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

  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 but 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.”

  * * *

  Early in 2009, a year after the unsuccessful efforts to sue me for libel, a sequence of curious events occurred in my own life. It is important to begin by saying this: I have no evidence that they had any connection with Joji Obara.

  A large, stiff envelope was delivered one morning to my home in Tokyo. It had taken several days to reach me; official marks indicated that it had bounced among several sub–post offices. It was addressed to someone called Kengo Namai at the Save the Nation Bulletin Co., but the address on the front of the envelope, an apartment on the far side of Tokyo, was unknown to the post office. The sender identified himself as “a Comrade” but provided no further contact information. Lacking a return address, the post office had opened it and, finding my name inside, had redirected it to me.

  My home address was to be found on a sheet of paper inside the envelope, below a photocopy of my business card. The envelope also contained a stapled sheaf of printed documents, a couple sheets of photographs, and a hardback book in Japanese with the cover image of a woman in a tiara.

  I looked at the photographs first. There were ten of them photocopied in color on two sheets of paper. They were photographs of me, sometimes alone, sometimes alongside friends. It was obvious that they had been taken covertly, by someone who had been following me for the purposes of surveillance.

  Five of them were from three months earlier. I remembered the events of the day clearly: a bright Saturday afternoon in autumn, a late lunch with visitors from London. In the photographs, I was talking and smiling with my guests as we strolled home along a busy street of shops. Other images were harder to place. One might have been taken in an elevator, by a security camera; two others seemed to show me speaking in public, at some kind of lecture or gathering. I strained to remember these occasions and for the image of a furtive figure with a camera, but nothing came to mind. He—or she—had been there anyway, following me as I went about my unremarkable daily business, in streets close to my home.

  Now I examined the other contents of the envelope. The book was one I recognized. It was the Japanese translation of Princess Masako: Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne by an Australian journalist named Ben Hills, which had been published in a brief blaze of notoriety three years earlier. It told the unhappy story of Japan’s crown princess, a bright and internationally educated former diplomat, who had been driven to chronic depression by the stifling demands of the imperial court, a state of affairs that was covered up for months by the palace bureaucracy. On publication, the book had been angrily denounced by the Japanese government; the offices of its Tokyo publisher had been picketed by angry ultranationalists. I had met Ben Hills once, when he interviewed me during his research, and his book quoted one or two of my articles about Princess Masako. In the copy of the translation that I held in my hands, each of the references to my name had been highlighted in yellow and the pages carefully marked with adhesive notes.

  The last object in the envelope was the stapled document, six laser-printed sheets. It began abruptly, without salutation or introductory phrases: “The goal of Richard Lloyd Parry is to bring down the Japanese imperial family and after that to bring Japan itself under the control of Britain.”

  Princess Masako, a calumnious book about the imperial family, uses material provided by Richard Parry, who manipulated the Australian journalist, Ben Hills, and had him publish it. Although he has the title Tokyo Bureau Chief, Richard Parry has just one employee, and gets away with whatever he likes … He persists in insulting the imperial family overseas and if he is allowed, the situation will be beyond repair. We hope for a hero who will deal with Richard Parry.

  At the moment, the items which calumniate the imperial family cannot be found on the Internet (they are not allowed to be found). What follows is the gist of articles, photographs, and other materials which used to be on the Internet.

  Richard Parry, a man who plots against Japan, should not be tolerated anymore. The Parry clan slaughtered 186 Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. He insulted the imperial family and threw Japan into confusion … He provided materials to Ben Hills, who claims to be an Australian journalist, for the purpose of plotting against the Japanese imperial family by writing and publishing a book … We should not allow Richard Parry to insult the imperial family and throw Japan into confusion anymore.

  This was a great deal of strangeness contained within a single envelope.

  It was not the fir
st time that I had been called an enemy of the imperial family, and other journalists who had reported on the depression of the crown princess had been accused of the same thing. To be named as the puppet master behind an Australian author, and of serving as an agent of British imperial ambitions, was a first. But the outstanding item among all this was the nugget of wartime history (completely new to me) and the image of wartime Lloyd Parry “clansmen” standing atop a heap of Japanese corpses. It was almost too far-fetched to be made up. I found myself smiling as I read. It reminded me of somebody …

  But it was clear what had happened. Somebody, most likely a private detective, had carefully compiled this dossier. Judging from its impersonal tone, he had probably made multiple copies of it and sent out a wave of mail shots to numerous addresses, among them the Save the Nation Bulletin Co. But either the organization had moved or gone out of business and so, by chance, this envelope had ended up in my hands—the last person it was intended for.

  Its name suggested that the Save the Nation Bulletin Co. was a right-wing ultranationalist group—one of many, large and small, that exist across Japan and that mount noisy demonstrations against people and organizations deemed insufficiently patriotic. Academics or public officials who disparage Japan’s wartime conduct, the embassies of Russia, South Korea, and China, journalists held to have embarrassed the imperial family—all of these, from time to time, incur the displeasure of the uyoku, or rightists, which inevitably expresses itself in the same form—a visit by one or more black vans blaring denunciations through high-powered loudspeakers, with rippling Rising Sun flags mounted on their roofs. Sometimes these groups have links to yakuza gangs; very rarely, acts of violence are associated with them. Whoever had sent this package hoped to inflame the anger of such people against me personally, in the hope that one of them would take it upon himself to visit my home or office and “deal with” me.

  The word used for this expression is seibai. The Japanese friend to whom I showed the document puzzled over how to translate it. “‘Deal with’ is probably okay,” she told me. “You could also say ‘judge’ or ‘punish.’ ‘Subjugate,’ ‘vanquish’ even. It isn’t a good word. Not a good word at all. I think that you should take this to the police.”

  * * *

  I didn’t expect the police to take it seriously, but I was wrong. Within a few minutes of my arrival, four detectives were sitting in the small interview room examining the envelope and its contents with gloved hands. I was asked if I had ever been conscious of being followed, whether I’d received any strange telephone calls recently or seen any suspicious people or vehicles loitering near my home or office. The answer to all of these questions was no.

  “Have you made any enemies?” asked the chief detective, a small, weathered-looking man with a heavily lined smoker’s face.

  Occasionally, of course, people had been upset by articles I had written. Like every reporter who writes about the imperial family, particularly about the sad story of Princess Masako, I had received an angry letter and a barking phone call or two, and been denounced anonymously in the more obscure reaches of the Internet. But only one person had taken any serious action against me.

  “You were right to bring this to us,” said the chief detective. “It’s this word seibai—it’s an unusual word to use in a letter like this. But it implies violence. Do you watch TV samurai dramas? It’s the word that samurai use about attacking their enemies. And when the samurai deal with someone, they do it with a samurai sword.”

  The detectives kept the package to check it for fingerprints. I asked whether I needed to take any precautions. The chief frowned and nodded his head. “When you take the subway, don’t stand close to the edge of the platform,” he said. “Stand back. That makes it difficult for someone to push you in front of the train. Same when you’re crossing the road—stay back from the curb. Otherwise just keep an eye open for anything suspicious and call us straightaway if you spot anything. We’ll inform the local police station, so the officers on patrol will be aware of this and keep an eye on your place.”

  One of the police detectives specialized in following the activities of the far right. He knew of the Save the Nation Bulletin Co. and Kengo Namai, and he telephoned him there and then. The group’s address had indeed changed, Mr. Namai confirmed—and he had never received a copy of this, or any similar, package. The detective described its contents and asked him what he made of it. Mr. Namai was unimpressed. Ultranationalists receive plentiful crank mail, he said. No rightist with any gumption would act on the promptings of an unsigned, unsourced screed such as this.

  * * *

  There is nothing like the suspicion that you are being followed to open your senses to the world around you. Over the next few weeks, Tokyo took on a dreamlike sheen and burnish, as if shot through exquisite filters by a visionary cinematographer. Details to which I had never before paid attention suddenly glowed with powerful and sinister significance—cameras, sunglasses, the color and make of parked vehicles, the clothes and features of people I passed in the street. I found myself living every moment as if I might have to give a detailed account of it, under oath. The most mundane part of the day, the fifteen-minute subway journey to my office, became a heroic struggle to avoid assassination. It was laughably ridiculous and queasily alarming.

  The months passed. There were no attempts to pitch me into the path of a commuter train, no blows from glinting samurai swords, no more strange letters, phone calls, or anomalies of any kind. A detective called one day to say that none of the fingerprints on the envelope had come up on the police database. I was starting to become almost blasé about the act of crossing the road, when, in June 2009, a telephone call came from the police station close to my office. A group of ultranationalists, calling themselves the School of the Refined Heart, intended to carry out a demonstration against me, and—in the orderly and law-abiding way of the Japanese extremist—had filed a formal notification of their plans. The police could not stop them from invoking their right to free speech, but they were giving me due warning.

  The School of the Refined Heart appeared as arranged a few days later—four middle-aged men in an elderly flag-draped black van. It was the classic uyoku protest: a few turns around the office building, and an amplified broadcast of their demand—that Richard Parry of The Times apologize for insulting the imperial family. The men tried to enter the building, but the security guards politely blocked them. They presented a letter addressed to me; it was refused. They posted it in the mailbox in front of the building—but because they had failed to attach a stamp, it never arrived.

  After half an hour they drove away in their black van. They came back a month and a half later, and performed the same drill, with van, slogans, and letter. And after that I didn’t hear from them, or anyone like them, again.

  The whole affair remained a mystery. I still cannot say who it was who went to such extravagant lengths to encourage fascists to “deal with” me, or what was his—or her—motive. But the incident was impossible to forget, and it had an intriguing coda. Months afterwards, I met Yasuo Shionoya, one of Joji Obara’s lawyers, whom I had contacted in a final, and unsuccessful, attempt to gain an audience with his client. I told him the story of the strange package, and the photographs, and the men in the black vans—and a complicated expression crossed Mr. Shionoya’s face, part amusement, part surprise. He said, “I was talking to Mr. Obara once, and your name came up in conversation. He talked about articles you had written, about the Japanese royal family. He said, ‘Parry’s articles made the right-wingers angry. I think that he may get some trouble from them, one of these days.’ I asked, ‘What kind of trouble?’ and he said, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’”

  25. WHAT I REALLY AM

  What was Joji Obara, and what made him what he was? I spent years thinking about him, talking about him, and watching him in court—but how much did I truly know? Stretches of his life were a blank: his years of traveling after school, much of the period betw
een his return to Japan and his arrest. I had exhausted the obvious sources of information. His family was hostile and uncooperative; from Obara himself, I had had only evasiveness and writs. The police, who made a fuller reckoning of his life than anyone else, were incurious about anything that could not be used in court. Even Carlos Santana, his most celebrated and unexpected “friend,” refused to talk about him. And long before he had committed any crime, Obara himself had begun the task of erasing himself from his life as he moved through it, of frustrating anyone who might draw out patterns and make connections between the past and present. He changed his eyelids, he changed his name, he changed his nationality. He wore dark glasses and built up his shoes. He avoided the fixing gaze of the camera with the fervor of those isolated peoples who believe that a photograph snatches away a man’s soul. Even his sexual assaults were furtive, the opposite of rape as an assertion of male power: most of his victims, until they were shown the videos recovered by the police, did not know with certainty what had been done to them.

  Was that why he formed so few close relationships? Because friendship, among other things, represented a personal trace, a clue to identity as unique as a fingerprint, left upon the wider world? These days we are all amateur psychiatrists, and the connections between early experience and adult patterns of behavior are readily and sometimes glibly made. In Obara’s case there were obvious pressures on him even as a young boy—the expectations of his mother, the presence of a disturbed older brother, the loss of a father, the covert, instinctive prejudice experienced by all Koreans in Japan, and the dizzying, devastating liberation from duty and discipline brought by his sudden inheritance. But there were countless anxious children in Japan, and millions of disturbed families, spoiled rich kids, and victims of racism, and none but a tiny fraction of them went on to become serial rapists and killers.