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

  Eisho Kin had aspirations to be a writer. When he was twenty-two years old, a short story of his was published in a journal of Zainichi writing. It was an account of the sadness of a young man: hesitant, awkward, tormented by self-consciousness, disdainful of others, and humiliated by them.

  The story is called “It Happened One Day,” and its protagonist is a Zainichi named Bun’ichi Ri. He is sitting on the subway when three Japanese men of his own age board the train; he understands immediately that they are deaf. Unintelligible whooping sounds come from their mouths. They communicate with one another in sign language, with busily moving hands and exaggerated facial expressions. Bun’ichi wonders if subtle emotions and nuances of feeling can ever be expressed with fingers and eyebrows. But the deaf men are struggling so hard, with such physical effort, to communicate with one another. The sight of them moves him deeply.

  Bun’ichi, we are told, had “problems at home.” To escape them, he first put his energy into “social issues,” also of an unspecified kind. But he became disillusioned with the “phoniness” of the Zainichi organizations in which he participated and preoccupied by painful questions about discrimination. He identifies this not only in the treatment of Koreans by Japanese but also in a sense of superiority over others that he recognizes in himself. If Bun’ichi is a victim of racism, he also has to own up to prejudices of his own. “What are we to do with this habit, this instinct to discriminate against others, to feel good in setting another below ourselves?” he asks. “In thinking about such things, he felt the weight of a stone on the top of his head.” Bun’ichi feels himself to be divided within, to carry inside him a consciousness separate from his own—a cold, scrutinizing intelligence that passes judgment on him for saying one thing while intending another. It is the absence of this self-consciousness in the deaf men on the train that moves him so much. “They struggled without self-deception,” he observes. “There was no dishonesty in their desperate struggle to communicate.”

  A drunk Japanese man walks down the subway train—in his shiny suit and white shoes, he looks like a yakuza. One of the deaf men unintentionally brushes against him. The drunk reacts furiously, grabbing his collar and demanding an apology; all the deaf man can do is whoop wordlessly. Bun’ichi stands up and shouts at the bully to leave his victim alone, and so the man turns upon him. In a fight between the stocky thug and the tenderhearted Bun’ichi, it is obvious who will come off best. But before any blows are exchanged, the three deaf passengers come between the two of them—and in the end, it is the handicapped men who save the Korean from a beating by the Japanese gangster.

  Bun’ichi had intervened out of what he identified as a sense of fairness and justice. But in his humiliation, the voice in his head passes a harsher verdict. He acted because he had judged the deaf men to be weak and vulnerable. His anger against the drunken thug was actually based on a kind of prejudice and an assumption of superiority over the disabled—not so different from the prejudice he faces as a Zainichi. “Are we the strong if we name them the weak?” he asks himself. “Then what about Koreans in Japan who are discriminated against even in our jobs in this closed Japanese society? Which are we, the strong or the weak?”

  He gets off the train and walks home from the station, filled with confusion and self-reproach. “Am I no different from those I despise?” he asks himself. “Why do human beings want to discriminate against human beings?”

  He finds himself walking past a big house with an imposing front gate, a garden of “huge heavy stones, so huge that an ordinary house might be built with them.” A Cadillac drives past with its headlights blazing. “Bun’ichi wondered if people who live in such a house would ever think about what troubled him.”

  This house, although few readers of the story could ever have known it, is recognizably the house of the Kin family in Kitabatake; the Cadillac is probably old Kim Kyo Hak’s car. And so, in a story about self-reproach and isolation, Eisho Kin turns the final reproach against himself. He has created a sympathetic character, who articulates complicated feelings of alienation and self-disgust. But he has done so from a situation of unearned privilege, from behind the high walls in Kitabatake. Even the young man in his story, isolated as he is, is less isolated than the people in the big house. “Those parents and sons, so used to their wealthy life,” Bun’ichi reflects, referring, although he doesn’t know it, to his own creator. “What about me?”

  “It Happened One Day” appeared in the Winter 1977 issue of Sanzenri magazine. It was singled out for commendation in a literary award. Eisho Kin was delighted and told his friends about his success—it seemed to impart to him the confidence he had lacked. But then he discovered that the competition had been judged by a famous Zainichi writer, a close friend of his mother since before he was born. He came to believe that his story had been commended for reasons of favoritism and family feeling, not for its literary qualities. And his confidence fled him once again.

  * * *

  At school, Seisho Kin, the future Joji Obara, “liberated himself by degrading himself.” But when he chose, he could elevate himself ruthlessly. He demonstrated this when he passed the entrance examination for the senior high school attached to Keio, one of the most famous and prestigious private universities in the country. Boarding schools of the British kind were almost unknown, and for a teenager to leave home and move to another city was unusual, although not unheard of. But the arrangement his parents made for Seisho would be unusual in twenty-first-century Japan. In the 1960s, it was extraordinary.

  At the age of fifteen, he left home and went to live in Tokyo, alone. With a female housekeeper to look after him, he was installed in Den-en Chofu, another neighborhood of the very rich, Tokyo’s equivalent of Kitabatake. Today it is one of the few areas in the capital still dominated by traditional Japanese homes, set behind wooden fences in gardens of bamboo groves and moss. But the house where Seisho lived was aggressively modern, the epitome of late 1960s architectural chic. A six-foot brick wall and an inner cordon of fluffy pine trees closed it off from a narrow lane. Inside were an oval swimming pool and a wide two-story house with a façade of white plaster and brown tiles. The rooms were fronted by walls of sliding glass; those on the upper floor gave on to wide thrusting balconies, and a garage to one side had room for several cars. The traditional Japanese homes that surrounded it, like his parents’ house in Osaka, were shadowy, cool, and somber, but this house was a fantasy of Hawaii or California, a place of light and brightness, made for sunbathing, barbecues, and dancing by the pool. And in the move here, the future Joji Obara underwent the next stage of his self-transformation. He left behind Seisho Kin and became Seisho Hoshiyama, and the weight of his family, his life in Osaka, and his Koreanness fell from his shoulders, like a man in springtime shrugging off a heavy winter coat.

  Just as a criminal’s family bears moral responsibility for his crimes, so—to an extent milder and more obscure—do his schoolmates. Those who knew him at Keio University School were reluctant to speak about Seisho Hoshiyama, and in the reluctance there was an element of shame. By the time I found them, the trial was under way; it was difficult for anyone to unimagine those charges, to reach back to memories untainted by hindsight. The man who came closest was Koji Akimoto, who shared a class with Seisho in their last year at the school.

  “Every year the classes were changed around,” he remembered, “and I had a friend who had been a classmate of Hoshiyama. He said to me, ‘He’s a strange guy.’ But my first impression was of a rather amiable person. He was always neat. He had his hair carefully combed, in what we used to call the ‘Kennedy cut,’ like John F. Kennedy. He had smooth skin, a rather shiny face. He was a teenager, but he had good posture—he was well built but muscular, not at all plump. And he was always talking to people and trying to make friends. I thought that he seemed rather an interesting person, not strange at all. I said to my friend, ‘What makes you say that he’s strange?’ And he said, ‘Look at his eyes.’”

&nb
sp; Akimoto looked, and immediately saw what his friend was talking about. Tiny scars were visible around Hoshiyama’s eyelids, and, for his contemporaries at least, there was no doubt what they were—the marks of a surgery known as epicanthoplasty. The operation removed the epicanthic fold, a heavy lid of skin covering the inner angle of the eye, characteristic of many people from Central and East Asia. Surgery transformed the “single-fold” eyelid of the Asian to the “double-fold” of the Caucasian. It created eyes that were variously regarded as bigger, rounder, more “Western,” and more attractive—and, to many Japanese, and without any basis in racial science, less Korean. Twenty years later, there would be a fashion for the expensive operation among Asian women. “But for a high school boy at that time to have that kind of plastic surgery—well, that was very unusual,” said Akimoto. “But he seemed to have had the operation, and now he had the double fold. I thought that he must be a curious person.”*

  The two boys became close; two or three times Akimoto visited the house in Den-en Chofu. Plenty of the boys at Keio came from affluent families, but Hoshiyama’s wealth was extraordinary. “It was a huge house,” Akimoto said. “I thought that his family must have been rich for many generations. He had a big collection of records. And, even for Keio boys, those were expensive at that time. He told me that he had an annual income of ¥20 million a year—that was really an amazing amount. He said that he owned car parks. Somehow, maybe from him or maybe someone else, I heard that his parents came from Osaka. But he never talked about them really.

  “There weren’t any pictures or family photographs in the house. I think he said that he lived there with his grandfather, but the only person I ever saw there was the maid. I started to think that perhaps there was no grandfather. And he would often be late for lessons. I thought, ‘It’s because he lives alone, except for that maid. There’s no one to wake him up in the morning and make sure he gets to school.’ He was a clever guy, but his school results were bad. Because he wasn’t living with his parents. Nobody looked after him. He created his own world; he lived in his own atmosphere.”

  It was difficult to describe. But something about him set Seisho Hoshiyama apart—a poise and an independence, which often seemed close to isolation and solitude. “Once he came back after the holidays with these wristwatches—Rolex, I think—which he was offering for sale. He said he’d bought them in Hong Kong, and, as boys, we were very impressed. Foreign watches, foreign travel—that was a world away from us then.” Hoshiyama was a confident English-speaker, and a brilliant and charismatic musician—at least to the ears of the unworldly teenagers at Keio. “He was a very, very good singer,” Akimoto remembered. “We had a school festival in the autumn, and we decided to put on a show with a band, sell bottles of Coca-Cola from a stall, and make a bit of money. Hoshiyama was the singer. He did Tom Jones—he was superb! He was exactly like Tom Jones, thrusting his hips, the whole act. I don’t remember the song he did—it wasn’t ‘Delilah,’ one of the other ones. He wore a long-sleeved shirt, a beautiful shirt in some kind of black satin or silk. That was an amazing shirt. By day, he didn’t dress particularly sharply, but he had his own style and he looked good.”

  And yet, for Akimoto, it was impossible truly to befriend Seisho Hoshiyama. There was a fugitive quality in his personality and a hollowness, as if, below the promising exterior, the most important element, the substance of friendship, was being withheld—if, in fact, it was even present. “When I agreed to see you I thought hard about what he was like,” Koji Akimoto told me. “It’s very difficult to express. He built up a wall between himself and others. He never really understood his schoolmates. With friends you share a common feeling. You find things you agree on, and your conversation and understanding become deeper—even if it’s just that you both like Honda motorbikes, or something like that.

  “With Hoshiyama, I never had that experience. He would say, about someone in our class whom he wanted to become friends with, ‘He’s a cool guy.’ But he never looked into people’s characters. He was materialistic. He always lacked that subtle rapport which you enjoy when you’re really communicating with someone’s heart. He was interested in what he wanted to do, but he never made any compromise with others. He was the first person I ever knew who was like that and I’ve never known a person like that since. I kept my distance to some extent and observed him closely. But it was as if there was no room to step in and become a true friend. I still remember it.”

  Most impressive about Seisho was his assurance with girls. “He used to go out on his own to Jiyugaoka and Yokohama,” Akimoto remembered. “In Yokohama, there was a famous disco, where he would go. Boys like me at that age, we might go out to play around in a group of two or three, but never on our own. But Hoshiyama had the confidence to do that. He behaved like an adult, he played around like an adult, and that was so unusual, so impressive.

  “In our third year of high school he told me, ‘I’ve got a date with a girl.’ He said, ‘Let me show you her picture.’ I looked at it. They were sitting together in some expensive restaurant in the suburbs. It was a place schoolboys would never think of going. And there he was, in a white suit. Beside them there was a big bunch of flowers. The girl was half Japanese and half Western. Her name was Betty. I think that he was really serious about Betty, but she left him, and afterwards he rang up another friend of mine and he cried. She told him, ‘If you can be a mature man, I’ll come back to you.’ He felt that he wasn’t mature enough, but he was determined that he would become so. He was a human being, of course. Apart from everything else, he could be a true, loving person.”

  There were several ethnic Korean and Chinese students at Keio University School. But none of his schoolmates, at least among those I interviewed, ever knew that Seisho Hoshiyama was Zainichi. None of them ever met his parents or his brothers, or anyone from his early life in Osaka. And none heard anything of what must have been one of the defining moments of his teenage years: the sudden death in 1969 of his father, Kim Kyo Hak, in circumstances that have never been fully explained.

  15. GEORGE O’HARA

  Instead of Azabu Police Station, where they would have interrogated the suspect in a more routine case, Superintendent Udo’s detectives took Joji Obara to the fortresslike headquarters of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police in the Kasumigaseki district, the bureaucratic nerve center of Japan. The ministries of Finance, Foreign Affairs, and Justice were strolling distance away; in the space of this square mile was the greatest concentration of state power in the country. Within a few hours of his arrest, hundreds of officers had descended with search warrants on twenty of Obara’s properties all over the country. They included the apartment among the palm trees in Zushi Marina, the room in Blue Sea Aburatsubo where the dead dog had been laid, the building near Roppongi where he was arrested, and the big house in Den-en Chofu. Helicopters from the Japanese television companies hovered close by, peeping across the cordons. They captured images of search dogs snorting over the grounds and policemen in overalls shoveling mounds of earth. For days, police vans came and went carrying out articles of evidence. There were tools, clothes, notebooks, sheaves of documents, rolls of film, videotapes, audio cassettes, photographic prints, bottles of fluid, and sachets of powder. They were gathered in a storeroom in Kasumigaseki, where Udo himself supervised their sifting. “There were fifteen thousand items there,” he told me. “It was the biggest room we had available to us. There was so much dust, we were coughing and scratching, and there were dust mites biting our legs. But for us they were piles of treasure.”

  Obara was held in one of the cells inside the same building. In theory, criminal suspects in Japan are supposed to be kept in detention centers from which they travel in the morning for questioning and where they are dropped off after working hours. In fact, they are almost always held at a police station, where the organization investigating them also controls every aspect: visitors, the time and duration of their interrogations, their food, even the lighting in their ce
lls.

  Many of the rights regarded as fundamental in British and American justice are unavailable to the suspect in Japan—or, if available in theory, waived or ignored in practice. He has the right to see a lawyer, but the frequency and duration of the visits are decided by the police. He has the right to remain silent under questioning, but he is obliged to sit through the questions, which can go on for hour after hour through relays of fresh officers until the suspect is numb with boredom and fatigue. There is no obligation for detectives to record interrogations. Instead of a verbatim account, they produce at the end of the proceedings a summary (known within the justice system as the “prosecutor’s essay”) to which the exhausted suspect is simply asked to put his name.

  An arrest warrant allows the police to hold a suspect for three days, but with the permission of a judge this can be extended, twice, by ten days at a time. The judge almost never refuses. For twenty-three days, then, a person can be incarcerated incommunicado by the police, without any access to lawyers, family, or friends, and without any charge being brought against him. “The formal legal system in Japan provides detectives with so many advantages that they rarely need to resort to obviously illegal tactics,” writes the criminologist Setsuo Miyazawa. “The whole system is designed and implemented in such a way that the suspect will offer apparently voluntary confessions to his captors.”