Monday, May. 07, 2001

By Evan Alan Wright - Tokyo

Roppongi, where she eventually found work at a hostess bar called Casablanca, is the neon-lit playground of this civilization in decline, where Japanese Neros go to fiddle while their economy burns, where saked-up salarymen nuzzle Russian strippers and tea-haired twenty-somethings look to score designer drugs. The district is home to scores of dives, cafe strip clubs, casinos and after-hours clubs catering to foreigners and to Japanese who like to hang out with them. The crowd?American bond-traders in Brooks Brothers suits, visiting models, second-rate rock stars, African bouncers, Israeli street vendors, drunken U.S. Marines, Pakistani pimps and assorted polyglot freaks?reinforced the notion of Roppongi as ground zero for Tokyo's gilded, fecund nightlife.

Lucie had come because she had heard there was a fortune to be made in this glittering district simply by pouring drinks and making small talk with Japanese businessmen. To Western girls with a streak of adventure, this Japan has a curious appeal. They find out about hostessing while touring Asia, perhaps, and encountering women returning from Japan who tell stories about the big money. Some answer employment agency ads in overseas newspapers to work in Japan as "dancers" or "entertainers"?only to find themselves hostessing. Others are just passing through Tokyo, perhaps as the first stop on an Asian itinerary, and see there is easy money to be made rapping to inebriated Japanese. It was a friend's older sister in London who first told Lucie about the opportunities for an attractive young woman in Japan.

Very loosely descended from the geisha house tradition, hostess bars hire out women by the hour to act as companions for customers. Hostesses are not prostitutes; they are more like paid, platonic girlfriends. They may choose to sleep with a client, they may not. Although there are no official numbers on how many women work in hostess bars, it's estimated that hundreds of thousands labor throughout Japan in what is surely a multibillion-dollar industry. For the salaryman customers, hostess bars, with their posh atmosphere, beautiful women and steady flow of drinks, are a choice venue in which to try to impress a client or close a business deal. Most hostess clubs employ Japanese and other Asian women, but beginning in the early 1980s, more and more began to stock Western women. Of all the hostesses in Japan, the highest paid tend to be pretty, English-speaking, Caucasian, blond. Lucie met every requirement.

The first few weeks for a novice hostess can be disorienting. First of all there are the hours. You become a purely nocturnal creature, showing up for work at about 9 p.m., finishing at around 2 a.m., and then unwinding until dawn at bars like Gas Panic or higher-priced clubs like Lexington Queen. The girls earn $150 to $400 a night in salary, in addition to the perquisites and gifts that adoring customers shower on them. But in this saturnalian spectacle there are even more opportunities to burn the money. In addition to the booze, clubs and clothes, there are the drugs?ecstasy, pot, cocaine?in which too many girls indulge. The cycle didn't make sense at first to Lucie?work in a bar for five hours and then go out to more bars and clubs to unwind?but after spending whole nights pretending to laugh at idiotic jokes or feigning understanding of some drunken salaryman's broken English, it didn't hurt to blow off some steam.

Equally confusing to Lucie were the peculiarities of the business. For example, every evening between 9:00 and 10:00 when the clubs were just opening up, a steady stream of Nissan Cimas and Jaguar S-TYPEs pulled to the curbs in front of the six- and seven-story buildings housing the hostess bars to drop off foreign girls in their knocked-off finest. The girls, nearly always Caucasian and usually in their early 20s, insouciantly climbed out through doors held open by men who were always Japanese and usually twice their age. The girls cut through the Roppongi sidewalk with a disinterested air, telegraphing sexiness and unobtainability with each click of their high heels on the pavement. This curbside ritual was part of a hostess club custom called the dohan. The men dropping them off were loyal customers of hostess clubs who paid additional fees to take the hostess to dinner and then deliver her to work.

Lucie Blackman hated it all when she first arrived. The hours. The pressure to go out on dohans. She had worked for two years on BA's long-haul routes to Africa and the Americas, but she had seldom been away from her family home?where she still lived with her mother and younger sister and brother?in the London suburb of Sevenoaks, Kent, for more than four days in a row. After arriving in Tokyo, she phoned and e-mailed family almost daily, telling them she was homesick.

She had quit her job as a stewardess because, she complained to her sister, it left her feeling "permanently jet-lagged." Her annual salary at BA had been $18,700. A good hostess could earn that in two months. Before even boarding that flight for Tokyo she was anti-cipating the hostessing windfall, charging $1,400 to her credit card to buy a new bed that she planned to use when she returned from Japan. "Lucie was not the most intelligent person," says her sister Sophie, "nor was she stupid. She did the things a normal 21-year-old would do."

Lucie e-mailed her sister that working in the club was "like being an air hostess without the altitude." She phoned her mother once to tell her that a customer had offered her "a fantastic sum of money to sleep with him." Lucie said she laughed off the proposal, reminding her mother that her job was to pour drinks, light cigarettes and "discuss boring subjects like volcanoes." She confessed to Sophie that sometimes her customers spoke English with such thick accents, all she could do was nod. "I can't believe I am paid so much money just to pretend I am listening to them," she reported.

Lucie and Louise Phillips, a friend who came with her to Tokyo from England, shared a room in the Yoyogi gaijin house. By the start of her second month in Tokyo, Lucie hadn't managed to save any money, but she was beginning to make peace with her Tokyo environs. Continuing to e-mail her sister nearly every day, she told her she was earning the equivalent of $1,450 a week. And she expected her earnings to increase as customers more frequently requested her. She was enjoying the Roppongi nightlife and had gone on a few actual dates, as opposed to dohans, with an American, Scott Fraser, a young Marine stationed on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Kittyhawk.

On July 1, a Saturday, Lucie went on a dohan with a customer from Casablanca. The man, whose name Lucie did not share with anyone, had offered her a prepaid mobile phone if she would accompany him to a restaurant near the beach. Her roommate Louise was still in bed in their six-tatami matted room when Lucie left. Louise recalls glimpsing Lucie on her way out in sandals and a black one-piece dress, and a silver necklace with hearts on it. They had plans to see each other in the evening, along with Scott. Lucie phoned Louise three times that day, first at 1:30 to say she had met her lunch date, then at 5:00 saying, "I'm being taken to the sea" and finally at 7:00 when she said, "I'll be back in half an hour." She phoned Scott a few minutes later with the same message. No one heard from her again.

The next day, Phillips received a call on her cell phone from a man who spoke in a thick accent and identified himself as Akira Takagi. He told her: "Lucie has joined a newly risen cult. She is safe and training in a hut in Chiba."

The white stucco four-story apartment building on the rocky, windswept Miura coast is called the Blue Sea. The palm tree in front is lashed down with ropes to keep it from blowing over. But the views of the sailboat marina and rugged coastline are spectacular. It's a tony area: Japan's best-known actor of the 1960s, Toshiro Mifune, lived a few hundred meters down the coast until he died a few years ago. It takes no more than 60 seconds to walk from the front lobby of the Blue Sea to the spot where Lucie's remains were discovered.

The killer had only one direction to go when he carried Lucie's body parts from his apartment. A driveway turns out to the right of the front door; the marina is straight ahead. To the left there is a small parking lot, then a narrow path leading across stones and cement pilings to the tiny beach, which is maybe one-quarter the area of a tennis court. Five meters back from the water is a rock face with a crevice a couple of meters wide extending a few meters from the beach. It is partially open on top, and light streams into it. There used to be a discarded bathtub there among pieces of trash blown in by the wind. During the four months when Tokyo Metropolitan Police officers, with assistance from elements of the Self-Defense Force, combed the area, no one bothered to look beneath the discarded tub. Eventually, at about 9:00 a.m. on Feb. 9, police revisited the cave they had already searched in the fall. Poking around by the bathtub, they found Lucie's body cut into eight pieces, buried approximately 50 cm beneath the sand. At first, investigators couldn't identify the corpse. The head had been entombed in cement. The body parts were so badly decayed that their gender could not even be determined. When postmortem examiners cut into the cement encasing the head in hopes of finding teeth to match with dental records, they immediately found one identifiable feature, unmistakably foreign: long, natural blond hair.

The last time Sophie Blackman saw her older sister alive had been at 4 a.m. the day Lucie left for Japan. Before going to the airport, Lucie had climbed into Sophie's bed. She had intended to give Lucie a card wishing her good luck, but instead she produced an 18-page letter. "Lucie had a beautiful soul," says Sophie. "I wanted to tell her what she meant to me."

Unlike her sister who hadn't really figured out what she wanted to do with her life, Sophie had worked as a cardiac technician at a local hospital for more than a year. She found the work rewarding. It probably also helped train her to react swiftly and with methodical detachment in a crisis.

Lucie's mother Jane had been preparing a care package for Lucie of cold medicine and her favorite "pick-and- mix" snacks from Woolworth's when Phillips called the Blackmans' house on July 3. Lucie's parents, Tim and Jane, both in their mid-40s, had separated five years earlier. Tim lived one-and-a-half hours away on the Isle of Wight in an apartment with his girlfriend. The girls lived with their mother and 17-year-old brother, Rupert. They were renters, not owners, but comfortably middle class. Everyone except Rupert worked. Jane was a therapist for cancer patients. Tim had a small home-building company.

That Monday when Jane Blackman received the call, she phoned Sophie at work. Sophie made arrangements to fly to Tokyo. Tim Blackman, planning for the worst, went to his bank and secured a line of credit for $29,000. Ultimately, he would spend nearly $145,000?most of it contributed by relatives? searching for Lucie.

Sophie left for Tokyo the next day and arrived on July 5. Tim Blackman came a few days later, after turning over day-to-day operations of his business to his partners. Sophie remembers not sleeping for her first eight days in Tokyo, sweating from the intense heat and becoming disoriented in labyrinthine train stations. In their first two weeks, she and her father printed and distributed 30,000 posters with Lucie's picture on them. They talked to anyone who might have known her. They met with police. They held a press conference. Sophie says, "We wanted to make it impossible for anyone to say, 'We're not investigating this.'"

That was the problem, as far as Tim saw it. Among all the possible leads, the most traceable should have been the four calls that had been placed during and after Lucie's dohan?in particular, the three that Lucie had made on a cell phone provided by her "date." Tim says: "The authorities told us that they were unable to get any information due to privacy laws, and they said the technical means of doing so was beyond the capability of Japanese telecom companies."

Tim Blackman also wondered why the owner of the club where Lucie had worked was unable to provide police with any solid information about the customer his daughter had met while working there. "My daughter was introduced to this man at the club she worked in a few days before she disappeared. How could the club owner not know anything about him?" The family couldn't help but wonder if the police had other motives for dragging their feet. "My sister was working in Japan illegally," says Sophie. "We were afraid that some people might take the attitude that whatever happened serves her right."

Of the roughly 300,000 illegal foreign workers estimated to be in Japan, about a third are women employed in the mizushobai, or water trade, the catchall phrase for the sex-entertainment industry. While most of the economy has stagnated in the 10 years since the bubble collapsed, the water trade has boomed.

Most English-speaking Caucasian women working in Roppongi's hostess clubs don't realize they are part of the mizushobai. Within it they occupy a privileged position compared with the tens of thousands of Asian women who work in storefront shops churning out sex acts for prices listed on menu boards. Nor do hostesses encounter the obvious dangers faced by the hundreds of South American women, some as young as 16, who openly work as prostitutes on central Tokyo's backstreets.

Within the mizushobai, Caucasian hostesses are essentially paid the most for doing the least, but this does not shield them from stigma. "Some hostesses don't consider themselves part of the mizushobai because they are not having sexual intercourse," says Mizuho Fukushima, member of the Upper House of Japan's parliament and a high-profile women's rights advocate. "But people outside consider what they are doing part of the sex industry." Before she entered government, Fukushima in 1989 helped establish a private center called Help, which has assisted more than 2,000 women?most of them Asian but including an increasing number from Russia and South America?who have suffered from abuses such as coerced prostitution, physical intimidation and assault. Fukushima says, "I have taken foreign women who have been beaten up to the police or to the immigration department who have said to my face, 'What are you doing here? These women are here illegally.'" She adds that the officials try to justify turning away such cases, arguing: "What were these women expecting when they came here illegally?"

What is most troubling, says Fukushima, are the foreign women, mostly Asian, who have disappeared or died under mysterious circumstances over the years. "They are undocumented, so we don't have good numbers," she says. "The media barely covered this problem until Lucie's case. All of a sudden it was news when a white girl disappeared."

It also helped that the Blackmans worked every possible angle in pushing their investigation. A friend of Tim's who had once worked as an airport limo driver in London had given several rides to Sir Richard Branson, legendary founder of Virgin Enterprises. The driver phoned Sir Richard's office and, a few days later, Virgin offered to help the Blackmans open a Tokyo office for their investigation.

Tim and Jane Blackman called and e-mailed the British foreign ministry, until they worked their way up to Prime Minster Tony Blair's office. By coincidence, Blair was scheduled to be in Japan on July 21 for the Group of Eight economic summit in Okinawa. Blair raised the issue of Lucie's disappearance with his Japanese counterpart, Yoshiro Mori. The high-level contacts brought immediate results. Soon after the G-8 meeting, Tim Blackman says, "I was told by the police that they had suddenly solved all of the technical and legal problems in tracing the phone calls."

Meanwhile, leads began to pour into a hot line the Blackmans had set up in Tokyo. Three foreign women came forward with remarkably similar stories. Each had been working at Roppongi hostess clubs within the past few years and gone on a dohan to a seaside restaurant with a wealthy, well-dressed Japanese businessman. Each of the women reported blacking out and waking up hours or days later in this man's apartment. He used a different pseudonym with each girl, calling himself "Kazu," "Yuji" or "Koji."

By the end of July, Lucie's face was on the front pages of Japan's and overseas newspapers. TV reporters descended on the Blackmans, following their every Tokyo move. Many articles dwelled on the seamier aspects of Roppongi and speculated that Lucie had been caught up in drugs or an S&M cult. By the time her body was discovered, her face was known to virtually everyone in Japan. Her disappearance had been as obsessively covered locally as the O.J. Simpson trial had been in America, exploring as it did similarly complex racial issues, only this time through a Japanese mirror. The blondness of the victim, the assumed Japaneseness of the murderer, so many issues could be read into this case: How does Japan deal with foreigners? How does this society dehumanize women? And most importantly, what does the crime say about Japan's moral state? The media had a field day discussing these and other issues as Lucie became a cause for national soul-searching and head-scratching, yet another reminder that something, ineffably, was very wrong.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police would eventually assign more officers to this case than it had to the 1995 sarin gas attack in the city subway system that had killed 12 and injured 5,500. They finally got their suspect on Oct. 12 when a 48-year-old Japanese businessman named Joji Obara was detained in connection with Lucie's disappearance. On April 6, Obara, who has steadfastly maintained his innocence, was charged with her death: a rape that apparently turned into murder. Police officials, speaking off the record to the Japanese press, suggest he may have raped as many as 200 women over a two-and-a-half decade span, a crime spree to which, TIME has learned, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police had been alerted before Lucie's death.

While Joji Obara awaits trial for killing Lucie, and the case mounts against him as one of the most prolific serial rapists ever caught, he has become a symbol to some Japanese of the malaise of the post-bubble economy and its moral aftermath.

If there is one career path that captures the essence of post-bubble Japan, it is "failed real estate speculator." During the '80s and early '90s, real estate speculation had been the frothy center of Japan's double-espresso economy, with developers and brokers becoming that era's version of the more recent dotcom billionaires. Speculators like Joji Obara were the heroes of Japan's go-go era, driving their Bentleys and Rolls Royces, living in their mansions, dating their exotic blond girlfriends. This was the period, remember, when Japan was going to take over the world. Men like Joji Obara cast themselves as the Fibe Mini warriors on the vanguard of this Japanese invasion. Naoko Tomono, a journalist who has written extensively about Lucie's case for the weekly magazine Shukan Bunshon, offers a surprising insight into how some men in Obara's age group perceive his infamy as a serial rapist: "They respect him as a man comfortable going to expensive bars and picking up Western girls." Susumu Oda, professor of psychiatry at Gakuin University, who has worked with authorities on other high-profile criminal cases, says Obara is a "peculiar symbol" of men of his generation, "because he was obsessed with Caucasian women."

Obara's decline?his firm collapsed, his banks called in their loans?is also a parable for Japan's economic journey. And like most of his countrymen, the downturn didn't affect his lifestyle. His lavish habits continued; he kept his Ferrari, vintage red Rolls Royce Silver Cloud, his condominiums by the sea in Miura. Driving his Ferrari around Roppongi, he was a curious figure with his droopy mustache and surgically altered, Westernized eyes. At 1.7 m tall, he wore shoe lifts and took regular doses of human growth hormone under the mistaken belief it would make him taller.

It is at Obara's Den'en Chofu mansion that the shabby decadence of his post-bubble lifestyle comes into stark focus. The mod 1960s design rises up behind a gated drive, with surveillance cameras poking out from bushes. At the height of the bubble it was worth more than $25 million. Liens were filed against this property when his firm went bust in the early 1990s. Obara continued to frequent the house up until his arrest, letting it slide, like some Dorian Gray portrait of Japan's national psyche, into a state of advanced decay, with rust flaking off the exterior ironwork and bricks crumbling from the walls. A Maserati, a Bentley and an early 1960s Aston Martin are parked in the yard. The cars have flat tires. There is trash everywhere. Keeping watch by a side door is a life-size statue of a German shepherd, with bared ceramic fangs and a pink tongue that glistens in the sunlight.

When police searched the home, they also found a real German shepherd frozen in a solid block in a large freezer next to a bouquet of roses and some dog food. Obara would later say he had preserved it with the hope that, one day, science would enable him to "reanimate my loving pet into a clone dog." Strange as it was, the dog fits a pattern Obara had of hoarding personal detritus. There were stacks of old car batteries, trashed TV sets, receipts, journals and personal tape recordings dating back to the 1970s. The biggest haul comprised more than 200 videotapes showing dozens of apparently unconscious women being assaulted by Obara, who, in many of the tapes according to a police source, wears nothing but a Zorro mask. (There are similarities between Obara's alleged crimes and videos and the theme commonly depicted in Japanese pornography of men having intercourse with sleeping women. Called yobai, there are even sex shops in Tokyo called "image clubs" where men pay to fondle and have intercourse with prostitutes feigning sleep. These contemporary forms of yobai are a bastardization of folklore myths about young men taking brides in their sleep. Yobai was even a theme of a novel by Nobel Prize-winning writer Yasunari Kawabata.)

Joji Obara was born in 1952 to an impoverished Korean family in postwar Osaka. His father had been a scrap collector, then a taxi driver who worked his way into owning a fleet of cars and a string of pachinko parlors from which he amassed a fortune. Perhaps mindful of the discrimination faced by Koreans, when the young Obara? then known by his Korean name Kim?was asked to pen a farewell sentiment in his junior-high class yearbook, he wrote: "Upbringing is more important than family name."

At 15 he was accepted into Japan's most high school, a Yokohoma prep school affiliated with prestigious Keio University. To facilitate Obara's entry to the school his father purchased the Den'en Chofu mansion and sent the boy to live there with a maid. When Obara was 17, his father died, leaving holdings in Tokyo and Osaka to his son.

By 1981 Obara had graduated from Keio University (alma mater of newly elected Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi) with degrees in politics and law, become a naturalized Japanese citizen and legally changed his name to Obara. Once he had expunged his Korean lineage, Obara, with his wealth and his educational background, could have entered the nation's ruling, becoming, perhaps, a top bureaucrat or corporate chieftain. Instead he became a man of his times, leading a desultory, undistinguished existence, punctuated by his disastrous forays into real estate speculation. He formed an investment company, Plant, in 1988, relatively late in the bubble cycle. When the economy collapsed, nearly taking Obara's assets with it, his mother, who still controlled the lucrative pachinko operations, helped bail her son out, at one point paying off a creditor nearly $33 million in cash. Following these business failings, Obara's company reportedly became a front for the Sumiyoshi yakuza?branded Japan's second-largest organized crime syndicate by the national police?who kept him afloat by employing him as a straw man for their money-laundering operations.

Obara hid from cameras his entire life. Few photos of him have been unearthed other than a grainy 1970s shot. Former employees at his real estate company say he forbade them to take pictures of him. During the day he invariably wore sunglasses. Cell phone records obtained by police after his arrest indicate he had become a nocturnal creature, making most of his phone calls between sundown and sunrise while he restlessly cruised between his seacoast apartments and central Tokyo residences.

Prior to his arrest in connection with Lucie's disappearance, Obara had one notable brush with the law. In 1998 he was arrested in a women's restroom in a beach town called Shirahama in Wakayama prefecture. Obara was in drag, and he was attempting to videotape a woman using the toilets. He was charged with a misdemeanor and fined $75.

After Obara's arrest in connection with Lucie's disappearance, a sharper image of his personal life emerged. In contrast to his occluded public persona, Obara's private obsessions are delineated in excruciating detail. He wrote journals and dictated audio diaries on cassette tapes starting in the early 1970s. Police have leaked some of Obara's most incriminating entries to Japanese reporters like Mamoru Kadowaki of the Weekly Shincho magazine. According to Kadowaki one of Obara's most troubling entries, presented in vaguely poetic form, includes the lines, "Women are only good for sex. I will lie to them. I will seek revenge. Revenge on the world."

In 1983 his journals make their first references to "conquer play," a euphemism, prosecutors say, Obara used to describe his assaults on women. Journals between 1983 and 1995 include the names of more than 200 women, beside which Obara wrote code words, 29 of which, investigators believe, refer to drugs. Police recovered more than a dozen different varieties of drugs from Obara's homes?from sleeping pills to chloroform to human growth hormone. In his diaries, he mentions drugs frequently, at one point declaring, "I am so bored with pot, hash and LSD." But if there were any doubts about his main interest, these were dispelled by an entry in which he stated, "I can not do women who are conscious."

When police arrested Obara in early October, he initially denied knowing who Lucie Blackman was. Police found blond hairs that matched Lucie's in one of Obara's seacoast condominiums, then a roll of film that contained pictures of her taken near the same dwelling. But without a body, they were unable to bring charges against him. Police culled Obara's videos and journals for other victims. The three foreign hostesses agreed to cooperate with the prosecution, and Obara was charged with several counts of rape.

In a rambling November letter to the media, Obara countered: "These ladies who are supposed to be victims are all foreign hostesses or sex club girls. Many took cocaine or other drugs in front of me, and all of them agreed to have sex for money." The women told a different story. He met them in hostess clubs, invited them on dohans, drove them to the sea and lured them into his condominium using a variety of methods. He invited one woman over, offering to cook her dinner. He asked another to accompany him to a party later in the evening. In the meantime they could watch a Mariah Carey concert on TV at his condo. Another, he simply drove to his building and asked to help him carry up some boxes from his car.

Once he got them inside, he would keep the conversation light. Inevitably he would urge them to try a rare wine which he would tell them came from India or the Philippines. To account for the funny taste of this drug-laced beverage, Obara told his victims it contained special herbs. There was one victim he coaxed into making a "good luck" toast that required her to down the entire glass in a single gulp. If she didn't drink it all, he warned her, she wouldn't have good luck.

Videotapes then tell the rest of the story. According to court documents filed by the prosecution, the tapes show Obara lugging unconscious women onto his bed. He must have struggled with some. Lucie was a good 5 cm taller than he was. Police have leaked details of his having tied some of the women down, penetrating them with foreign objects and sodomizing many of them. He would assault most victims for 12 hours or more. To insure they remained unconscious, he would place a cloth soaked in a drug, known to be chloroform in at least one case, over their mouths. He captured his assaults on tape using professional video equipment and lights. One of his victims sustained burns when he left a hot light too close to her body.

Obara's women would awaken 24 or even 48 hours later, sick and disoriented from the drugs. Chloroform is toxic to the liver and can be fatal. Each of the women recounted waking up vomiting, being unable to stand, crawling on her hands and knees to the bathroom. Few had any idea what had happened. Obara would sometimes dress them back in their own clothes before they regained consciousness. Then, he would always have a story. He told one woman: "You are such a fun girl. You drank an entire bottle of vodka." He told another there had been a gas leak. The woman with the burned skin, who had been unconscious on and off for more than 36 hours, was told she had become drunk and fallen over.

In addition to the witnesses against Obara, police discovered hospital receipts linking him to a former Roppongi hostess, an Australian named Carita Ridgeway. In 1992 he took a gravely ill Ridgeway to Hideshima hospital, telling nurses she had eaten bad shellfish. Ridgeway was erroneously diagnosed as suffering from liver failure as a result of eating seafood tainted with the virus that causes hepatitis. After she died a few days later, Obara even comforted her parents when they came to take her body home. Due to an administrative fluke, Ridgeway's liver had been preserved at Tokyo Women's Hospital, where the autopsy had originally been performed. Last autumn, after Obara came under investigation for Lucie's disappearance and his other assaults, medical examiners tested Ridgeway's liver for chloroform, which proved to be present in toxic levels. Obara was charged in connection with her death.

If anything, the arrest of Obara proved even more agonizing for the Blackmans. In addition to what they had learned about his assaults on other women, police leaked disturbing details of his activities during the first days of Lucie's disappearance. Late on the night of July 2, Obara called area hospitals asking how to treat a victim of a drug overdose.

On July 3 Obara purchased a chainsaw, cement mix and other tools from a hardware store. That afternoon, the manager of Obara's seaside condominium in Miura called police to report a tenant who was behaving suspiciously. Even in the terse language of police reports leaked to the media, the scene that afternoon at Obara's apartment has a Hitchcock-like caste. Obara had cement mix on his hands when he greeted the police at his door. Suspicious, they asked to look around his apartment. Obara consented, but then became agitated when the police asked to look in his bathroom. When he refused to let them in, the police left without pressing the issue further.

Neighbors subsequently reported seeing Obara that evening pacing the small, 15-m-wide beach adjacent to his apartment building. The next day, records showed Obara was treated at a hospital for extensive bug bites as a result of being outside all night. Despite all this information, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police failed to thoroughly search the area around Obara's apartment until early February.

Many in Japan, even hardened reporters, bought into a myth that the police had known the location of Lucie's remains for months. Respected weeklies hinted that the remains had been left undisturbed in order to somehow trap Obara. The reality is, the police blew the murder case against Obara by failing to discover the body much sooner. Lucie's corpse was so badly decayed, the autopsy was unable to reveal her cause of death. Authorities have hinted they possess a video of Obara assaulting Lucie, but without proof of chloroform in her liver, they cannot directly link Obara to her murder.

Even more serious allegations of police ineptitude have been raised by Kazuo Iizuka, the owner of Club Cadeau, another Roppongi hostess joint. Iizuka says that on a Saturday night in early October 1997 one of his employees, a young British hostess, came into his club seriously ill after going on a dohan with a man now believed to be Obara. She had been drugged and, she suspected, sexually assaulted. Iizuka says she was so pale and weak, he had an ambulance take her from his club to a doctor. Tests revealed her liver function was seriously depleted. Iizuka says he took her to the police on more than one occasion and attempted to help her file rape charges against the unknown assailant, whom, he believes, could have been identified. "But the police asked me, 'What are you doing here?'" says Iizuka. "I am a club owner, and she was a hostess. They looked down on that. They refused to open a case."

After Obara was arrested, Iizuka says he found out that three more women who worked at his club had been drugged and assaulted. A source in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police acknowledges that Iizuka contacted the Azabu police department in 1997 but he says, "there were not enough concrete details to judge whether there was an issue of crime."

A little before noon on March 1, Tim Blackman, his girlfriend and his two surviving children opened a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne on the beach where Lucie had been recovered. With representatives from Scotland Yard and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police looking on, as well as dozens of paparazzi buzzing the water in speedboats, the Blackmans planted a small evergreen tree in Lucie's memory. Tim said of his daughter's end, "I hope Lucie had a glass of champagne, felt a bit woozy and passed out." They prayed. They cried. And then, for some reason, they started to laugh. Tim says this might be difficult to understand, but "with Lucie, laughter was always present."

It could be that because murder is so rare in Japan, the public has the luxury of according its most outrageous murderers near-celebrity status. A decade ago, when Issei Sagawa was returned to Japan from a European mental hospital, after murdering and cannibalizing his girlfriend, he became a pundit on television shows and was given his own newspaper column. Obara's arrest prompted a deluge of phone calls to the British embassy from Japanese who wanted to express their shame. But at the same time, hostesses in Roppongi report a rash of male customers introducing themselves as "Joji Obara." Amelia, one of the young women working at Lucie's old club, says a customer told her recently: "'I know a girl like you would never sleep with me. The only way I could get you would be to drug you."

Casablanca, Lucie's club, is no longer listed on the directory of the narrow, six-story building just off Roppongi's main drag. In an effort to erase their club's history, management has changed its name to Greengrass. Everything else is the same. Customers are still greeted when they enter the joint by a mae d' in an ill-fitting tuxedo. The lounge area is still dark. The black leather modular couches are still so mushy that customers and hostesses almost collapse into each other when they sit down. There are a dozen small tables, each just big enough for the decanter of Suntory whiskey, the water syphon and ice bucket, all of which are provided as part of the basic $150 entrance fee.

At 11:00 on a recent Friday night, a glassy-eyed senior citizen treats the club to a warb-ling, sick-dog rendition of John Lennon's Imagine. Beside him a young blond girl wearing a ruffly white dress she might have worn to her prom smiles happily, her hands poised, ready to clap when her elderly companion finishes his song. At another table a man dressed in a white V-neck sweater and cream-colored golf pants is flanked by two big-boned Nordic women. In halting English, he regales them with tales of how much his hotel accommodations cost on a recent trip. "Very much expensive," he repeats, as they dutifully nod. Across the room a powerfully built man in his 30s?displaying the latest Tokyo gangster style with his buzz cut and loud, metallic-colored tracksuit?sprawls on a couch, sleeping. A young blond sits by his side staring into space.

Ten young women waiting to be selected by customers perch on couches. Nearly all of them are blond, their average age perhaps 22. They sit upright, jumbled together like a doll collection. Careful not to disturb makeup and hair, they move with exaggerated stiffness but their eyes flit eagerly when a new prospect enters the club. Soon, each of the young women is sitting next to a total stranger. They hand out their business cards. They know about Lucie, but that's history. Last week, two girls at Greengrass were sacked because they didn't meet their dohan quotas.

With reporting by Michiko Toyama/Tokyo

How the bubble burst for Lucie's alleged killer

Five years ago Lucie Blackman, a British bar hostess, was missing in Japan. As the trial of Joji Obara, the man accused of her murder, continues, our correspondent profiles the ‘playboy’ with a dark past and £122m of debt

August 17, 2005

Richard Lloyd Parry - The Times

THROUGHOUT his strange life, and the various identities that he created for himself, Joji Obara fled from cameras; even today, four years into his interminable trial, there are only two images of him in public circulation. The first is from the early 1970s when he was a university student in Tokyo: a shy smile, youthful skin, a young man poignantly uncorrupted. The second is the sketch by the courtroom artist of Obara as he was seen in the Tokyo District Court last month: thinning black hair, patchy goatee, crumpled charcoal suit, flanked by two unsmiling guards.

Thirty years separate the two images, a period in which Joji Obara left few public traces. In Britain, he is known as the man accused of killing the young British woman Lucie Blackman, the Tokyo bar hostess whose dismembered body was dug up from a Japanese beach near his apartment in 2001. Japanese remember that he is charged with six other rapes and one other count of “rape leading to death”. Newspaper accounts refer to him without elaboration as a “property developer” and “playboy”. But these vague terms hardly begin to do justice to his extraordinary career.

It reads like a metaphor for Japan’s bubble economy, the period between the 1980s and early 1990s when the country’s economy went up like a rocket only to crash down like an anvil. In the three decades between university and criminal prosecution, Joji Obara inherited a fortune; today he has debts of £122 million. He went from being the despised son of an immigrant to a member of the elite; now he is on trial as a serial rapist. And in an age of extravagant, excessive consumption, he lived his life on the basis that anything could be bought, and that those who had money were entitled to everything they wanted: pleasure, status, immunity from the law and, above all, the bodies of women.

He was born Kim Sung Jong in 1952 to Korean parents in Osaka. His father was a poor immigrant who built himself a fortune in taxis, property and pachinko, the addictive Japanese version of bagatelle. At 15, Kim Sung Jong was sent to the preparatory school for the private and prestigious Keio University in Tokyo. There he studied politics and law. It was at this time that he underwent surgery on his eyes to make them larger and less oriental, and he took on a new, Japanese name, Seisho Hoshiyama.

When Seisho was 17, his father died in Hong Kong. Seisho shared the vast inheritance with his two brothers and, at the age of 21, underwent another shift of identity, taking on Japanese nationality and the name of Joji Obara.

Those who know him are convinced that his strange upbringing played a part in forming his personality. But how exactly? A child of exiles who loses his father suddenly, while still young, who cuts himself off from his family, changes his name and even his face, and who becomes so rich that he never has to work . . . the potential for dislocation and maladjustment is obvious. But there are many people who have suffered more, and few of them have become half as maladjusted as Joji Obara.

Japanese magazine reports suggest that Obara began to show signs of a sexually predatory nature in the early 1980s. He was arrested in October 2000, and the videos of his sexual escapades are said to number 200; for nearly 20 years he is believed to have raped women at an average rate of more than ten a year — possibly more, as these are just the ones that he filmed.

His modus operandi is set out in court documents concerning a Canadian woman named Donna whom he is alleged to have raped in 1996. Donna worked as a hostess in Roppongi, a cramped half-square mile of Central Tokyo containing a concentration of bars, pubs, cabarets, nightclubs, karaoke bars, lap-dancing joints and hostess bars.

The court documents say that Obara met Donna in March 1996 at a club in Roppongi, and introduced himself as “Kazu” (he had a roster of pseudonyms, including “Yuji” and “Koji”). He took her to his apartment in the seaside town of Zushi, south of Tokyo, and gave her a drink which he described as “a very rare herb wine from the Philippines”. After one sip she fell unconscious. When she had come to, feeling dizzy, nauseous and lethargic, Obara told her that she had passed out after drinking a bottle of vodka. Five years later, after Obara’s arrest, the police found a large number of home videos of the suspect having sex with unconscious women, foreign and Japanese. Among them was Donna.

According to the prosecution, he took her to his bedroom, removed her trousers and underwear, and raped her in front of his video camera; Obara appeared in many of the videos naked, or wearing a Zorro mask.

To ensure the women’s compliance, the prosecution alleges, he pressed over their faces a rag soaked in chloroform, a poison which damages the liver. In 1992, an Australian woman named Carita Ridgway fell unconscious and died of liver failure a few days after being raped by Obara. With remarkable composure, Obara checked her into hospital, consoled her distraught parents and succeeded in convincing the doctors that her illness had been caused by hepatitis and a bad oyster.

It was in the summer of 2000 that he met Lucie Blackman, a former British Airways stewardess, who was working in a Roppongi bar called Casablanca. On July 1, the two went to the apartment in Zushi together.

For seven dismal months, nothing more was heard of Lucie. Her father, Tim, flew out repeatedly to Tokyo, accompanied by his younger daughter, Sophie. They produced missing-person posters and set up a telephone hotline. They consulted detectives and bar girls, journalists and psychics, and even engineered a meeting with a sympathetic Tony Blair while he was on a visit to Japan.

As a result of the publicity surrounding the case, three foreign women, including Donna, came forward to describe waking up, sore and sick, in Obara’s bed, with no memory of the night before. (Several of them, it turned out, had reported him to the Roppongi police, but had been ignored.) The police arrested Obara in October 2000 and raided his properties, where they found decades worth of accumulated clutter.

Court evidence reveals that his cars included a Ferrari, an Aston Martin, a Bentley and a Rolls-Royce. There were piles of diaries and documents, and in the refrigerator the body of Obara’s beloved pet, a German shepherd dog, accompanied by frozen dog food and roses. (He later explained that he was waiting for biotechnology to advance so that he could have the animal cloned.) They also found the rape videos, date- rape drugs and chloroform, and blonde hairs belonging to Lucie. Finally, the following February, her body was recovered from a seaside cave, 200 yards from one of Obara’s apartments, cut with a chainsaw into ten pieces.

Obara and his lawyers argued last month that Lucie was a drug user who died of an overdose, a claim dismissed as ludicrous by her father, Tim. The prosecution claims that the drugs that killed her were Rohypnol and chloroform, administered by Obara. Unlike the other girls, there is no video of Lucie and Obara and, because of the state of the body, no decisive DNA evidence. But even ignoring the mass of circumstantial evidence amassed by the prosecution, Obara’s defence team faces one inescapable fact: in criminal cases such as that of Obara, fewer than 1 per cent of defendants are acquitted.

But few battle so hard to prove their innocence. At the detention centre where he lives, documents relating to the trial stand in piles almost to the ceiling of his small cell. One of his team of ten lawyers visits him almost every day. Apart from the eight criminal charges against him, he is involved in litigation involving his companies. Last year he was declared personally bankrupt, with debts of 23.8 billion yen (£122 million).

Apart from his lawyers, only his mother, now in her eighties, is allowed to visit him; for the past few months she has been too unwell to make the journey from Osaka. He gets on fine with the guards at the detention centre, but rarely smiles or makes a joke. He seldom speaks of the past or of his family, and never about friends.

“My impression is that he is totally sane,” says one who knows him. “There’s nothing crazy about him except the way he treats women. He’s very, very clever but very selfish, totally convinced that he is right, and he never listens to the opinions of other people. But I don’t think he ever had a true friend he could rely on, and he doesn’t now. He is a very lonely person. Apart from his lawyers, there’s no one he can rely on or consult.”

In court, he follows the proceeding with concentration, scribbling notes and whispering with his lawyers. But at the two hearings last month, as he hunched in the dock, another middle-aged man sat a few feet away — Tim Blackman, whose campaign to find his daughter led directly to Obara’s arrest. He sat with his daughter, Sophie, and his partner Josephine, listening calmly while the man in the dock tried to convince the court that his daughter was a drug user.

I asked Tim Blackman what it was like to see face-to-face the man accused of killing his daughter. “I could be a bit odd,” he said. “I’m prepared to admit that. But I see somebody who is the same age as me, who has, by his actions, produced the most terrible situation for himself by doing something so heinous to somebody else’s life. And in a very strange way there’s a pathos that neutralises the more natural anger. I feel sorry for him. I do feel sorry for him."

The 'beast with a human face'

By Chris Summers

BBC News

Tuesday, 24 April 2007

A Japanese businessman has been cleared of raping and killing British woman Lucie Blackman. But Joji Obara, who was convicted of killing Australian Carita Ridgway and eight other rapes, was described in court as a "beast with a human face".

Carita Ridgway, an Australian, was taken to hospital by Obara after apparently suffering food poisoning from some shellfish.

The medical authorities accepted Obara's story and cited liver failure as her cause of death. He was so convincing that when Carita's parents flew to Tokyo they shook his hand and thanked him for the way he had cared for their daughter in her final hours.

In the summer of 2000 he met Lucie at a club in Tokyo's Roppongi district.

Obara has admitted spending the day of 1 July 2000 with her but has always denied having anything to do with her death.

Her father, Tim, does not believe Obara's story. He believes Obara probably offered money and gifts to Lucie in an attempt to persuade her to meet him away from the relatively safe environment of the club.

Mr Blackman thinks the trump card which Obara may have used to finally lure Lucie was a Japanese mobile phone.

"Japanese mobile phones are very hard to get hold of for foreigners as you really have to be a Japanese citizen. We think that Obara probably had a supply of these phones which he offered to give to girls like Lucie, who were desperate to stay in contact with their friends in Tokyo," he said.

In October 2000 Japanese police raided Obara's homes in and around Tokyo after he was named by several women who had reported waking up in a drugged state at his apartment.

Detectives found hundreds of sex videos as well as chloroform, piles of diaries and documents and also the body of his German shepherd dog in the refrigerator, surrounded by roses.

During his trial the businessman, who has been in custody since October 2000, sought to besmirch Lucie's character.

He claimed she was lonely, in debt and using marijuana at the time of her death and he sought to use excerpts from her diary to back up his case, which were also published on a website called "The Truth About Lucie's Case".

Obara painted a picture of Ms Blackman as a young woman who was out of control.

Bankrupt

Lucie's father, Tim, said Obara was lying about his daughter using drugs and he said it was deeply hurtful hearing personal details from the diary being read out.

While he was in jail Obara was declared bankrupt with debts of £122m (23.8 billion yen).

He is destined to spend many years in prison despite being acquitted of Lucie's death.

But Tim Blackman says he does not even feel hatred.