was rash or idiotic, but that—in a safe, yet complex, society—she was very, very unlucky.

  * * *

  I put this once to Tim Blackman, and he immediately disagreed. “I don’t think Lucie was unlucky,” he said. “She was preyed upon by someone, someone who should not have been at large. Not unlucky. It was the failure of society to control someone who should not have been free. She was the victim of a failure of law and order.”

  Superintendent Udo, and the handful of other officers of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police who agreed to talk to me, were sincere, committed men who worked night and day in the hunt for Lucie’s killer. Unfortunately, they served an institution that was, and is, arrogant, complacent, and frequently incompetent. The inadequacy of its police force is one of the mysterious taboos of Japanese society, a subject that the media and politicians strain to avoid confronting, or even acknowledging.*

  At the local level, as directors of traffic, helpers of confused old ladies, and chastisers of the drunk and disorderly, they are outstanding. In cases of more serious crime, they are competent at wringing confessions out of conventional Japanese criminals. But against almost any out-of-the-ordinary crime, they are lamentably ill equipped—sclerotic, unimaginative, prejudiced, and procedure-bound, a liability to a modern nation. Their performance, in the Lucie Blackman case and many others, suggests that the true reason for Japan’s lack of crime lies not with its guardians bu
t with its people, who are law-abiding, mutually respectful, and nonviolent not because of but despite the performance of the Japanese police.

  Allowances must be made, of course, for the complications brought to the case by the victim’s foreign nationality. The Japanese family of a daughter missing in Britain would have surely faced many of the same frustrations the Blackmans endured. But the true scandal was not the investigation itself, which was no more than routinely shoddy, with its slow start, the patchy tailing of Obara, the failure to spot the body in the cave. The most serious failure of the police was in not identifying and bringing Obara to justice years before. Katie Vickers, for one, had reported him in 1997; she was ignored. How many others, who have never told their stories publicly, experienced similar treatment? The greatest disgrace had been another five years before that, when the police dismissed the suspicions of Carita Ridgway’s family about “Nishida,” the man who brought their dying daughter to hospital. The failure was one of imagination, an institutional inability to think other than in clichés. People were types, and types were to be relied upon. The young hostess who went to a customer’s place and then claimed rape must be trying it on; the respectable chap who talked of a bad oyster and food poisoning was to be believed. Against Obara, the Japanese police offered no protection whatsoever; he slipped freely in and out of the coarse mesh of their net. Lucie Blackman had been thirteen years old when Carita died: it might have ended there and then. “If the police had located Obara at that time, all they would have had to do was search his home, and they would have uncovered his decades-long crime spree,” the Ridgways wrote in a statement on the eve of the verdict. “Obara spent thirty years as a serial rapist, drugging his victims. If the police had acted in 1992, as we had asked, Lucie Blackman would still be alive and many other girls, both Japanese and Western, would not have been drugged and raped.”