People Who Eat Darkness
Page 42
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.
The website of the Lucie Blackman Trust is at www.lucieblackmantrust.org.
Jane Steare supports the Hospice in the Weald: www.hospiceintheweald.org.uk.
ALSO BY RICHARD LLOYD PARRY
In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos
PRAISE FOR People Who Eat Darkness
“An extraordinary true crime book that sheds light on one of the most horrific kill
ings of the last decade. Difficult to put down … impossible to forget.”
—Minette Walters, author of The Chameleon’s Shadow and Disordered Minds
“People Who Eat Darkness is an extraordinary, compulsive, and brilliant book. The account of the crime, the investigation and the trial—particularly in its knowledge and understanding of the Japan in which this tragedy took place—is both insightful and gripping; the attempt to understand Obara is fascinating but never ghoulish; and finally, and most of all, the compassion for Lucie Blackman and her family is very, very moving.”
—David Peace, author of the Red Riding quartet and the Tokyo trilogy
“A riveting and clear-eyed account of a family struggling to deal with unimaginable trauma. Richard Lloyd Parry combines extraordinary investigative skills with a natural storytelling ability to create an utterly compelling read. People Who Eat Darkness comes with the cast-iron guarantee that you will read to the very end.”
—Mo Hayder, author of Gone and The Devil of Nanking
“A masterpiece of writing this surely is, but it is more than that—it is a committed, compassionate, courageous act of journalism that changes the way we think. Everyone who has ever loved someone and held that life dear should read this stunning book, and shiver.”
—Chris Cleave, author of Little Bee and Incendiary
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2011, 2012 by Richard Lloyd Parry
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2011, in slightly different form, by Jonathan Cape, Great Britain, as People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2012
All materials from the notebooks, schoolbooks, and journals of Lucie Blackman are reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Lucie Blackman.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parry, Richard Lloyd.
People who eat darkness : the true story of a young woman who vanished from the streets of Tokyo—and the evil that swallowed her up / Richard Lloyd Parry. — 1st American ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-374-23059-3 (alk. paper)
1. Blackman, Lucie Jane, 1978–2000. 2. Obara, Joji—Trials, litigation, etc. 3. Murder—Investigation—Japan—Tokyo. 4. Young women—Crimes against—Japan—Tokyo. I. Title.
HV6535.J33 T664 2012
364.152'3092—dc23
2011047019
eISBN 978-1-4668-2002-9
www.fsgbooks.com
* During the years covered in this book, one British pound was worth approximately $1.50.
* When Lucie went missing in July 2000, one U.S. dollar was worth approximately ¥106.
* Several of the most notorious scandals were about missing persons. The most appalling concerned the murder the previous December of a nineteen-year-old boy named Masakazu Sudo, whose body had been found in a forest in Tochigi prefecture, north of Tokyo. Sudo had been missing for more than a month, and his parents had a good idea why. Three other youths, whom they identified by name, had been holding the young man captive, marching him to cash machines and loan shops, and forcing him to take out and hand over large sums of money.
The Sudos went repeatedly to the police, but the police refused to investigate, insinuating that Masakazu was a delinquent, and even a drug user, himself. Then one day, on the orders of his captors, he called his parents on a mobile telephone. They happened to be in the police station at the time, and they begged the sergeant on duty, who was still refusing to look into the case, to pose as a friend of their son and speak to the kidnappers. The officer took the phone—and immediately introduced himself as a policeman. Soon after, Masakazu Sudo was taken into the forest and strangled. One of the three killers, who were eventually tried and convicted of murder, turned out to be the son of another local officer.
Equally alarming, from the point of view of the Blackman family, was the case of a ten-year-old Japanese girl from Niigata who had gone missing in 1990. Ten years passed without a hint of what had happened to her, until in February 2000 she turned up at a local hospital. For almost a decade, she had been held captive in a single room in a house a few hundred yards from a police station. Her abductor was a convicted child molester. Four years earlier the police had received a tip that he was holding her, but they had not even bothered to knock on his door.
* One of the cultural differences revealed by the Lucie case was the differing international attitudes to flight attendants. In Britain, the figure of the “trolley dolly” is regarded with as much mockery as admiration. But in Japan, air stewardesses are a high-altitude elite, the epitome of feminine glamour and sophistication. At the height of their ascendancy, in the bubble years of the late 1980s, they were from time to time chosen as brides by pop stars and sumo wrestlers. For many Japanese, it was incomprehensible, indeed highly suspicious, that a woman would choose to give up a job at British Airways to become a bar hostess in Roppongi.
* In an account commissioned by Joji Obara’s lawyer thirty-nine years later, it was reported that he had indeed undergone eye surgery at the age of sixteen, but that it was treatment for injuries when a pair of sunglasses broke against his face in a car accident.
* Of the four acquaintances from Keio University School whom I interviewed, none remembered hearing anything about a car accident involving Seisho Hoshiyama, or his hospitalization.
* “Lay judges”—members of the public who sit on the panel alongside the professional judges—were introduced in 2009, part of broader reforms intended to increase the pace and efficiency of Japanese criminal trials.
* I have been unable to find any record of the missing-person case to which Obara referred.
* Japan retains the death penalty for murder, and a handful of death-row inmates are hanged every year. But capital punishment is imposed only in the most extreme cases—child murders, multiple murders, and premeditated killings carried out for cynical motives such as life-insurance fraud. No one ever accused Joji Obara of deliberately attempting to kill his victims—although the prosecutors might have chosen to argue that, having unintentionally killed Carita Ridgway with an excess of illegally administered drugs, his recklessness in repeating the mistake with Lucie Blackman amounted to murder. But given their reliance upon circumstantial evidence in proving Obara’s guilt, they concluded that a lesser charge of “rape resulting in death” was more likely to secure a conviction.
Annette’s final comments speak to what, in a Western jurisdiction, are two crucially distinct duties of the court: the adjudication of guilt or innocence, and the sentencing of a convicted defendant. If Obara had pleaded, or been found, guilty, then the views of his victims’ families would reasonably have been taken into account in deciding his sentence. But at this stage, he was a defendant who vigorously denied all the charges against him.
To invite the views of the bereaved at this stage, when the accused should still have been under the presumption of innocence, reinforced the impression given by so many other aspects of the Japanese justice system that the defendant’s guilt had been unofficially established before he stepped into court and that the trial was a hollow ritual.
“I have never accepted any count of the criminal prosecution on this trial,” Obara wrote in a statement prepared for these hearings. “On the other hand, the statements by the relatives of Carita Ridgway and Lucie Blackman are supposed to be directed towards the offender. Therefore, if I appear in court, I am afraid that I would be regarded as the offender and I would be supposed to accept it … I am afraid that this must reduce the criminal court to a venue for retaliation and criticism, resulting in hatred and regret.” Justice Tochigi refused to allow this document to be read out in court.
* The existence of a “black substance” on Lucie’s head was raised repeatedly by the defense. Pos
tmortem photographs showed a tarry liquid on her head and in her mouth. The lawyers never spelled out what they thought it was, but the implication seemed to be that it was formed when the head was burned, and that this further exculpated Obara because none of the witnesses to his behavior in the days after Lucie’s disappearance had reported signs of a fire.
* Huw had by now moved to Kuala Lumpur. He had embarked on a short-lived engagement to a Malaysian princess, and had a new business, as the partner of the psychic Ron Bard.
* Mr. Arai encouraged me to take away the photographs; I sent them back to him, as he had asked, the following week. Four months later, in an indignant letter, he accused me of “delivering copies to Scotland Yard which then showed the copies to the family of the deceased Ms Lucie Blackman.” He went on: “This act of yours not only violated the promise you owed to your source and damaged a relationship of mutual trust, but also hurt the family and increased their grief. Such an act should never be forgiven as a journalist and as a human being.” There was no truth whatever to any of these assertions.
* The principal article of evidence, of course, was the stenographer’s transcript of the hearing. But although the trial was conducted in public, this was not a public document and it required the permission of the judge for it to be made available to my lawyers.
* It was forbidden to make public official documents such as this without the court’s permission; police muttered angrily of a prosecution for publishing evidence in an ongoing criminal case. But somebody had thought of this: the website—with its suffix “.cx”—was hosted in the obscure Australian territory of Christmas Island. No criminal investigation was ever pursued.