Tokyo Vice

by Jake Adelstein

This wasn’t exactly a quotable comment about the deceased. “What about her husband?” I asked.

  “Not around. She lived with her daughter. People said they weren’t getting along. Something about the daughter’s boyfriend.”

  “Was he a yakuza or just some kind of badass?”

  “Nope. Worse. He was a foreigner.”

  “What kind of foreigner?”

  “Don’t know. I can’t tell the difference,” he said sheepishly. “Looks kind of like you.”

  All right! I thought. We’ve got a suspect! I rang Yamamoto and gave him the news.

  He complimented me on my investigative skills, then filled me in on what he’d learned at the briefing. The Chichibu police had declared it a murder and set up a special investigation headquarters, calling it, unofficially, “The Chichibu Snack-mama Murder Case.”

  Snack-mama had been running her snack bar for close to fifteen years. She usually went to work at five in the afternoon, but when she didn’t show up that day, one of the hostesses went to her apartment. She’d knocked but gotten no answer. The door was locked. Worried, the hostess had the building manager open the door with a key.

  The apartment was orderly, no signs of struggle or burglary, but Snack-mama was dead, lying on her futon, facedown, blood soaked into the mattress. The house was otherwise in order, and nothing appeared to have been stolen.

  A preliminary autopsy suggested that she’d been killed sometime between midnight and early morning that day. The injury suggested that she’d been hit by a rodlike object, maybe a baseball bat, with enough force to kill her instantly. There was one blow to the skull, causing her to bleed to death.

  The last time she’d been seen alive was at 1 A.M., when an employee had dropped her off after work. A friend from high school had telephoned her at 10 A.M. but gotten no answer, corroborating the estimated time of death. The daughter, age twenty-eight, had been seen leaving the house with a man around 2:30 A.M.

  Yamamoto then asked me, “Is the forensic team around?”

  “How would I know that?”

  “They’re wearing blue uniforms that cleverly say FORENSIC DEPARTMENT. They’re looking for the weapon. If you can get a picture of them with the weapon, we’ll use it. I’m sending Frenchie out to help you. Chappy will pick up the picture of the vic.”

  By the time Chappy showed up, it was getting close to dawn. He had brought me some kairo, instant heating pads that would, when pounded and exposed to air, impart the illusion of warmth. I stuffed them into every pocket I had and waited, looking around and hoping to catch something worthwhile.

  The building was still cordoned off, but I could see the forensic guys poking around bushes on the far end of the crime scene, which abutted a field. Other reporters on the scene were canvassing the parking lots in the complex, hoping to talk to people on their way to work.

  I was looking for another angle when I noticed, in the bushes, what appeared to be a drainage ditch and a culvert in an embankment adjacent to the housing complex. I guessed it would lead out to the field and under the yellow tape. Impulsively I decided to see if I was correct.

  I crawled into the culvert and emerged, smudged, right beneath the embankment. I had a great view of the investigators digging through the bushes and brush. I got out my humongous camera with a telephoto lens and started snapping away. Suddenly, I felt a large presence looming over me.

  “You must be Mr. Adelstein,” a voice said.

  I looked up nervously. It was Kanji Yokozawa, the head of the Forensic Department, a veteran homicide detective who commanded wide respect. He was wearing a modified baseball cap and square-cut frameless glasses, and he was clad in the dark blue scrubs of the forensic team, white latex gloves rolled down to his wrists.

  I couldn’t tell if I was in trouble or not. Technically, I was behind the police line. “Ahh, yes, that would be me,” I said conversationally.

  “Mr. Adelstein, I’m wondering how you got past that yellow tape over there.”

  “Well, I crawled through the drainage tunnel.”

  “I see. And are you getting any good photos?”

  “Usable stuff. I was hoping for the magic moment when you find the murder weapon.”

  “If we find it, I’ll let you know. I’ll even pose for the picture. But I don’t think it will be that easy. By the way, as you are scurrying through the fields, if you happen to find something that looks like a murder weapon, a bat, a metal rod, or some blunt object—please don’t touch it. Leave it where it is, but let us know.”

  One thing about Yokozawa, he was always a gentleman, even when he had cause not to be. In homicide, most detectives have pretty short fuses, and they don’t like reporters. Yokozawa was the exception. So I decided to see how far I could go. “As long as you’re here and I’m here,” I began, “do you think I could ask you a few questions?”

  “Yes, you can ask. I may not be able to answer all of them, but I’ll answer what I can.”

  “Thank you, Yokozawa-san,” I said. “First question: The coroner says Snack-mama was killed with a single blow to the head. Lucky shot?”

  “Good question. My guess is that the killer knew exactly what he was doing. Most criminals screw it up and strike again and again, even if the skull was smashed on the first blow. In the tension of the moment, sometimes they whack the shoulders, sometimes they break the victim’s back. Not in this case. In a way, this was a professional job.”

  “A hit man?”

  “No, not like that. Whoever killed her knew how to dispatch someone efficiently. He or she knew how to kill.”

  “So you’re thinking the daughter’s boyfriend?”

  “I can’t answer that. But I will tell you something, and I want you to think about this. The daughter’s boyfriend, he’s Iranian. A lot of the Iranians who are in Japan are ex-soldiers; many fought in the Iraq-Iran War. They know how to kill—with knives, guns, hands, blunt objects. In fact, although you may not quote me on this, many police officers are more afraid of Iranians than they are of the yakuza.”

  “Who do you think locked the door?”

  “Well, it would have had to have been somebody with a key. It’s possible that someone got into the apartment, killed Snack-mama, stole her key, and then locked the door to delay the finding of the body. It’s possible but unlikely. First of all, it’s doubtful Snack-mama would leave the door unlocked or greet someone in her pajamas. So whoever locked the door after killing her probably had a key in the first place.”

  With that Yokozawa nodded and returned to the apartment building. As he left, he mentioned that he thought the case would be wrapped up fairly shortly.

  I stuck around for another hour. I got one out-of-focus shot of a CSI guy in the parking lot, holding a plastic bag with what looked like a bloody sweatshirt inside. I didn’t see anything else of interest.

  Back at the office, we compared notes. According to Yamamoto, the cops were pretty sure that the daughter’s boyfriend had killed Snack-mama. What they didn’t know was if the daughter had put him up to it. The daughter was in shock, questioning was not going well, and the Iranian boyfriend was not to be found.

  In the late 1980s, when the Japanese economy was at its peak and construction was rampant, an agreement between Japan and Iran gave Iranians the opportunity to work in Japan without a visa. Essentially this was part of an unofficial policy of the Japanese government to provide the country with much-needed cheap manual labor, and many Iranians came and stayed (and overstayed).

  At the time, young Japanese were above what was known as 3K jobs: kitanai (dirty), kitsui (difficult), and kurushii (painful). In 1993, when the Japanese bubble deflated, the agreement was canceled, but Chichibu was still a place with enough heavy industry and factories to provide the Iranians with places to work.

  Now, with this murder, the response of the Saitama police was to round up every Iranian working in Chichibu they could find. This was going to take time.

  I did the allotted three days in Chichibu, foll
owing leads, talking to Iranians and factory workers, using the Yomiuri expense account for drinks in seedy hostess clubs with Chappy, and going to press conferences where there was less and less information to be disseminated. And I got stuck covering the funeral.

  Articles about funerals, with minor variations, follow the same pattern: funerals are carried out “quietly and somberly.” You can always hear “muffled sobbing” from the crowd. Even if the relatives of the deceased were having a fine time at the wake the night before, laughing and remembering good times with the deceased and getting rip-roaring drunk, that’s never what appears in the paper.

  I really dreaded going to this one, and I had a legitimate reason. By now, everyone in the town knew that the chief suspect was the daughter’s Iranian boyfriend. I’m Jewish, with typical Jewish features—dark hair, olive skin, big nose. I could pass as an Iranian. I had visions of being mistaken for the suspect and trampled to death in front of the funeral pyre.

  I protested to Yamamoto, but to no avail.

  The turnout was huge. The victim’s daughter was there (we were told to get her picture since she was still a suspect), along with relatives and customers. All in all, about ninety people, all dressed in proper funereal black.

  After the services had been conducted and everyone had placed incense on the charcoal brazier and bowed to the photo of the victim, the victim’s younger brother spoke on behalf of the relatives. “She was a wonderful sister. She always looked after people with dedication and attention. When I think about what happened to her, I’m just so angry. What am I supposed to do with this anger? Who can I take it out on?”

  He paused, and it sure as hell seemed as if he were staring at me. In fact, except for the daughter, it seemed as if all ninety mourners were staring at me. I nervously pulled on my Yomiuri armband, hoping it would deflect some of the fury aimed my way. Then some little boy’s voice broke the silence: “I have to go to the toilet! I can’t wait! I’m going to pee on the floor if I don’t go now!” Nervous titters filled the room, and everyone’s eyes slowly left me.

  I would have liked to have gone home and crashed after that, but three days of sports records, event blurbs, and birth announcements had to be written up. I stayed at the office until one in the morning, checking to make sure we’d inputted the records correctly. I got a migraine from two hours of reading the scrawled cursive Japanese of the mothers who’d sent in pictures of their little whelps for publication. Chappy and I amused ourselves by making up rude captions such as, “I’m not slobbering because I’m an infant, I’m slobbering because Mom has great tits!” or “If you think I have a hairy face, you should see the hair on my tongue!” But eventually we had to finish the work.

  I bicycled home at two in the morning. The apartment was empty. A note from I-chan lay on the futon: “It’s over.”

  Her stuff was gone. She’d made up the futon and washed the dishes in the sink, even cleaned out the bathtub and taken out the trash. It was the most considerate breakup I’d ever experienced. I lay down on the futon in my suit and thought about calling her. I was still thinking about it when I fell asleep. And that was that.

  Yamamoto decided that I needed to start doing the night rounds at Yokozawa’s home. Yokozawa seemed to like me, he’d shared some information with me before, and Yamamoto was hoping he’d do it again—that is, leak something, anything, that would put us ahead of the competition on this story.

  When I knocked on the door of Yokozawa’s apartment, his wife answered. It was early evening, but he was home, lounging on the sofa in his bathrobe. He told me that most reporters knocked on his door only after ten at night, and he asked me not to tell anyone that he actually came home earlier than that. I laughed and agreed.

  We chatted about the weather and my life in Japan and finally got around to the Chichibu case. He implied that a weapon had been found, but he wouldn’t be pinned down. I kept mental notes; it’s taboo for a reporter to take notes with a cop on the night rounds. That would dismantle the illusion that you are just two professionals making small talk, that you’re not really trying to get some information. The rules aren’t hard and fast, but generally speaking, what you pick up from a cop over drinks is never something that you can attribute to that person by name. If there’s enough material to write an article, it’s always “sources close to the investigation” or “the Saitama police.”

  Drinking is important for the police, too, because it gives them plausible deniability. The cop can say, “No, I never told that reporter anything. Well, we were drunk and maybe something slipped out. I can’t remember.”

  Yokozawa and I discussed the fine points of the case for about half an hour, after which I went to the nearest telephone booth and called Yamamoto. I repeated the conversation as best I could, word for word. He told me I’d done great work and that he’d pass on the information. I had no idea if anything I’d said was important, but I guess Yamamoto understood the subtext, the bigger picture. I was too ashamed (yes, ashamed) to ask him exactly what had been useful.

  The next morning at the press club, Yamamoto and Ono came in early and scrambled to get an article in the evening edition. We had the scoop, and the headline read, “Snack-mama Murder: Saitama Police to Arrest Iranian Boyfriend of Victim’s Eldest2* Daughter.”

  The article noted that the police were about to arrest an Iranian who had already been prosecuted for immigration violations. Forensics had determined the culprit’s identity through a bloodstained sweatshirt, a pair of pants with a key to the apartment in a pocket, and a bloodstained metal tool that had been found in the general area of the crime scene. The police had requested an arrest warrant and were expecting to serve it within the day.

  It was a clean scoop. Not the investigative journalism kind of scoop, but the much-esteemed “we-wrote-it-before-the-police-announced-it” class of scoop. The police did arrest the boyfriend within the day, and the Asahi, our natural enemy in the newspaper world, was forced to follow up later.

  I spoke that night with Yokozawa, who congratulated me on the scoop. I was duly modest; the fact was, I still didn’t know what I’d done. According to the forensics chief, the boyfriend had killed snack-mama because she didn’t want him to marry her daughter. He refused to admit his guilt, however, and claimed, “This is a police trap—I’ve been framed.”

  But as far as I was concerned, the case was finished. I didn’t think about it again until almost a year later.

  I was eating yakisoba at Omiya station when Takahashi, the newbie, rang me. It was a hysterical call, the same kind I used to make as a freshman when I was overwhelmed by unfolding news and three people were barking different commands at the same time. I finally got him to read me the press release.

  The gist of the first bulletin was this: The body of a young Japanese female had been found in Maruyama Park in Ageo. She’d been strangled with a lady’s scarf. Color of scarf? Not yet released.

  I could hear Yamamoto yelling in the background for me to get to the crime scene. So off I sped to Maruyama Park.

  Typically, parks in Tokyo and Saitama urban areas are giant parking lots with a couple of swing sets, teeter-totters, and sparse vegetation struggling to survive. But Maruyama Park was the real thing, with wide expanses of grass and groves of trees. The victim had been found in some bushes behind a gazebo in the center of the park.

  The police had attempted to cordon off the entire park but had been thwarted by mothers angry that they had no place to take their children to play. So the off-limits area was confined to the area immediately surrounding the crime scene. By the time I got there, the yellow tape was flanked by a crowd of curious housewives, park workers, loafing salarymen, students with nothing better to do, and senior citizens out for a stroll. Of course, reporters were already roaming around the park, looking for anything that would help make the story more coherent.

  Since getting close to the crime scene was out of the question, I decided to join my fellow journalists in canvassing the parkgoers.
Any suspicious activities? Did local gangs hang out in the park? Was the park a popular place for kids to make out? Was the park safe?

  One toothless older man dressed in a golf shirt, jeans, and sandals said a lot of Iranians had been hanging out in the park recently. He figured they were out of work and killing time or maybe exchanging information about where to find work. When the first police car showed up this afternoon, he had watched them vanish. It was the best piece of information I had after an hour of work.

  I called Nakajima and told him what I’d just learned.

  “Shit! Try to find someone who saw something. Yamamoto is heading to the press conference. We’ll keep you posted.”

  I walked around the park talking to people but came up with nothing further. I could see police officers doing the same thing, but the usual army of blue-uniformed forensic guys wasn’t present. The police were so sure the scarf was the murder weapon that they didn’t bother scouring the park for anything else.

  When I next checked in with the office, Yamamoto wanted me to go with him to the press conference at the police station. My job would be to take notes and relay them back to people putting the story together for the next edition. (They’d begun trusting my ability to comprehend Japanese—or maybe they’d run out of personnel. My Japanese skills were up to junior high school level.)

  Saeki, the head of Saitama homicide, was running the press conference. He had bad skin and thick glasses, and even though he was at least twenty pounds overweight, he still managed to find suits that were baggy on him. He was growing bald, so he combed his hair, grown long on the sides, over the bald part on top, producing the hairstyle known in Japan as a “bar code.” Saeki also had a reputation as an extraordinary cop. I annoyed the hell out of him, for reasons I never understood, so I was glad Yamamoto was along to ask questions.

  The conference started with a biography of the twenty-three-year-old victim, followed by a barrage of extremely precise but not necessarily important questions that reporters have to ask. Where was the body located? Which way were the feet pointed? Was the body faceup? Which direction was her head pointed toward? (This last question is actually relevant. Japanese usually lay out corpses with the head facing north, so if the body was laid out that way, it might indicate a Japanese murderer feeling remorse.)