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Japanese police struggle to find Lindsay's killer

Richard Lloyd Parry
Ichikawa

Four days after the murder of Lindsay Hawker, the British teacher found strangled in a Tokyo suburb, Japanese police raided a suburban sex motel yesterday in a vain search for the Japanese man suspected of killing her.

A team of twenty officers took up positions around the Hotel Chateau, a “love hotel” in Nishi-Funabashi, east of Tokyo, where rooms are rented to couples by the hour. They were following up a reported sighting of Tatsuya Ichihashi, a 28-year old doctor’s son in whose home Lindsay’s body was found buried in an earth-filled bath. After a 45 minutes search of the premises, broadcast on Japanese television, they emerged frustrated, seemingly no closer to finding their quarry than when he escaped from under their noses on Monday night.

The Hunt for Mr Ichihashi

Richard Lloyd Parry and Kyoko Onoki
Ichikawa, Tokyo

Japanese police were engaged on a murder manhunt last night after the naked corpse of a young British woman was found in a Tokyo flat buried in an sand-filled bathtub.

The severely beaten body of Lindsay Hawker, a 22-year old English conversation teacher from Coventry, West Midlands, will undergo an autopsy today after being found late on Monday night in Chiba prefecture in the suburbs of Tokyo. Police are hunting for the occupant of the apartment, a 28-year old Japanese man named Tatsuya Ichihashi, who fled barefoot from the scene when police called in search of the missing woman.

(If you have infromation about the case, ring The Times Tokyo Bureau on 03-3270-3480/1 or email richardlloydparry@compuserve.com. Information treated in confidence.)

Lindsay Hawker and Tatsuya Ichihashi

This is Lindsay Hawker, a 22-year old English conversation teacher from Coventry, whose body was found buried in a bathtub of earth in an aprtment in Chiba prefecture on Monday.

This is Tatsuya Ichihashi, who ran away from the apartment when the police called and who is sought by police in connection with her death.

More about this in The Times in a few hours (and on this blog). In the meantime, if anyone has any information about the case, or either of the people above, please contact me.

03-3270-3481

from outside Japan: +81-3-3270-3481

or by email:

richardlloydparry@compuserve.com

Murdered British woman: appeal for information

From Kyodo News this morning. If anyone has more informatioin about the circumstances of this case, or the victim, please contact us on Tokyo 03-3270-3480 (from outside Japan +81-3-3270-3480) or richardlloydparry@compuserve.com.

All information will be treated in confidence.

Body believed to be English woman's found in Chiba apartment 

CHIBA, Japan, March 27  KYODO 

     A body of a young woman was found Monday night in a bathtub placed on the balcony of an apartment in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, the police said.
     The police believe the woman has been murdered and that the body is that of a 22-year-old woman from Britain who worked at a language school.
     The apartment belongs to a Japanese man in his 20s, whom she knew. The bathtub contained a large amount of sand, covering all parts of the body except for part of a hand.
     The man, who has been missing, is being sought by the police.
     The case came to light as another English woman, who lived with the victim, contacted the police Monday afternoon, saying she had not come home and that she could not contact her by mobile phone.
==Kyodo

March 27, 2007　03:45:18 

Nakasone: Board Games, not Rape

[Here's a piece that got bumped from Saturday's piece, about Nakasone and his wartime relationship, or lack ofn one. with the "Comfort Women'. There's a lot more to say on this subject, and I hope I'll be able to add to this soon.]

Saturday 26th March 2007

Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo

Japan’s most respected elder statesmen was forced yesterday [Friday] to contradict an autobiographical account suggesting that as a young officer during the second world war he forced women to serve as military sex slaves.

Yasuhiro Nakasone, one of Japan’s most distinguished former prime ministers, is the latest politician to be drawn into a bitter controversy about the so-called “comfort women”, which boiled over this month after years of simmering resentment.

At a press conference in Tokyo yesterday [Friday], he admitted that Japanese forces did force women to serve on “comfort stations”, the euphemism for military brothels where many Koreans and Chinese claim to have been enslaved and raped. But he denied allegations, based on an account he himself wrote 29 years ago, that he organised brothels as a military logistics officer in the Imperial Navy in the island of Borneo.

“They were civilian engineers, not military people, and they just wanted a place for rest or entertainment,” he told a press conference in Tokyo. “They wanted entertainment such as [the board game] go or Japanese chess. We simply established facilities where such [diversions] could be offered.”

But this account of innocent games centres seems to contradict a written memoir by Mr Nakasone published in 1978, before the existence of the “comfort women” had become controversial.

Leo guests on Horie

[For the first time, Asia Exile is entrusted to the hands of a guest blogger - my worthy colleague, Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent, who returns to The Times this week, amid scenes of near hysterical rejoicing, after a few weeks getting something out of his system (working for the Financial Times). He writes on Takafumi Horie, the former CEO of Livedoor, who faces a verdict this Friday is his trial on charges of market manipulation and false accounting.

Take it away, Leo.]

Abraham Zapruder, Deep Throat, that Area 51 alien dissection footage and now…me.

Nestled in a top secret location somewhere in Tokyo (and under 24-hour guard by vicious attack pot-plants) is my Olympus Voice Trek 50 digital recorder – an excellent model that will record around 40 hours of interviews at pin-drop high quality.

And the Japanese want it from me.

Oh how they want it from me.

They want it so badly they will pay anything to get it. They are talking offer prices that are corpulent with zeroes. One chap called eight times yesterday and on the eighth refusal got his friend to call me a further five. The final husky-voiced “give me the tape” call came in at 2:30am (because they thought I was in the UK).

And what lies behind this joke-and-dagger farce?

'The Tide is High'

Anyone interested in the plight of the Carteret Islands should look at a podcast by the estimable Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, with whom I travelled there last December. Beautiful images and an interesting commentary, including interviews with the Carteret islanders themselves.

The picture above was taken on the fishing boat which took us over to the islands. Jeremy is on the right.

Death and life in Yogya

News of a plane crash sends a shiver down the spine of any air traveller, but anyone who has flown on Indonesia’s domestic air lines will experience a chill of awful recognition at the news of yesterday’s crash in Yogyakarta in the island of Java.

Unpredictability, improvisation and casualness can be charming when you are travelling on a flexible schedule by boat or bus and train. But when it comes to aeroplanes, what you want most of all is for everything to be done by the book. In Indonesia, you sometimes get the impression that the book has been mislaid.

Running an airline is a demanding and competitive business at the best of times, all the more so in a massive, sprawling country of 17,000 islands, subject to frequent tropical storms and even volcanic eruptions. One of the most remarkable airline incidents of all time was in 1982, when all four engines of a British Airways 747 failed during a flight to Australia. They had become choked with ash from Mt Galunggung in Java which happened to be erupting 37,000 feet below. When the plane passed out of the dust cloud, the silent engines hummed backed into life.

After the Asian economic crisis of 1997, Indonesian airlines were hurt as hard as anyone by the collapse of the currency, the rupiah. The soaring cost of aviation fuel had driven the price of tickets beyond the reach of anyone but foreigners, or the rich. More alarmingly spare parts had become unaffordable. I remember sitting on quarter full flight for Surabaya which was an hour late in taking off, as the ground engineers delved in the engine, making do with what they had.

There are plenty of alarms and bumpy landings, and occasionally an awful tragedy like yesterday’s, with all the grief that it brings. But for all this, Indonesia is one of the most alluring and enjoyable countries on earth, a place almost literally magical. Travelling there is worth the small risk; most people come home uninjured and alive.

Blubber on their faces

Greenpeace is too shrewd and media-conscious an organisation to display any outward sign of satisfaction at the news today that the Japanese feet is abandoning its whaling hunt after a disastrous fire – their statement a few hours ago was dignified and measured, rightly containing expressions of condolence for the loss of the Japanese sailor who died in the accident. But behind closed doors the environmentalists must giving thanks to the Green Gods.

The fire and the abandonment of the hunt is an unqualified disaster for the Japanese side, coming as it does during an aggressive push to force a lifting of the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling. When the accident happened the whalers were looking rather good, after their encounter with the self-styled environmental “pirates” of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

Sea Shepherd’s militant, confrontational tactics make Greenpeace look like a bunch of old ladies, but this time they backfired. After squirting the Japanese decks with acid “stink bombs”, two of the activists got lost for seven hours in icy seas and were only found after a search in which the whalers, in gracious and seamanlike spirit, also took part. Sea Shepherd backed off soon after, having run out of fuel, and the Greenpeace boat Esperanza chugged into the picture. Then, on 15th February, came the devastating fire.

The Institute of Cetacean Research, the Japanese government’s whaling propaganda arm, has given few details about the accident – and so feeble and compliant is the Japanese media on such matters that they have not been pressed for any. But it was clearly a bad fire. One man died (apparently of asphyxiation, rather than burns). And the Nisshin Maru, the factory ship and hub of the whole operation, was crippled.

This was a gift for Greenpeace. They no longer had to ask the whalers to stop killing whales, since such activity was now out of the question. They were able to offer their own help in towing the stricken vessel away – while repeatedly pointing out the danger which a damaged and oil-laden ship posed to the purity of the Antarctic landscape and a nearby colony of nervous penguins. In this, they were backed up by the prime minister of New Zealand, Helen Clarke, who helpfully demanded that the Japanese leave pronto.

For a fortnight, the whalers frantically fiddled and tinkered with their maimed ship, but it was no good. The Japanese government’s irrational insistence on pushing the whaling cause (in a country whose people aren’t actually interested in eating whales) makes them look bad enough. Now, apart from being (unfairly) characterized as bloodthirsty killers of blubbery cuties, they look, in addition, careless, incompetent and environmentally reckless.

The image above is Turner's Ship on Fire.