Tokyo Vice

by Jake Adelstein

  On July 3, Louise got a very strange call on her cell phone. It was from a Japanese man calling himself “Akira Takagi.” He told Louise, “Lucie has entered a cult in Chiba Prefecture. She can’t come home. Don’t worry about her.”

  Now Louise was very worried. She went to the British Embassy and asked for advice and then went to the Azabu police station to file a missing persons report. The Azabu police did not want to take the case from the outset. However, the embassy had been notified and the mysterious phone call was impossible to ignore. If it hadn’t been for that phone call, there might never have been a real investigation. On the ninth, the TMPD Investigative Division (homicide, robberies and other violent crimes) officially decided to take over the case. It was out of the hands of the local cops and now a problem for headquarters.

  Around that time, I got a call from a senior police reporter, Nishijima, aka Pablo, asking me to help cover the story, though it wasn’t really a story yet; the TMPD hadn’t made an official announcement, and the Yomiuri was just beginning its prep work. The details of Lucie’s disappearance were still very vague. Pablo warned me to keep my mouth shut about it for the time being.

  I liked Pablo a lot; he was a good reporter and a gentleman to boot. Yamamoto and Pablo were both on the TMPD police beat, covering violent crimes and international crimes (Investigative Division 1 and International Crimes Division). Pablo was Yamamoto’s right-hand man.

  Pablo didn’t look like a Japanese guy. He had an American ancestor somewhere in his family tree, giving him an almost Latin look. One of our coworkers used to joke that there were really three foreigners in the National News Department: a Mongolian (Yamamoto), a Jew (myself), and a Mexican (Pablo).

  On the phone, Pablo was refreshingly point-blank: “Well, Jake, it looks like you might actually be useful for a change. The victim is a foreigner and all her friends are foreigners. We need someone who can blend in and also talk to people who know her and her family. That would be you. Are you interested?”

  Absolutely, I assured him.

  Honestly, at the time I thought the whole thing was being overblown. I assumed that Lucie was just another gaijin hostess who had taken off to Thailand or Bali with her boyfriend or her sugar daddy and just forgotten to notify anyone.

  Nonetheless, I applied for permission to abandon my usual duties and help the TMPD team for a few weeks. On July 9, when the investigation officially began, I went to the TMPD headquarters, was waved in, and went up to the ninth floor. Pablo and Yamamoto were waiting for me. Misawa, the boss and captain of the TMPD press club, was passed out on the couch. The office looked the same as it had in 1993, although the copy of Madonna’s Sex had long since vanished from the bookshelf.

  Yamamoto was in good spirits and greeted me warmly. “Jake, long time no see. Still doing heroin?”

  “No, Yamamoto. I’m just selling it to schoolchildren now. I don’t use anymore.”

  “Is that so? No wonder you’re getting so fat.”

  It was true. Not that I had stopped doing heroin (or ever had done heroin), but I had gotten pretty fat.

  Yamamoto, on the other hand, had lost a lot of weight—perhaps too much. Of all the assignments you can get on the police beat, the homicide/violent crimes beat is the toughest. It had taken its toll on him. Vice isn’t an easy beat, but you rarely get called out in the middle of the night for a bust. Vice is not a spontaneous crime. I learned this covering the Fourth District. The social impact of a police raid on a sex club or the seizure of pornographic DVDs was nominal at best and not the kind of news story that required immediate and deep coverage. Most of the time, what the vice squad did, if it was announced at all, never made it into the newspapers. Oh, you had to write up the articles but with the understanding that it was more than likely to be work in vain. Homicide and violent crimes are different. In a country where murders are rare, they are almost always big stories. They happen and are discovered at odd, inconvenient hours, and as news stories they have a real immediacy. You have to be on the scene quickly, and the competition is fierce to get a scoop on those kinds of sensational stories. I didn’t envy Yamamoto.

  Pablo, on the other hand, probably because he was the guy on the ground floor rather than the middle manager, seemed to be entirely in his element. He quickly brought me up to speed on the case, referring to his notes. The cops had the following intel on Lucie at that point in time:

  On the day Lucie vanished, she was last seen wearing a black dress with black sandals and a black bag. Her wallet was of brown alligator skin and folded in half, with a little change inside. She wore a heart-shaped diamond necklace and a square Armani wristwatch. She had worked for close to a year and a half for British Airways as a flight attendant. Her father had not forbidden her to go to Japan; Lucie had money, and he’d sent her money as well. She had told her parents it was possible to go sightseeing in Japan and earn a little money doing odd jobs. She did not intend to stay long.

  The TMPD did not believe the cult story, especially in the context of the previous events. The homicide cops were already convinced that she’d probably been kidnapped and killed by one of the customers from the club. They were highly doubtful that Akira Takagi even existed; he was more than likely a fake identity created by the person responsible for her disappearance.

  They were putting some guys from the homicide squad on the case, including a few detectives who spoke English (or who couldn’t really but wanted to speak English) and had experience with sex crimes. Pablo gave me the names of the detectives in charge. I knew one of them already.

  Yamamoto came over to join us while Pablo continued the briefing.

  “Well, what do you want me to do?”

  Yamamoto took the lead. “We want you to go talk to people at the gaijin house she was staying at and start looking around Roppongi for people who knew her, for anyone who might have been a customer. You must have some friends there, right?”

  In actuality, I avoided Roppongi like the plague. Most of my friends were Japanese. I was more comfortable hanging out in Kabukicho, Shibuya, Ebisu, or even Korea Town. I had Sunao, so I didn’t need to or want to pick up an easy Roppongi girl for some no-strings-attached sex. I didn’t do drugs, nor did I have a fascination with big-breasted foreign strippers, discos, or expensive restaurants. I had no desire to fraternize with other gaijin. Roppongi was as foreign to me as it was to Pablo or Yamamoto.

  So I told that to Yamamoto.

  He just shook his head. “You’re an American, and you don’t go to Roppongi and you don’t know the rules of baseball. You must not be a real American. You’re really a North Korean spy, aren’t you. Confess.”

  Pablo joined in. “Even I go to Roppongi now and then, and I’m Japanese.”

  “Pablo-san, you look more like a foreigner than I do. This is why people call you Pablo. You belong in Roppongi. I’m sure the Filipino girls love you.”

  “Is that so, Adelstein? Hey, at least I don’t look like an Iranian.”

  While Pablo and I were trading crude insults about our ethnic appearances, Yamamoto pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket and handed it to me.

  “What’s this for?”

  “I don’t go to Roppongi much,” explained Yamamoto, “but I know one thing. It’s an expensive playground. Get receipts, if you can.”

  I had no idea where to start looking, but I figured Lucie’s old club would be the best place. Unfortunately, when I arrived, there was a sign on the door stating CLOSED FOR RENOVATION. Not an auspicious start.

  On July 12, the TMPD officially announced that it was conducting an investigation into the disappearance of Lucie Blackman. The Japanese newspaper coverage was subdued, but within days it became a major story in England.

  I was spending every night in Roppongi scouring the streets for anyone who knew Lucie. I came across as so horribly geeky and uncomfortable that no one would talk to me. I had spent so much time immersed in an all-Japanese environment that I was having trouble speaking English. I stuttered.
I probably sounded like a Japanese person trying to speak English. I must have given off a cop vibe.

  And then around July 20, 2000, a very strange letter was delivered to the Azabu police, supposedly from Lucie Blackman herself.

  The letter was postmarked from Chiba Prefecture, where Lucie was supposedly undergoing spiritual training. It told the police and her family to give up searching for her. The Azabu cops thought it was either a cheap prank or an attempt by the assailant to divert the investigation. One of the cops on the squad, whom I knew from the Fourth District, showed me the letter and asked me for my opinion. The cop had a strange name for a Japanese guy, so weird that he had to write the reading of it on his meishi so that people could make sense of it. I also think he had a thyroid condition, because his eyes literally bulged out of his head. His fellow cops, noticing this as cops are prone to do, nicknamed him Googly.

  It was clear to me that the letter had been written by a Japanese person posing as a native speaker. The misuse of “a” and “the” and the stiffness of the prose, combined with a penchant for double negatives, clearly indicated that it had been written by a Japanese national. It was not a bad attempt but not a convincing one either. If I’d gotten anything out of teaching English conversation in Japan, it was a working knowledge of the quirks of Japanese English, aka Japlish. I explained as much to Googly, and he seemed convinced.

  The next day Tim Blackman set up a special hotline to collect information regarding Lucie.

  The first week of August came and went. Lucie had come to Japan on a ninety-day tourist visa. If she was still in Japan, she was now an illegal alien.

  Tim Blackman came back to Japan, and it was a media circus. At a press conference at the British Embassy, he announced a reward of 1.5 million yen (about $15,000) for information leading to the rescue or discovery of Lucie. Meanwhile, the police were slowly uncovering the true identity of the mysterious Akira Takagi but still had no information on the current whereabouts of Lucie.

  Lucie’s birthday came on September 1. She would have been twenty-two.

  I still had nothing solid on Lucie either. The only thing that sounded promising was information about a man who went by the name of Yuji. Yuji had long hair tinged with gray. He was a frequent customer at the foreign hostess clubs in Roppongi, Akasaka, and Ginza. He dressed well and spent copious amounts of money in every club he visited; he preferred blondes. No one had seen Yuji since late June. No one had his business card, and no one had a photo of him either.

  • • •

  Getting information about Lucie would require fitting into the Roppongi nightlife. It couldn’t be done by declaring myself a reporter. A lot of the foreigners there were working illegally. They didn’t trust cops or journos. So I created a fake identity.

  I couldn’t pretend to be a counterculture, hip, cool gaijin guy/DJ/English teacher on the prowl in Roppongi. I’m not the type. The best I could hope for was to be perceived as another well-paid, sleazy foreign businessman. The phenotype was in ample supply, so it wasn’t hard to learn to imitate them. I got a better suit, took off my necktie, chatted up the girls in the bars, and stopped asking too many questions. I contemplated getting an earring, but that seemed as though it would be too much.

  I made up a fake name for myself and an occupation that was close to what I was really doing: an insurance investigator. I made a fake business card, got a second cell phone, and spent every weekend in the dregs of Roppongi looking for someone who knew Lucie or the customer who’d taken her to the seaside.

  I took the information about Yuji and passed it to my boss; I also passed it along to Googly. I thought about sharing my source with Pablo but couldn’t get myself to do it. Sources are things you can’t help but hoard for yourself.

  The only other solid piece of information I had was that Yuji used to frequent a place called Club Codex. I went to check it out. It was run by a Japanese man called Slick.

  As soon as I walked into Club Codex, I knew there was something a little different going on. Oh, it appeared to be a typical hostess club. It had the low lights, the fake potted plants, the velvety sofas and tables, the crystal decanters of whiskey and water perched on tables. However, the clientele seemed a little scruffier than most and the Eastern European women there did not seem to be enjoying themselves. Their smiles were forced; they seemed skittish. At that time, I had no idea what was really going on in the club; later I did. I casually mentioned Yuji to one of the girls and was asked to leave almost immediately. I took that as confirmation that Yuji had been there and that they were aware he was under investigation or going to be under investigation. I had one other piece of information from the trip. The Estonian girl who’d been chatting me up had said, “Yuji? It sounds like you’re talking about Georgie.”

  Georgie? Yuji? The same guy with different aliases? I had no idea.

  I’m not sure the police made contact with Slick after I passed on my information to them or whether Slick made contact with the police on his own. In any event, around this time, Slick began spilling his guts to the TMPD.

  A few years before, one of Slick’s girls had been raped by “Yuji,” a frequent customer at the bar. Yuji had invited her on a leisurely drive to the coast, then taken her to the Izu Marina in Yokohama. Finally he took her to his apartment in Zushi, plied her with wine that was drugged, and then raped her. She’d been furious and wanted to go to the police. Slick had apparently talked her out of it. He had not forbidden Yuji to come to the club after the incident but had warned the girls to be wary of him. He passed along the name of the marina where his employee had been taken and all the information he had. It turned out to be a break for the investigation.

  The other name that kept coming up in talks with the locals was Joji Obara. Obara was a rich real estate owner and property developer, age forty-eight, who frequented the foreign hostess clubs in Roppongi on a regular basis. He sounded a lot like Yuji. I passed on what I had heard to the cops. They had already heard about him.

  By October 1, Obara was definitely a suspect. On October 12, the police arrested him for sexual assault in a different case.

  The press release was very succinct:

  During the course of the initial investigation, a number of assaults against foreign women came to light. In these cases, the perpetrator would approach the foreign women and suggest, “Let’s go look at the ocean” and skillfully verbally entice them into going on a drive. He would give them alcoholic drinks laced with drugs and, after clouding their consciousness, would rape them. We were able to identify the man responsible and arrest him on the twelfth of this month.

  The use of narcotics to incapacitate mostly foreign women and rape them repeatedly is an extremely malevolent crime. The MO used on these women bears a strong resemblance to the circumstances of Lucie Blackman’s disappearance.

  The impact of this crime within Japan and internationally is huge. Therefore, we are expanding the original special investigation unit into a full-fledged Special Investigation Headquarters and devoting more than a hundred officers to getting to the bottom of these cases.

  The man believed to be responsible is Joji Obara, age 48, a company executive.

  He was arrested for sexual assault against a person unable to resist. He is charged with sexually assaulting a foreign woman (age 23 at the time) in March 1996. He met the women at a hostess club in the Fifth Section of Roppongi. He suggested they go look at the ocean, inviting her for a drive, and took her to his apartment in Kanagawa Prefecture. He convinced her to enter his apartment, where he made her drink alcohol and caused her to lose consciousness for several hours and, during that period, sexually assaulted her.

  After the press release was issued, a very short press conference was held. Here’s how it went:

  CHIEF DETECTIVE: Lucie’s connection with Obara’s offense has not been established yet. However, the method of approach is similar, which is to invite women to go to the ocean. This is why it is necessary to build up our formation to a
bout one hundred detectives. It will be a large-scale operation because there are many sources of evidence.

  Q: How many other complaints have there been?

  A: A number. Some women have called in. If we expand the investigation, someone may press charges with the police.

  Q: What about the victims all being foreigners?

  A: There are some Japanese, too, who are in the middle of discussion. They are debating whether to make a report or not.

  Q: Are they all hostesses?

  A: They were at the time.

  Q: How many articles have been confiscated?

  A: A lot. About a few thousand. About a one-ton truckful. I can’t say how many precisely.

  Q: What is there most of?

  A: Some books that are thought to have enticed him. Some documents and videos. We are not dealing with simple sexual assault here but serial assault. Keep that in mind.

  Q: What are the drugs?

  A: Sleep-inducing drugs have been confirmed.

  Q: Halcion?

  A: That and other kinds.

  Q: Where were they found?

  A: Some places related to him.

  Q: How large is the investigation?

  A: About one hundred detectives.

  Q: Who are the principal detectives?

  A: (Names four principal detectives.)

  Q: Who are the section heads?

  A: (Names four section heads.) That is how much effort Division One is putting into this.

  Q: Is the special investigative headquarters set up at the Azabu police station?

  A: Yes. The confiscated articles are at the TMPD headquarters. Azabu is for information gathering.

  I think Googly summed Obara up best: “He’s a sick fuck.”

  The prosecutors would later conclude that “from as early as 1973, Obara would repeatedly lure women into his apartment in Zushi and give them drinks laced with drugs that caused sleepiness or impaired functioning, and when they would lose consciousness he would engage them in illicit sex (or sexually assault them) and then record the acts on videotape or other medium. He called this ‘subjugation play.’”