hear the army

        i feel loved again – sorry for my lapse of that recognition. i am human etc. etc.

thanks for the email replies since i seemed to have disabled comments for those not registered at some point. still didn’t stop the spam from coming in though. they’re good – when i’m not writing i get nothing, but the second the sense movement, the come running. f-in spammers.

did you hear the news? a young british english teacher at nova (fondly coined the mcdonalds of english schools in japan) in tokyo (lindsay hawker) was strangled, placed naked in a bathtub on a porch and covered with sand but an obsessed student she’d agreed to do a private lesson for. somehow he was able to slip away barefoot WHILE police were questioning him!?

let’s face it, there are sickos anywhere but somehow in japan the handling of these crimes just makes it all the more disturbing. reading the article, i recalled reading about lucie blackman, the british hostess who disappeared in 2000 – found dismembered and stuffed into a cave near her killer’s home a year later. and, as you do, looking up her story lead me from one website to another and further and further into shocked disbelief.

another hostess, australian carita ridgeway, died in 1992 after being dropped off unconscious at a hospital by joji obara (a wealthy korean japanese know for his taste in foreign hostesses). when her family pushed the police to investigate her death the were laughed at and told it was a hepatitis related death.

almost 10 years later, a year after the disappearance of lucie, at the insistence of her family based on knowledge that the last person she was seen with was obara, police finally raided his seaside home and found lucie’s body only meters away. inside they found journals stating obara couldn’t have sex with a woman if she was conscious. they also found over 100 home videos recording the sex he had with hundreds of drugged and unconscious western women. one of these women was carita.

10 years before her family knew the truth – that night she had been drugged and raped by obara – when she didn’t regain consciousness he dropped her off at the hospital where she later died.

so, this is japan right? no cushy prisons here – no leniency. i mean, i have a friend who works for the american consulate and she has stories of young kids coming back from a holiday in thailand with a forgotten joint in their bag who were kept in prison for 2 years. and japan has the death penalty. surely with the tapes of the rapes, the receipt for a chainsaw they never found, this man would be dead by now, right?

wrong. he isn’t even on trial for murder. now, japan has an impressive 98% conviction rate and they don’t have juries. what happened? obara never confessed and judges in japan rely on written confessions. somehow the interrogation of a man with the connections and money that obara has doesn’t produce the usual confession. amazingly, they also can’t find the video of lucie or the chainsaw a year after her murder.

onto the next encouraging tidbit. ever heard of issei sagawa? me neither. he was arrested in france in 1981 after he killed and ate part of a dutch woman. sagawa was a brilliant student from a wealthy family. he also is obsessed with foreign women. after being caught dumping the uneaten body in a park he was found legally insane and unfit to stand trial, deported back to japan and admitted into a mental institution. he spent 15 months there and then checked himself out. he’s been free ever since.

sagawa still frequents the foreign hostess bars in tokyo where unknowing young girls freely chat with him and give them their personal phone number. in a 2005 interview by 60 minutes he maintained that the girls have nothing to fear, “Never. Never. At least, um, kill, never. Of course I want to eat the meat of young beautiful girls. It will not change at all, but…”

i can’t help but ask myself – how, HOW do I feel so safe in japan? is it cause i’m over 30 and married? all these girls were no older than 22. but then again – 3 cases in 30 years is pretty good odds though who knows how many southeast asian girls or eastern european/russian women have met the same fate but just didn’t have a family who would/could push the issue with police. i’ve seen groups of russian women at the visa office. all of them with yen signs in their eyes excited at the promising lifestyle as an “entertainer” in wealthy japan. but they don’t hold their passports – there is always a man in a business suit who produces them from a large manila envelope for the officials and returns them there safely after the process is through. who would report their disappearance?