つづきです。
Like a scene out of a movie, the detective who had at first
reluctantly taken her case but had become her advocate told her
over the phone, “He’s walking past us. I can’t do anything.
I’ve got orders from way above. I’ve just been told I’m being
taken off the case, as well. I’m sorry.”
It wasn’t a scene from a movie. That was exactly what happened.
And that is where the story takes a major political twist.
It is not surprising that the opposition party and Japan’s
media are reporting the possibility of a cover-up or, at a
minimum, gross interference in the rape investigation.
It’s quite a cast of characters that show up in this human drama,
and it may help to have a program to keep them straight.
The Alleged Victim—Shiori, whose calm anger and direct account
of events the press has found more than compelling, and whose
case may well have helped force the Japanese parliament to
revise the country’s horribly antiquated laws on sexual assault.
The Alleged Rapist—The wiry Yamaguchi, taking the Bill Cosby
approach, insists that he is innocent and anything that happened
was consensual, even though there is ample proof that Shiori
was only semi-conscious if, indeed, she was conscious at all.
He is beloved not only by Prime Minister Abe, but also by Japan’s
right wing for an infamous article he penned which appeared to
dismiss the sufferings of “the comfort women” who were enslaved
to sexually service Japanese soldiers during WWII.
Mr. Fixit—Cabinet Spokesman Yoshihide Suga is about as close to
the prime minister as white on rice, as they say in some parts
of the United States. Physically unprepossessing, he is famed
for his sarcasm, quick wit, and ability to keep cool. Suga figures
in this story, as in many others in Japanese politics, as a
likely go-between. In appearance, he bears some resemblance
to the plastic Troll dolls of yesteryear, and in his demeanor,
especially in his brawls with the press, he is like the most
formidable internet troll made flesh—rarely losing a battle or
getting rattled. He is everything that Sean Spicer would like
to be, and could give Steve Bannon a run for his money.
The Chief—Suga’s former secretary, Itaru Nakamura, is a gruff,
chubby National Police Agency career bureaucrat, who sports a
type of combover known here as the “barcode” haircut. He was
the chief of the Tokyo Police Criminal Investigation Bureau at
the time the arrest warrant was issued. He allegedly gave the
orders to stop the arrest and personally intervened to stall
or scuttle the investigation.
The Prime Minister—Shinzo Abe, 62 years old, is a proud man with
a long memory and a short temper, lashing out at his critics with
infamous ferocity. This is his second time serving as prime minister
after he gave up the job in 2007 due to illness. Just before Abe quit,
he communicated his plans to resign to... Yamaguchi, who delivered
the scoop for his network, achieving a great measure of fame as an
ace reporter with rock-solid ties to the prime minister.
Yamaguchi’s details of his close relationship with Abe are
highlighted in the two books he has written about him, especially
his magnum opus, Sori (Prime Minister), which monthly magazine CYZO
characterized as “a book full of flattery for Abe” punctuated with
“Yamaguchi boasting about his close relationships to the Prime
Minister and those around him.” Of course, the trollish Suga also
makes an appearance in the books.
The Police Chief, is not mentioned in Yamaguchi’s writings but
he appears to be quite loyal to Mr. Fixit and to Abe as well.
When a television commentator criticized Abe’s fatal handling
of the abduction of the freelance journalist Kenji Goto, The Chief
reportedly sent him a message saying, “You deserve 10,000 deaths.”
Police officers who know The Chief, aka Detective Barcode, say he
doesn’t mince words. Unlike Shiori or Mr. Fixit, he also does not
do on-the-record press conferences and has not given a full
explanation of how he became involved with the case and why he
decided to step in.
Shiori allowed reporters to print her first name and let cameramen
photograph her face at her press conference where she spoke about
her ordeal. Her full statement is here.
Shiori is an average-sized Japanese woman, thin, and well-mannered.
She has worked at large international news agencies and her English
is good. She is currently working on a documentary about guerrillas
in South America; she is no shrinking violet. And in Japan, where
rape victims are expected to cry, break down, and fall apart—or
simply pretend the rape never happened—her steely resolve has
surprised many.
The odds were never in her favor. Until very recently, sexual
assault victims had to file charges for an investigation to
take place, Japan’s 90 percent male police force often discouraged
victims from filing charges, and first-time offenders could get
away with no jail time at all if they apologized and paid compensation.
Even if there was an arrest made, prosecutors routinely dropped half
of the cases.
Shiori explains her decision: “I wanted to use my full name, but
my family was against it. I have to question this situation where
victims cannot talk unless they hide their face, remain sad, weak,
and believe they have to feel shame,” she said in an interview with
The Daily Beast.
“I believe it was necessary for me to talk about the horror of rape
and the massive impact it had on my life afterward,” she said.
“I am now painfully aware of how much the legal and social system
fails sex crime victims. For a long time in Japan, women who have
been sexually assaulted blame themselves or are blamed by others.
When I was about 10, I went to a public pool in a bikini my
parents had bought for me—and was terrified when a man groped
me in the pool. But when I told the adults, they told me,
‘It’s because you were wearing a sexy bikini.’ So I thought,
oh it is my fault. I don’t think like that any more.”
Shiori said she had met Yamaguchi for dinner in Tokyo on April
3, 2015, to discuss his offer to find her work in the United States.
Shiori said Yamaguchi took her to two restaurants where she
remembers having a few drinks. Her last memory before she lost
consciousness was of dizzily leaning against a water cooler,
she said.
A taxi driver who drove the pair later that night said Shiori
repeatedly asked to be dropped off at the nearest station,
she said, but Yamaguchi instructed the driver to head to a hotel.
“According to the driver’s testimony, I wasn’t able to
get out of the taxi on my own, so Mr. Yamaguchi had to carry me,”
she said.
Footage from a security camera at the Sheraton Miyako Hotel showed
Yamaguchi carrying her out of the taxi and into the hotel.
The Daily Beast confirmed the content of the video with a police
source who also said investigators spoke to eyewitnesses.
The Daily Beast also talked to a third source who viewed the
hotel security video and confirmed Shiori’s characterization
of the footage.
Shiori said she tried to file a report with the police, but
officers initially tried to discourage her, warning her
it would ruin her career. Investigators finally accepted Shiori’s
criminal complaint in late April after she convinced an officer to
check security footage from the hotel. The officer retrieved the
footage on April 15. After the detectives watched the footage,
they agreed there were grounds for a criminal case.
The police then enthusiastically pursued the case.
It should be noted, that Shukan Shincho, the weekly magazine
initially reporting on these events was also able to verify
the details of Shiori’s account with witnesses.
Police officers obtained an arrest warrant for Yamaguchi
on suspicion of incapacitated rape and were waiting to arrest
him at Narita Airport on June 8, 2015. But investigators never
executed the warrant and instead let him walk away, Shiori said.
They had received last minute “orders from above,” an
investigator told her on the phone. Police sources confirmed
this with The Daily Beast.
The call to halt the arrest came directly from The Chief (Nakamura)
who as mentioned previously, headed the investigative bureau of
the Tokyo Metropolitan Police at the time.
When responding to the enquiries of the weekly magazine Shincho,
The Chief, admitted he called off the arrest, but said
Abe’s administration had nothing to do with his decision.
“I made the decision, by myself, based on the details of the case,”
he said before Shiori went public.
The Chief began his career as a bureaucrat in Japan’s National
Police Agency, which oversees all police forces in the country
but cannot conduct investigations or conduct arrests; it gives
guidance. Thus NPA bureaucrats are usually dispatched to local
police departments at an executive officer level and are referred
to as kyaria (career guys) by other police who are local hires.
They rarely stay in one prefecture for long and lack the street
sense of cops who start at the bottom and work their way up.
“They’re the police elite. They usually are more like
politicians than police officers,” said one Saitama Prefecture
detective. NPA bureaucrats often are temporarily transferred to
other agencies as well, such as the Nuclear Regulation Authority.
At the time of the rape investigation, The Chief had been
temporarily transferred to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.
It is highly irregular for a top-ranking official to stop an arrest
warrant or interfere with a case at this level, say many police
sources. Jiro Ono, former chief of the Kagoshima Police Headquarters
and a former Upper House Member of the Parliament publicly commented.
“An arrest for incapacitated rape is typically done based on the
judgment of the head of the police department [in this case Takanawa
Police] and for the chief of the Criminal Investigative Bureau to
butt in and give orders I must say is extremely abnormal.”
The irregularity of how this case has been handled is one reason
Shiori is now seeking a reversal of the prosecutor’s decision.
Even a current high-ranking officer in the National Police Agency
was critical of the handling of the case, and commented under
condition of anonymity: “When you consider Nakamura’s close
relationship to Abe and Suga, and the case involves Abe’s closest
friend in the media, Mr. Yamaguchi, Nakamura’s intervention in
the case was completely inappropriate. It’s a conflict of
interest and it gives the appearance of impropriety. To anyone,
it might appear that Nakamura, in his position as the head of the
investigative bureau, deliberately squashed an investigation to
benefit the friend of his former boss, Suga. It’s disgraceful.
I don’t know whether that was the case but the problem is that
people may reasonably believe that’s exactly what happened.
It’s not hard to see why. Here’s how it could happen.
Yamaguchi asks Abe or Suga to intervene. One of them calls Nakamura.
Loyal to his former boss, Nakamura scuttles the arrest warrant
and the case. It doesn’t take a massive criminal conspiracy to
make that happen. It just takes a few phone calls.”
When pressed to go on the record, the officer declined, sheepishly
explaining the Abe administration just hinted that they will have
the whistleblower in the Kake Gakuen case (a brewing scandal
involving the licensing of a school) prosecuted for violations of
the Civil Servants Act—releasing information gained on the job.
“That will be the end of that bureaucrat’s career and possibly
time in jail,” the officer said. “I could argue that I am sharing
police common sense, not secret information. But even then, as
in the case of the whistleblower, anyone who opposes Abe ends
up not only having their career shortened but their reputation ruined.
If I was retired, like Mr. Ono, I’d be happy to go on the record.”
Former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, however, pulled no punches
in his comment on the case. On the evening of May 31, he tweeted,
“What is wrong with Japan’s media?...They have remained silent
on the rape committed by former TBS bureau chief, Yamaguchi,
who is an intimate friend of Prime Minister Abe. Nakamura,
the Chief of Criminal Investigations for the Tokyo Metropolitan
Police Department, buried the arrest warrant and Nakamura was
the former personal secretary of Cabinet Minister Suga. Except
for Tokyo Shimbun [the newspaper], no other media outlet will
write about this. Has Japan’s media’s sold out their national
[sense of] justice to the Cabinet Office?” Perhaps it was the
brevity of Twitter that resulted in Mr. Hatoyama not adding
“allegedly” in front of the rape accusation, but over 12,000
people appear to agree with his sentiment.
The burying of the arrest warrant is not the only puzzling thing
in the investigation.
Following the aborted arrest, the lead investigator was taken off
the case, the prosecutor handling Shiori’s case, prosecutor Mori,
was changed out, and the case was moved from the jurisdiction of
Takanawa Police Department to the Criminal Investigative Division
One (Violent Crimes) of Tokyo Police Headquarters, where The Chief
would have day-to-day access to the detectives handling the case.
The newly appointed detectives urged Shiori to settle with
Mr. Yamaguchi and drop charges. She did not agree. The police
eventually filed papers against Mr. Yamaguchi with the Tokyo
prosecutors, where the case languished for months, until the
prosecutors eventually decided to drop all charges against
Yamaguchi in July of 2016. They would only say there was not
sufficient evidence to indict.
Mr. Fixit, as the Cabinet spokesman, told reporters at a regular
press briefing this month he had nothing to do with police calling
off Yamaguchi’s arrest and said he was not informed of the
investigation. Because The Chief (Nakamura), who called off
the arrest, once worked for him, it’s not surprising that
even Japan’s media would go through the motions of questioning him.
“I do not know anything about the details [of the Shiori case],”
he said gruffly.
つづく
