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 detectives and prosecutors work under one particular pressure of their own: the pressure to obtain a confession. Unlike a British or American court, where it is necessary only to prove the facts, Japanese courts attach great importance to motive. The reasoning and impulses that led to a crime must be proved in court; they are a crucial factor in determining a convicted criminal’s sentence. The who, what, where, and when are not enough: a Japanese judge demands to know why. A detective, then, is obliged to get inside his suspect’s skull. If he fails to do that, he is not considered to have done his job.

  In reality, the only way to do this is by obtaining a confession. “Confession is king,” one detective said. Everything else, including physical evidence, is secondary. In some cases, police prefer to carry out their physical investigation only after obtaining a confession. The hope is that a suspect will disclose incriminating information unknown to the detectives, which will then be confirmed by subsequent investigation, thus making the confession all the more convincing and allaying suspicions that it may have been obtained under duress. “We require proof beyond an unreasonable doubt,” a Japanese prosecutor told the sociologist David Johnson, who writes that “confessions are the heart—the pump that keeps cases circulating in the system … Japanese prosecutors [are] characterized by an almost paralyzing fear to charge in the absence of confession.”

  And Japanese suspects do confess, whether they are guilty or not; over the years, they have confessed more and more. In 1984, eleven out of twelve people brought to criminal trial in Japanese courts admitted the charges against them. By 1998, the proportion was fifteen out of sixteen. From time to time, police and prosecutors break jaws, mash noses, and bruise genitals. (“To us Japanese, hitting in the head is not serious,” one prosecutor said. “Kicking is serious.”) But physical abuse is usually mild, intended to be humiliating rather than painful: slaps; light kicks; deprivation of sleep, food, and water; cigarette smoke blown in the face. More common is psychological intimidation; Johnson describes “suspects [who] were threatened, intimidated, worn down, led, induced, scolded, berated, manipulated, and deceived.” But given the police’s overwhelming power over those in their custody, such crude measures are rarely necessary. Japanese detectives, by and large, are calm, polite, detached, insistent, and relentless. They simply ask the same questions, over and over again, for the twenty-three days—or 552 hours, or 33,120 slow minutes—that they have suspects in their power. Most of the time, all they have to do is wait.

  These, then, were the powers ranged against Joji Obara when he was arrested on October 12, 2000.

  * * *

  He didn’t confess. He never bent at all. From the very beginning, when he refused to face the camera for the police mug shot, he offered no cooperation. It was clear that this was a suspect who knew, and would insist upon, his rights, and the Japanese police, in general, are wary of being caught overstepping the bounds of their considerable power. “When he was arrested he agreed to give fingerprints, but he wouldn’t agree to the photograph,” Superintendent Udo told me. “We couldn’t make him face the camera. If you forced his chin up, for example, that might be taken to be torture. So the photograph we took has him looking down.”

  Udo was reluctant to go into detail about the police questioning of Joji Obara, probably because, from the police point of view, it went so badly. “At the beginning, he seemed very intimidated,” Udo told me. “He sweated a lot, to the extent that his clothes got quite wet. He sweated, and sometimes he trembled. But he denied everything.” The crimes for which he had been arrested were the abduction and indecent assault of Clara Mendez. According to the rules, Udo emphasized, the detectives were supposed to confine their questions to that case alone. But everyone in the room knew that the true purpose of the interrogation was to find out what had happened to Lucie—and Udo conceded that the detectives “chatted” with their suspect about the Blackman case. But for a long time, Obara refused to talk to them. He confirmed his name; apart from that, he invoked his right to remain silent.

  Two weeks passed; the police’s twenty-three-day limit would soon expire. So the prosecutors employed another favorite technique. They charged Obara with the rape of Clara Mendez and immediately “rearrested” him for the indecent assault of Katie Vickers. With this, they gained another twenty-three days with their suspect, and they avoided losing him to the less pressured and intense environment of the detention center. They would use this questionable practice—not in itself illegal but verging on an abuse.

  * * *

  In 1969, at what was outwardly the peak of his success, Obara’s father, Kim Kyo Hak, had gone on an overseas trip with a group of Osaka businessmen. He was forty-four at the time, and his sons ranged in age from seven to twenty-one years old. The details, like so much else about him, were sketchy. But the party certainly visited Hong Kong and there, on or before April 27, Kim Kyo Hak died.

  Obara himself would insist later that the explanation was straightforward: his father’s death was caused by a sudden stroke. But other people sensed something mysterious about the tragedy. The wake, which one would have expected to be large and lavish, was not held at the Kitabatake house, as would be customary, and the Kims displayed none of the conventional signs of mourning. The subject was hardly discussed within the family. Decades later, the youngest son, Kosho, who had been a boy at the time, did not know how exactly his father had died. Japanese magazines, and the Kim family’s neighbors, speculated that it was an unnatural death, perhaps connected to a dispute over business. And afterwards, they reported that bulletproof glass was fitted in the windows of the big house in Den-en Chofu.

  Whatever the truth, the death of their patriarch transformed the lives of the surviving Kims. His wealth was divided among his sons and widow. The taxi firm went to the troubled oldest boy, Sosho; the pachinko parlors went to Eisho, the aspiring writer. Seisho Hoshiyama, as Obara was still calling himself then, received the parking lots and property, including Den-en Chofu. It is not clear what Kosho inherited, but it seems to have been less than an equal share—alone among the brothers, he received a free state education rather than an expensive private one. The boys were fatherless now, but they were also rich.

  It was about this time, when Seisho Hoshiyama was sixteen, that he was involved in the car crash that would be claimed later as the reason for his plastic surgery. “Glass pieces were taken out around his eyes,” it was reported in the book about Obara privately commissioned by one of his lawyers. “Many slashes were stitched, some of which went up to his ear.”* It was also around now, according to this same account, that he became an alcoholic. “[He] has been drinking since he was fifteen years old and has been addicted to alcohol ever since,” the book says. “When he was hospitalised from the traffic accident, he couldn’t drink alcohol through the mouth, so he tried inhaling it through the nose, which worked very well … He inhaled alcohol night after night and sank into a dreamy world.”

  Not surprisingly, his schoolwork was suffering. The whole point of Keio University School, for most of its students, was the all but guaranteed place it brought at Keio University—which, in its turn, was the ticket to a career in business, politics, law, or academia. For a student of Keio High School to be turned away from the university required more than average idleness, delinquency, or stupidity—and Hoshiyama was not stupid. In the book commissioned by his lawyer, it is claimed that he turned down the chance to go to the famous institution rather than being rejected. Either way, he graduated from high school in March 1971 at the age of nineteen without a place at Keio University.

  After that, a fog descends over the life of Seisho Hoshiyama. At some point he studied at Komazawa University in Tokyo, a less glamorous institution than Keio. For three years, he traveled: according to the book, “he lived in Washington State, Stockholm, and moved around the world several times.” He may have studied architecture, and at some point he claimed to have become acquainted with the famous American musician Carlos San
tana—years later, he would show a photograph of himself with his celebrity friend to Christa Mackenzie. Around 1974, he returned to Japan and was accepted at Keio University on a correspondence course. Eventually, he was allowed to enroll as a regular undergraduate. He went on to take two degrees, in law and then in politics. On both occasions, he declined to be photographed for the graduation yearbook.

  In 1971, around the time he left high school, he went through the next stage of his metamorphosis. He changed his nationality from South Korean to Japanese and took on a new name: Joji Obara. The first name, pronounced Jōji with a long o and written with the characters for “castle” and the number 2, was familiar enough, but Obara was a curiosity. Most Japanese ideographs can be read in two or more ways, depending on their context and the way they are combined with other characters. Common names have a standard reading, but more unusual ones have several possible pronunciations. Seisho Hoshiyama’s newly adopted surname consisted of two characters (meaning “weave” and “field”) and could be read as Obara, Ohara, or Orihara.

  At the age of eighteen, he had already been through three names; in the thirty years before his arrest, he would employ dozens more. For a man who instinctively clouded his identity, who could not bear to be pinned down, captured, or summed up, even by a camera, it was appropriate that even his legal name should be evasive. But why this name in particular?

  There was an actor called Joji Ohara (written with different kanji and pronounced with a long initial o) who starred in a series of soft-core porn films (Seduction of Flesh, Lustful Companions) of the kind that might have titillated a teenage boy in the late 1960s. A man of the same name was a Japanese cinematographer of the same period. But the Kim family, and others who knew him at this time, inferred another explanation.

  The point about the new names was that each could be pronounced to sound as if it were English. Joji: Jorj: George. Obara: Ohara: O’Hara. Was this, then, the end point of his journey through identity: from Kim Sung Jong, the Korean baby; through Seisho Kin, the Japanese-born Korean child; Seisho Hoshiyama, the Japanese youth with round eyes; Joji Obara-Ohara-Orihara, the ambiguous, unphotographable Japanese citizen—to George O’Hara, cosmopolite, friend to the famous, man of the world?

  * * *

  Obara emerged from his twenties with two university degrees and a few years of desultory travel but with no obvious experience of having earned a living. Then, in his thirties, he put himself and his inheritance to work, in the occupation that epitomized the spirit of the age: property developing.

  This was the time of Japan’s notorious bubble economy, the period between the 1980s and early 1990s when Tokyo fleetingly became the wealthiest city in the history of the world. After forty years of steadily accelerating growth, the Japanese yen, the stock exchange, and, above all, the value of land began to rise with intoxicating speed. Anyone holding property became rich, whether they deserved it or not, and Japanese banks competed with one another to lend them money without asking very many questions.

  These were giddy years in London and New York too, but nowhere was the consumption more conspicuous than in Tokyo. The grossness of bubble excess has become the stuff of urban legend: the nightclubs with mink covers on their lavatory seats, the cocktails sprinkled with gold leaf, and the banquets of sushi eaten off the naked bodies of young models. The Japanese who had lived through the war had seen Third World poverty and destitution; now their economy was close to overtaking that of the United States. Foreign tourists, who were accustomed to being the wealthiest people in the country, found themselves impoverished by the strong yen, which drew in a new working gaijin population of bankers, businessmen, English teachers, and laborers. And the Japanese took pride in this. Not only people of the poorer countries of Asia but now also Americans, Australians, and Europeans were coming to Tokyo, not as transient businessmen or idle backpackers but as worshippers at the shrine of Japanese economic might. The symbol of this was the gaijin hostess club, where the pretty foreign blond flirted submissively with the rich, newly potent salaryman.

  In the glare of money, shades of difference—between Zainichi and Japanese, for example, or between old money and new—became less visible. Joji Obara was well placed to benefit from these shifts of wealth and power. With one of his Osaka parking lots as collateral, he took out loans and acquired some twenty buildings and apartments all over Japan, most of which he rented out. They ranged from warm Kyushu, the southernmost of the main Japanese islands, to chilly Hokkaido in the far north. They had typically bubble-era names, charged with received notions of foreign grandeur: Sasebo Lion Tower, Kushiro Passion Building, Ginza Brightness. Obara made at least one overseas purchase, another palpable token of affluence and prestige: an apartment on the thirty-third floor of the Waikiki Beach Tower in Hawaii. Some of these assets were held in Obara’s name, but most were owned by nine companies that he established, including Atlantic Trading, Creation Inc., and the Plant Group. Each company had an address, a board of directors, and an auditor; on paper, they were perfectly legitimate. But later it would be reported that not all of those listed on these company documents even knew that they had been named as executives.

  Obara bought the one-room apartment in Roppongi—the room where he would be arrested—in 1996; another of his residences, a huge flat overlooking the Togu Palace, where Japan’s crown prince lived, was acquired in 1988. Nosy neighbors are an institution in Japan, but in each of these places it was remarkable how few people had distinct memories of Obara. He shunned casual contact; he turned himself away.

  At the Roppongi apartment block, the staff had no idea who Joji Obara was until troops of police took him away. At Den-en Chofu, he would roar out of the high gate at full throttle in his white Rolls-Royce or silver Porsche, but otherwise his neighbors scarcely saw him. “We never talked to him, and I always assumed that he was just an ordinary man,” said Mrs. Kurosaki, who lived three houses down from him. “But of course a young man on his own in a place that size stood out, and people talked about him. When he moved into that place with his own swimming pool, we were all envious.”

  Routine efforts to engage him in neighborly contact were ignored. Circulars delivered by the Den-en Chofu community association were never passed on, and Mitsuko Tanaka, the local housewife responsible for the national census forms, had great trouble extracting a completed form from the Obara house. Once, she chatted with the maid who was working there. “She was a nice friendly lady, said that he lived there on his own and that she cooked for him,” Mrs. Tanaka told me. “I asked her how long she’d been working there, and she said it was just a few days. She came from a temporary-employment agency, and he asked them to send a different helper every week.”

  Even the identity of the occupant of the Den-en Chofu house was not clear. On the nameplate outside, written in the Roman alphabet, was OHARA, and below, in smaller letters, HOSHIYAMA. Whatever his name, the man who lived there was not without company. “There’d be young people going in and out, including foreigners,” said Mrs. Kurosaki. “There was a high wall all around. I could hear women’s voices, so I assumed most of them were women. You’d hear talking and chatting and playing from just inside the gate. You didn’t see people, really. He didn’t walk around the place. The gate would open and he’d zoom out in his open-topped car with a woman at his side, and when he returned he’d just zoom in again.”

  Mrs. Tanaka said, “I remember one particular woman. She had long, black hair like a Japanese, but she looked foreign in some way. She was around for quite a long time, but then I didn’t see her anymore. After it happened, we wondered whatever became of that girl with the long hair.”

  * * *

  What kind of man was Obara, and how, apart from running his businesses, did he spend his time? The absence of information was more striking than the few available facts; put aside speculation, rumor, and conjecture, and there was little left but fragments. He was proud of his charitable donations—he would later claim to have given more than
¥100 million to worthy causes, including the Japanese Society for Disabled Children and the Legal Aid Association. Despite (or perhaps because of) his Korean birth, he was a warm admirer of the Japanese imperial family—he spoke with pride of the occasion when he had been presented at a party to Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko. As well as his rental businesses, he had a company, Ginza Foods, which operated a small ramen noodle restaurant in the most elegant part of Tokyo. He loved classic foreign cars, and at the time of his arrest owned nine of them, including a BMW, a Mercedes-Benz, a Ferrari, a 1962 Bentley Continental, and James Bond’s favorite car, a silver 1964 Aston Martin DB5.

  It is difficult to say much with certainty about Obara’s adult life. In weeks of inquiry into his past, I found no one who could be described as his friend. In the period after his arrest, it would not be surprising if such people were reluctant to identify themselves. But perhaps they did not exist. I talked to Obara’s neighbors, to the caretakers of his properties, to hostesses who entertained him, to shopkeepers and delivery men who served him. None ever described seeing him with anyone else or hearing him talk unambiguously of friendship—other than with Carlos Santana. After his arrest, he was visited during his long detention by one mysterious acquaintance, the owner of a pachinko company, but there seemed to have been no one else, apart from his elderly mother.

  Other people who got to know him after his arrest formed a strong impression of his profound and elaborate isolation. “I’ve dealt with many different kinds of people,” one of them told me, “but I don’t think he ever had a true friend he could rely on, never in his life. Sometimes I see on his face a need to rely on me. Even when he’s being very positive, I feel his loneliness then too. I often felt sorry for him, very often. He’s a man of great solitude. There’s no one he can trust, or talk things over with. Sometimes I think it’s because he has no one to rely on that he turned to women like that.