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

by Richard Lloyd Parry

  But the man strenuously refused to allow the police to inspect the house and insisted that he was doing nothing more than retiling his bathroom. “Showing you inside my room is like showing you my naked body,” he said angrily. Inspector Harada replied, “I’m not interested in your naked body—just let me look inside and I’ll leave.” But lacking a warrant, or any evidence of a specific crime, the policemen had no right to force entry or carry out a search. After radioing back to their station, and confirming that the man was indeed the legal owner of the property, they retreated down the stairs.

  The most bizarre part of the story came a little later when the man called them back up to the apartment. “He stood in front holding something wrapped in paper,” Inspector Harada said. “He opened it, as if cradling a baby. I saw the head of a dog. He said, ‘My beloved dog died. I thought you’d think it strange if you saw this body, so I didn’t want to let you in.’”

  One policeman remembered that the body of the creature was frozen and stiff. He said, “It was not something that had died that day or the day before.”

  “I thought he might be doing something serious like disposing of a body,” Inspector Harada would say in court, years later. But the local police never followed up on the incident of the man with the dead dog and never made any connection with the reports just a few days later that a foreign girl had disappeared after being driven to the sea.

  * * *

  Between July and October, six letters were sent to the heads of Azabu Police Station and the First Investigation Section. Two were in the same imperfect English and signed with the same fake signature in the name of Lucie Blackman. One was in Japanese and eight pages long, purportedly from an unidentified “acquaintance” of Lucie, who had met her “at a certain place.” It stated that Lucie suffered from schizophrenia and had multiple personalities, and that she had accumulated huge debts that she was paying off by working as a prostitute. “It was not kidnap—she used men,” the writer hissed. Superintendent Udo had the fingerprints of the suspect from his arrest in the public lavatory, but no prints of any kind were to be found on the letters or their envelopes.

  At the beginning of October, an especially fat envelope arrived at Azabu Police Station. It contained a wad of ¥10,000 notes—¥1,187,000 in total. The accompanying letter, once more signed by “Lucie,” explained that this was to pay off her debts of £7,418 (about $11,000). It said that, because of her debts, Lucie had decided to disappear for a while and that eventually she would leave Japan. The enclosed money was to be disbursed to her creditors by Sophie—and, however many posters were distributed with her photograph, she was determined to escape to a place where nobody knew her.

  For all their efforts at surveillance, the police never observed their suspect in the act of withdrawing the money from the bank or posting any of the letters. But they did become aware of a disturbing development: on October 1, he had purchased a boat.

  It was a twenty-foot fiberglass Yamaha fishing boat. It had been bought for ¥3.5 million, about $33,000, from a dealership in Yokohama and was delivered to the Seabornia Marina, a few hundred yards across the bay from the apartment at Blue Sea Aburatsubo. A few days later, the suspect had gone into the maritime-supplies store at Seabornia and bought a compass and a length of anchor rope. He told the manager of the shop, Hideo Kawaguchi, that he wanted to anchor somewhere very deep and that he would need one thousand yards of rope. “There is a spot of one thousand yards, out in Sagami Bay,” Mr. Kawaguchi remembered, “but it’s very difficult to weigh anchor at that depth. I told him that you need a very heavy anchor, and you have to connect one long rope to another. He told me he was very experienced, but I doubted it, because an experienced sailor would never ask for a rope that long.”

  Most visitors at the shop wore shorts and sandals, but this customer came in a pin-striped suit, tie, and black leather shoes. “I had the feeling he was a bit strange,” said Mr. Kawaguchi. “His manner was unusual, and he was sweating a lot.”

  Ten minutes after he had left the shop, the detectives arrived, wanting to know everything that had been said and cautioning the staff not to talk to anyone about their strange customer.

  Superintendent Udo suddenly had a lot to think about. What possible reason could the suspect have for buying a boat? It was the end of the sailing season, and he seemed to have had no previous interest in the sea. The talk of anchor rope and Sagami Bay suggested an obvious explanation: he had something he wished to dispose of, and he planned to do so in the depths of the ocean.

  Sailings out of Seabornia had to be registered in advance with the commodore of the marina, who had also received a discreet visit from the police. The following week, he told them that their suspect was planning to take out his boat on Thursday, October 12. “We guessed that Lucie’s body must be somewhere and that his plan was to dispose of the body,” Udo said. “So we prepared to arrest him that morning.” The Tokyo Public Prosecutors’ Office hastily obtained an arrest warrant—not for Lucie’s disappearance but for the rape of one of the other hostesses.

  The suspect spent the night of October 11 in one of his Tokyo properties, a one-room apartment ten minutes’ walk from Roppongi Crossing. The arrest was planned for early in the morning; everything was in place when Udo went to sleep that night.

  At 3:00 a.m. he was woken by a telephone call from a Japanese journalist. The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s—and the world’s—bestselling newspaper, was intending to run a front-page story in its earliest edition, reporting the imminent arrest of a man suspected of involvement in the disappearance of Lucie Blackman.

  “I knew that this would be picked up and reported on television too,” Udo said. “We had to act before he saw the morning news.” It wasn’t that the suspect might escape, for by now the surveillance of him was overwhelming. The fear was that, confronted with arrest, he would commit suicide.

  At 6:00 a.m. the officers staking out the apartment building saw the man walk out and enter the convenience store on the corner. He emerged clutching a bundle of newspapers. They descended on him then and there, and arrested him on suspicion of the abduction and indecent assault of Clara Mendez on March 31, 1996. The newspapers that day named him as Joji Obara, a forty-eight-year-old businessman and company president. “When the arresting officers addressed him, he started trembling,” Udo said, “and beads of sweat appeared.”

  PART FOUR OBARA

  14. THE WEAK AND THE STRONG

  Only a handful of photographs of Joji Obara ever reached the public domain and none was less than thirty years old.

  All but one were from his school days. They showed a young man with a gentle, almost feminine face and a shyly diffident smile. He wore the black, high-collared Prussian-style uniform of the Japanese schoolboy. His hair, parted on the right, was short and well shaped. In one photograph, he looked away from the camera and bit down on his lower lip with an expression of nervous abstraction. He looked to be a soft, sensitive, slightly girlish boy. His lips were by far his most striking feature: full and sharply defined, forming a symmetrical Cupid’s bow.

  The most recent picture, very coarse and grainy, showed a man in his early twenties, his wide-collared shirt unbuttoned to reveal an isosceles of exposed chest. He was thinner than the schoolboy, with a longer, fuller head of hair. He smiled confidently into the camera through a pair of large sunglasses. The pose was self-consciously manly; one could read a confidence, even an arrogance, in the directness of his gaze. Most of these images had been cut out and enlarged from group photographs taken at formal school ceremonies. They were obtained by Japanese reporters in the feverish weeks following Obara’s arrest, from old acquaintances at school or university. But after that last one, which must have dated from the mid-1970s, there was nothing.

  His elderly mother was said to possess a photograph or two. Otherwise, except for the purposes of unavoidable official documentation such as driver’s license and passport, Joji Obara shunned photographers. Even in the Tokyo Metropolitan
Police headquarters he twisted his head away from the camera and refused to display his face for the mug shot.

  He was a hoarder and collector and recorder, a diarist and a memo maker, who seems to have found it impossible to throw anything away. He was incriminated by this habit; without the chaotic private archive they found in his properties, the police would never have been able to charge Joji Obara. But through the outer world, he moved, or labored to move, without a trace. It seemed to be a habit inherited from his family.

  His past, even his most recent past, was dim and blurred. Stare long and hard enough (and I spent many months staring) and shapes and figures could be made out: flashes and flickers illuminating a face and an occasional snatch of speech. But it was difficult to name what was moving in the darkness.

  * * *

  Joji Obara had not always been Joji Obara. He was born in the city of Osaka on August 10, 1952. The following month, his father registered the child’s name with three characters which, in isolation, meant Gold Star Bell. In Japanese, they were read as Seisho Kin, but the child’s parents were Mr. and Mrs. Kim, and they would have called their baby Sung Jong. When it suited them, the family also identified itself by the Japanese surname Hoshiyama. It was entirely consistent with his later life that Kim Sung Jong/Seisho Kin/Seisho Hoshiyama entered the world with three names.

  The Kim-Kin-Hoshiyamas were members of the population known as Zainichi Chosenjin or simply Zainichi—the ethnic Koreans of Japan. In 2000, when Lucie Blackman came to Tokyo, there were nine hundred thousand of them, but one could live in Japan for years and never be aware of their presence. They were an ethnic minority in a country that presented itself as racially homogeneous and undivided. Their origins were a tragedy, a by-product of the churning politics of early twentieth-century Asia.

  Surrounded by powerful and aggressive neighbors, Korea had been a battlefield throughout its history. As far back as the sixteenth century, samurai armies had plundered the peninsula, returning across the narrow Strait of Tsushima with treasures, slaves, and the severed ears of slaughtered Korean warriors. Japan began to dominate Korea once again at the end of the nineteenth century; in 1910, the country was formally annexed into the emerging Japanese empire. The colonizers built roads, ports, railways, mines, and factories, introduced modern agricultural methods, and sent the children of the Korean elite to be educated in Tokyo. But whatever good Japanese power brought in the form of economic development was eclipsed by the racism, coercion, and violence of the imperial occupation.

  The policies of the Japanese administration shifted over time. But by the late 1930s, its goal was not merely to control Koreans and exploit their resources but also to dissolve their culture and colonize their minds. The Japanese language was made compulsory in schools; students were required to worship at Shinto shrines, and Koreans were encouraged to take Japanese names. Infrequent uprisings were quelled with arrests, torture, and killings. And a vast and unequal human exchange took place, as Japanese bureaucrats and settlers were shipped over to govern and farm the new lands, and poor Koreans sailed in the opposite direction to find work in the industrial cities of Tokyo, Osaka, and Fukuoka.

  At first, this migration was voluntary, but as the Pacific War turned against Japan, its colonial subjects were forcibly conscripted, both by the Imperial Army and civilian industry. By 1945, hundreds of thousands of Koreans were scattered across Asia with the Japanese forces, as soldiers, orderlies, camp guards, and military sex slaves (the “comfort women” whose existence was officially denied for almost fifty years). In Japan itself there were two million Zainichi, most of them concentrated in ghettos close to the mines and factories where they were set to work. As much as anything, it was the sudden presence of so many foreigners in the motherland that showed up the hypocrisy of Japanese colonialism.

  Government policy was bent on the complete assimilation of Koreans, whose own culture and language would be swallowed up. But while Japan was content to obliterate their identity, it could not bring itself to allow Koreans the privileges and status enjoyed by its own people.

  They were subjects of the emperor but never full citizens. Their voting rights were restricted, as was their representation in parliament. Koreans in the ghettos of Osaka and Kawasaki had lower standards of health and literacy than native Japanese. They were paid drastically less for the same work, earning them the hatred of many Japanese workers, whose own wages and labor were undercut. In everyday life, they encountered discrimination and contempt, which blocked opportunities in education, employment, and politics.

  Many Japanese regarded them with dislike verging on disgust. They were held to be hot-tempered, stubborn, and quarrelsome, a dirty, smelly people who consumed obnoxious food. It is arguable whether one could ever tell Japanese and Koreans apart by their faces alone, but there was no doubt that they talked differently, moved differently, and distinguished themselves in a thousand small ways from the proudly homogeneous Japanese. Above all, they lacked that instinctive reserve and internalized respect for authority that is still so striking in Japanese today. The newspapers eagerly carried stories of crimes perpetrated by “rebellious” Koreans who, even when caught in the act, were notoriously reluctant to confess. At best, they were considered rowdy and unsavory; at worst, as violent, criminal, and subversive. Such prejudices and tensions were not always obvious, but they were close to the surface and, when they did express themselves, they could be explosive.

  In 1923, an enormous earthquake destroyed Tokyo and neighboring Yokohama; 140,000 people died in the fires that consumed the wooden cities. In the stunned aftermath, rumors began to circulate—repeated by Japanese newspapers—that Koreans were starting fires, poisoning wells, rioting, raping women, and looting shops. There was no reason to believe any of the stories, but in the following few days thousands of Korean civilians were murdered by mobs of ordinary Japanese in a spontaneous eruption of hysterical violence.

  “When they captured one, they shouted, ‘Korean!’” according to a contemporary account.

  Many Japanese rushed to the scene, surrounding the victim. They tied him to a telephone pole, scooped out his eyes, cut off his nose, chopped open his stomach, and pulled out his internal organs. Sometimes they tied a Korean’s neck to a car and dragged him around until he choked to death. They also captured women, grabbed their legs, pulled them in opposite directions, and tore their bodies. The Koreans resisted till the last moment, begging and insisting on their innocence. But the crowd never listened.

  Two or three years after this, near the port city of Pusan, in what is now South Korea, Joji Obara’s parents were born.

  * * *

  In Japan, a crime is regarded not merely as the act of a criminal; in some deep sense, it originates from within his family. Morally, if not legally, his closest relatives also bear a responsibility—hence the spectacle, surprisingly common in Japan, of a wrongdoer’s parents (and sometimes siblings, schoolteachers, even employers) bowing deeply before the cameras and offering tearful apologies for deeds over which they had no influence or control. So within hours of Obara’s arrest, Japanese reporters were competing with one another to find out where he came from and who his people were.

  The essential facts—name, age, and occupation—were quickly established. But there the flow of information stopped. A few years later, I spent several weeks inquiring into Obara’s background. I spoke to a dozen Japanese journalists, veterans of solemn broadsheets and scandalous weekly magazines, who collectively had put in months of work. They were experienced investigative reporters; they had time, resources, and contacts. But between their efforts and mine, we assembled little more than scraps. “In most criminal cases,” one magazine reporter told me, “even if you don’t get anything from the family, then at least people around them will talk—friends, neighbors, business colleagues. But in Obara’s case there was almost nothing.”

  His father’s name was Kim Kyo Hak, his mother’s Chun Ok Su. They came to Japan before the war, not as co
nscripts but as voluntary migrants. According to one of his sons, Kim Kyo Hak was imprisoned for two and a half years for his resistance to the Japanese, although where, when, and how this happened is not clear. But he was in Japan in 1945, and in little more than a decade he went from being a disenfranchised immigrant to one of the richest men in Japan’s second-biggest city.

  Japan immediately after the war was poor and chaotic, but for Koreans it was a moment of rare confidence and opportunity. One can imagine the powerful, even violent, exhilaration: after thirty-five years as despised underdogs, Zainichi stood suddenly alongside the victors, a liberated people in the heart of the defeated country. Osaka, like almost every other city, had been substantially destroyed by Allied bombing. Title deeds to property had been lost forever; in the confusion that followed, force was enough to make claims to land that might never be overturned. Black markets sprang up in the ruins, dominated by the Japanese yakuza on one side, and on the other by the people referred to as sangokujin, or “third-country people”—newly liberated citizens of the former colonies. There were murderous turf wars. The police looked on helplessly as armies of gangsters fought pitched battles with hundreds of Koreans, Taiwanese, and Chinese. Many Zainichi hurried back to Korea after liberation, but conditions there were as wretched and desperate as in Japan. And after the exultation of victory, those who stayed behind were soon faced with the reality of their situation. They were still poor, still disadvantaged, and still the victims of prejudice. And with the defeat of the empire and the liberation of Korea, they were unambiguously foreigners, stripped of even the basic rights of colonial subjects.