Hanzai News for March 29, 2018

In this week’s Japan crime news roundup:

• Murder
• Kidnapping
• Gold Smuggling
• Upskirt Photos
• Larcenous LEOs
• Elder Abuse
• More!

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TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS:

# Hanzai News for March 29, 2018

Before we get started, I would like to thank each and every one of you for listening and helping the podcast steadily grow. Your support is sincerely appreciated.

INTRO Hanzai News Round-up for the week ending March 29th, 2018

## 1

If you live and drive in Japan, the National Police Agency would like to remind you that the new school year will be starting soon and there will be a lot of fresh first-grade children out there walking to school and crossing the streets. Let’s remember that in addition to being excited about starting school, those kids also have little to no experience with crossing streets on their own. Police have been busy analyzing data from the last 5 years and have learned that first grade kids get killed going to and from school at a rate 8 times higher than do 6th graders, with a full 4/10ths of the fatal accidents occuring at marked crosswalks.

Kids get run over more than you might think. In the last 5 years there were 18, 841 injuries and deaths among elementary school kids crossing the street.

A couple of sobering statistics for motorists:

1. 60% of those were from kids crossing at places other than designated crosswalks….but that still left over 7,300 happening *at* crosswalks.

2. While there were about a thousand cases of kids dashing into the street or not waiting for the crosswalk signal, in over 80% of cases the children were found to have done nothing wrong. On the other hand, in only 6 cases was it found that the driver of the car had done nothing wrong.

An editorial note: In case you didn’t know it, Japan maintains in Chiba Prefecture a prison which houses nothing but people sentenced on traffic charges.

## 2

Hyogo Prefectural Police have nabbed a con artist thanks to the quick thinking of a 55 year old man who alerted them after receiving a telephone call from a young man claiming to be an employee of the Ministry of Finance. The 21 year old called the home thinking he was speaking to the 55 year old resident’s deceased father, telling the man that his personal information had been leaked and that he would come to the intended victim’s home to collect his cash card and bank book.

Thinking it odd that someone would be calling his dead father, the resident pretended to be his father on the phone and after hanging up alerted the police, who were more than happy to come out and arrest the scam artist when he showed up later on.

## 3

A 42 year old Osaka man found himself the unexpected guest of the Kyoto Police on the 21st. He is said to have threatened the driver of a Kyoto taxi on that day, telling the 46 year old cabby, “If you get out of this cab, you’re going to die”. The taxi company called 110, Japan’s police emergency number after 5 o’clock that afternoon saying a customer was acting strangely. The passenger is being held on charges of holding the driver captive for nearly 20 minutes at a convenience store parking lot in Kyoto.

The cab was spotted traveling on the Meishin Expressway by a highway patrol unit of the Osaka Police, with Kyoto officers later joining the pursuit of the cab which continued along the expressway despite being ordered to stop. The passenger was apprehended when the taxi was finally stopped at a convenience store 15km away.

## 4

In the Yokohama District Court on the 22nd a sentence of death was handed down in the case of 25 year old Imai Hayato for the murder of three residents of a nursing home in Kawasaki City in November and December of 2014. The residents, ranging in age between 86 and 96 years old, were thrown off the verandas of their rooms.

In his trial, Imai proclaimed his innocence, despite having confessed to police earlier that he had killed the three victims. He claimed that he was pressured by investigators and told them what he thought they wanted to hear. His defense argued that he had been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum and thus had diminished responsibility for the deaths if indeed it was he who had committed the murders, also pointing out there was a complete lack of corroborating evidence against his client.

The prosecution built its case entirely on circumstantial evidence and the testimony of 20 workers at the facility and family members of the victims. There were both audio and video recordings of Imai’s police interrogation, which were played in court during the trial. The prosecutor pointed out that the recordings showed no signs of pressure from investigators and drew attention to the fact that Imai himself was volunteering details of the killings. The prosecution in its closing arguments requested the death penalty.

The death penalty in Japan is carried out by short drop hanging, with the date of execution being at the discretion of the Minister of Justice, once appeals are exhausted and the sentence confirmed.

## 5

It wouldn’t be a Hanzai News Roundup without at least one story of gold smugglers. Last week the Customs officials at Hakodate’s Chitose Airport arrested 3 Taiwanese women smuggling gold in their bras. This week they have confiscated a further 8kg of gold valued at 36 million yen from 2 Taiwanese men, who had the the precious metal snugly tucked into their underwear and hidden inside their shoes. They are charged with evading paying 2.9 million yen in tax.

## 6

March 21st was the vernal equinox and a national holiday in Japan. A man from Ichihara City, Chiba Prefecture took his wife out for a drive that afternoon and had the misfortune of running his car up onto a sidewalk and striking a telephone pole. A passer-by who witnessed the accident called the police and reported the accident.

Responding officers placed the driver under arrest for unlawful disposition of a corpse when they discovered the wife’s dead body in the car. The man admitted he had placed her corpse in his car himsself. Police are investigating to determine if foul play was involved. The woman’s body was found face up in the back seat of the car and appeared to have been deceased for several days. THere were no apparent external injuries discovered.

## 7

Just before midnight the evening of the 20th, Police in Kazo City, Saitama Prefecture spotted a car running a red light and ordered the vehicle to stop. The driver of the car took off rapidly and managed to elude the police, who lost sight of the vehicle. The escape from the law quickly came to an end only 1.2km away when the driver hit a tree and overturned.

Riding in the car were 4 youths ranging in age between 15 and 20, with the car being driven by a 16 year old youth from Chiba City who has no driver’s license. The four suffered no injuries more serious than a few busted ribs.

## 8

Another story involving a Kyoto taxicab driver. a 44 year old driver who is charged with sexually assaulting a severely inebriated 21 year old female passenger the evening of February 25. The employee of Kyoto’s MK Taxi is said to have taken the young woman to a hotel between 10:45 p.m. and half past midnight, claiming that going to the hot sheets hotel for sex was her idea and he was just doing what she wanted.

## 9

If you’ve had any thoughts that we might make it through a week without any stories of misbehaving cops, you were mistaken. Police have stepped up to the plate and delivered the goods yet again.

A 33 year old senior patrolman with the Osaka Police has been punished with a 10% reduction in pay for 6 months after it was learned he was an enthusiastic street photographer, with a preference for taking upskirt shots of women’s panties. He was caught in the act in February and has since confessed to having done it about 70 times since the summer of 2016.

He has resigned from the police force and is now awaiting word on what the public prosecutors want to do with him.

## 10

A 33 year old man from Chiba Prefecture has set what is believed to be a motorcycle speed record for Japan, accelerating his British Daytona 675SE to a very impressive maximum speed of 279km/h, as recorded on the camera mounted to the bike. For better or worse, officials are only crediting the man with 239km/h, which is still a new motorcycle speed record in Japan.

The man carefully chose his course for the run, selecting an area guarded from crosswinds and which gave the 670cc Triumph an extra boost by being a long downhill stretch.

The run took place at about 3:50 a.m. on May 24th of 2017 and didn’t receive official certification until recently as the rider made the record setting run for the sole purpose of boosting his YouTube subscribers enough that he could monetize the channel. A person viewing the video of the record setting run brought it to the attention of people who could provide official certification of the run and they, though identifying the bike by the speedometer in the video and using the make of the bike to lead them to other videos, managed to locate the man and provide him the certification….in the form of a speeding ticket for 159km/h over the 80km/h speed limit.

At the very least, his license will be revoked for two years and he will be facing a hefty fine for pulling the stunt in the Aqua Line Tunnel running beneath Tokyo Bay between Chiba Prefecture and Tokyo.

## 11

A senior patrolman in Oita Prefecture has been fired from the force and referred to prosecutors in relation to several acts of misconduct. One thing the man in his 30s found himself in trouble for was making the speeding ticket of a fellow police officer magically disappear last year. Another was taking home with him several hundred CD-R and DVD discs containing adult videos. The discs contained illicitly shot adult videos and were to have been detroyed when they were no longer needed as evidence. The officer said he would take care of destroying them and instead removed them to his home.

He was also found to enjoy the same photographic hobby as his Osaka counterpart mentioned a couple of stories earlier; he was found to have used his cell phone to take upskirt photos of at 3 women and admits to having done it dozens of other times as well. The married officer was also found to have been engaged in an affair from January of 2017 until March of 2018.

## 12

A 51 year old man in Osaka has an ususual hobby. He walks up behind women on the street, grabs them around their thighs, and presses his face into their buttocks. He has had lots of practice doing it and the police have had lots of practice arresting him for doing it. This makes the 4th time he has been arrested for the same thing since November of 2017.

## 13

In an update to an earlier news report, the Public Prosecutor in Kobe who was taking pictures of women using the restroom at his workplace has been fined 500,000 yen and fired from his position.

## 14

In a country where the conviction rate hovers so near 100% it isn’t worth the bother of googling the actual numbers, it is a matter worthy of making the news when a court hands down a verdict of NOT guilty. That was what happened in the case of a 33 year old woman in Kobe who was on trial for having in her bag a syringe containing traces of methamphetamine. The judge ruled there was reasonable doubt the syringe had been placed there by the woman’s ex-husband, who was still on good enough terms with her that he came over to her house once or twice a week to shoot up. The man has admitted that he put the syringe in a bag in the home and forgotten about it. The prosecutor had sought a sentence of two and a half years for the defendant.

## 15

After years of devotedly taking care of the needs of his 79 year old wife who suffered from debilitating rheumatism and renal insufficiency, an 80 year old Nagoya man acceded to his wife’s request that he kill her. He was sentenced to 2 and 1/2 years in prison, suspended for 4 years when he was found guilty on the 23rd of strangling his spouse.

## 16

Police in Fukuoka Prefecture have referred to prosecutors two female caregivers in their 50s in connection with the accidental drowning death of a 96 year old woman at a nursing home. The charges of professional negligence resulting in death arise from the October 2016 drowning of the woman who had been left alone and unattended by the two while they performed other tasks, despite rules in place specifying that 2 staff members handle patients who require the level of care that was required by the victim.

One caregiver was helping bathe other patients and the remaining caregiver left the victim unattended in the bathtub while she performed some tasks in the dressing room.

## 17

THe hard-working crew at the trash recycling center in Sapporo City got an unexpected hand from a member of the public at about half past 6 on the afternoon of the 23rd. Unfortunately, the arm it was attached to only went up to the left elbow. Police have begun an investigation and the dismembered forearm was autopsied on the 26th.

After the discovery of the severed arm was reported in the news, police received several calls from people who said they had seen it lying in the road but who hadn’t realized it was a human arm. One of the calls was from a person who claimed to have picked it up and placed it in the trash.

## 18

Four police officers in Mie Prefecture have been arrested on charges of battery….theft. As in “stealing AA and AAA dry cell batteries”.

Between the four of them, they separately stole a grand total of 4,400 battiers from the police department. The four are reported to have used the batteries in electronic games and to power their children’s toys, and then selling the remainder to what in Japan is known as a “recycle shop” for amounts ranging between 1,000 and 20,000 yen.

One was disciplined with a 10% pay cut for one month and the other three were docked the same amount for three months. The prosecutor gets the next whack at them.

The batteries, purchased by the police department in bulk, are in boxes of 200 batteries each. Two of the policement are said to have helped themselves to 2000 batteries each while the other two each took one box of 200. The total value of the stolen batteries is 83,000 yen.

The four worked in different sections and their thefts were each independent and not connected to each other.

As an editorial note, I must say that this story came as no surprise to me. About 15 or so years ago I read a behind-the-scenes whistleblower book written by a former Japanese police officer who said it was standard practice in his department for ranking officers in supervisory positions to steal batteries in bulk and resale them, leaving the patrolmen in the police boxes to buy the batteries for their flashlights and other battery-powered tools of the trade out of their own pockets.

## 19

In a bizarre armed robbery in Niiza City, Saitama Prefecture on the evening of the 22nd, a 27 year old woman about to unlock her door upon returning home was suddenly approached by a knife-wielding man who demanded she give him her keys. The woman resisted the attacker, who siezed her by the hair and threw her to the ground. The man got one key away from the victim and fled the scene. The woman sustained slight injuries to her left hand.

## 20

In an update to a story from a few weeks ago in which a policeman abused the police computer system to gain information about money and valuables which had been turned in at various police stations and then claimed them as his own, it has been learned that in addition to the previously reported instance in which he claimed 280,000 yen from the Machida Police Station, he also claimed 140,000 yen from the Shinjuku Police Station last October 25th. On February 26th, the same day he successfully duped Machida cops out of the 280,000 he also attempted to claim 235,000 yen at the Musashino Police Station, claiming his grandfather had lost it. He failed in this as Musashino officers weren’t satisfied with his description of the wallet.

## 21

Coming to us from Yamaguchi Prefecture is our second story this week of a man taking his wife for a drive. A relative who went to visit the couple at their apartment the morning of the 21st reported them missing to police in Yamaguchi and the pair were located by alert officers of the Shimane Prefectural Police in Masuda City later that same afternoon. The 66 year old wife was reclining in the passenger seat, dead from having been strangled to death by her 69 year old husband with a cord at their home.

## 22

A 45 year old Tokyo man has been arrested by police in beautiful Gunma prefecture on suspicion of kidnapping a 13 year old first year junior high school girl he met via a social media app. Telling the girl via the app that he had prepared an apartment, clothing, shoes, and all necessities for her the man picked her up in his car in Takasaki City and set off with her. The girl was rescued 20 minutes later at a convenience store in neighboring Annaka City.

## 23

Officials of the Taiyo Bank in Miyazaki have announced they plan soon to file charges of embezzlement against a 64 year old part time worker, a former full-time employee of the bank. The man is said to have taken 2.85 million yen in cash from the bank. The man’s family has already made restitution and depositors were not affected.

## 24

The 3 month old infant daughter of a police officer in Kumagaya City, Saitama Prefecture, was rushed to the hospital by ambulance crews the afternoon of the 22nd after her 25 year old father reported that the child seemed to be hyperventilating. The baby was found to have internal bleeding in her eyes and her brain. Investigators larned that the officer, at home alone with his daughter on his day off, had become exasperated by the child’s crying and had shaken her vigorously, perhaps about 10 times.

The officer was initially placed under arrest on charges of causing bodily injury, but the charges were later changed to manslaughter after the child died of her injuries on the night of the 25th.

## 25

A workplace prank by a plumber at a jobsite in Hamada City, Shimane Prefecture went horribly wrong the afternoon of the 22nd, resulting in the 54 year old victim of the prank being transported to the hospital by ambulance. The prankster, a 28 year old man, was arrested for blowing air up the rectum of the unfortunate victim with an air compressor. Reportedly, the air was applied through the victim’s trousers and resulting in damage to the man’s rectum. I can’t resist it either, so join me in saying the punchline to the classic joke: “Rectum? Damned near killed him!”

## 26

A taxi driver in Osaka has been arrested in connection with a hit and run accident which took place about 3 a.m. on the 24th. The victim was a 38 year old man who was tossed through the air and who suffered a broken hip and other injuries. Detectives tracked the 66 year old cabbie down through security camera footage and were able to confirm damage on the taxi consistent with having struck someone. Witnesses in the area reported to police that the victim had been sitting in the middle of the road. The taxi driver maintains that the victim was already down in the road and that he stopped without striking the victim with his cab.

## 27

Our next story isn’t exactly crime-related, but I’m going to include it anyway.

A teacher of junior high aged children at a special needs school in the north of Tochigi Prefecture made it into the news for actions he took in June of last year regarding a student whose classroom farting had apparently reached the point he considered it a problem. The teacher made the student write a note promising to fart only in the toilet during break periods. The note was then posted in the classroom for all to see. The student was to be punished for infractions of the promise by being made to run 10 laps of the school’s cycling course. Reportedly the student was never actually made to run laps.

School officials admitted the inappropriateness of attempting to place limits on the natural bodily function refered to by Mark Twain as “the fundamental sigh” and said the teacher had gone too far.

## 28

Once more hogging space in the weekly crime roundup, we have yet another misbehaving officer of the law. A 56 year old police inspector in Osaka has been arrested on shoplifing charges. The inspector went to a home center on his day off and soon after entering the store grabbed three refill packs of shampoo valued at 2,200 yen and walked out of the store with them. He was nabbed by store employees, who held him until some police officers who *didn’t* have the day off could be summoned to take him into custody. Police Internal Affairs investigators have said his motive was just his unwillingness to spend his money on the shampoo. He had several 10,000 yen bills in his wallet at the time of the theft.

## 29

In Amagasaki CIty, Hyogo Prefecture the evening of the 24th a 43 year old man was arrested for interfering with an officer conducting his duties after he dragged the 34 year old officer about 3m with his mini-bike. The senior patrolman sustained scratches on his right leg. The officer had initially responded to the scene after a passerby contacted police telling them of a drunken man who had fallen off his mini-bike. When the officer tried to stop the man, who had regained his feet and righted the vehicle, the man took off again, dragging the cop 3 meters before falling over again.

The drunk man denies the charges, saying he was at home during the time of the incident.

## 30

If there were a competition for the most creative way to try to rob a convenience store, the culprit in this next story would stand a strong chance of winning. at 11 o’clock in the morning on the 25th, a 28 year old woman walked into a convenience store in Eniwa City, Hokkaido, and approached a female clerk who was busy stocking shelves. The would-be bandit threw an arm around the clerk’s neck and then pointed a spray bottle of disinfectant at the clerk and ordered, “Give me the money!”.

The clerk slipped out of the head lock and ran away without injury. THe perpetrator was arrested at the scene.

## 31

Two supermarket chains in Gifu Prefecture received warnings from police recently. In an attempt to encourage recycling, the chains were giving “eco points” to customers who brought in empty aluminum cans, with customers receiving points according to the number of cans they brought to the store’s collection areas. The points could be used for shopping at the chains’ locations.

The chains’ activities apparently ran afoul of the law of unintended consequences, being warned last November and December that they might be in violation of the Gifu Prefectural ordinance regarding the buying and selling of scrap metal. The ordinance was enacted in 2013 to combat a rash of thefts in the prefecture in which thieves were stealing the metal covers off of roadside drainage trenches and even the metal fittings off the end of fire hoses and selling them to scrap metal dealers.

## 32

It appears that Osaka Police didn’t do a very good job searching for a man in his 80s who went missing in June of 2013 and for whom a missing person report had been filed. While they are still awaiting positive identification, it is believed the bones found on the 25th in a planter box in the man’s own back yard are most likely those of the missing man. The man’s wife, also in her 80s, continued to live at the home until she passed away in September of 2017. The bones, which were not even covered over with dirt, were found in the planter box by gardening workers hired by surviving relatives to cut the grass and take care of the neglected greenery at the Osaka residence, which has stood empty since the wife’s passing.

## 33

Prosecutors are charging a 25 year old Wakayama Prefecture man with causing bodily injury to a 96 year old woman at 1:20 a.m. on January 9th of this year. The man was working the overnight shift as a caregiver at a nursing home and because frustrated by the incessant yelling of the woman, who suffers from severe dementia. He responded by throwing scalding hot water onto her, burning the area around her mouth and resulting in injuries that will take 50 days to heal. The burns were discovered later that morning by a different worker who had come in for the day shift.

## 34

In an update to a story in an earlier report, we have word that the Wakayama Prefecture husband and wife pair who murdered her father and disposed of his body in the mountains have been sentenced to 16 and 13 years respectively.

## 35

Imagine the surprise of a 19 year old female college student who emerged from the stall in the lady’s restroom of the Yutaka Driving School in Aichi’s Toyohashi City only to find a 32 year old man there waiting for her with his arms spread wide. He was holding a length of duck tape and intended to restrain her with it and rob her. The young lady escaped the restroom without injury. The man qas quickly placed under arrest by police who were in the area in response to an earlier report from another woman of a suspicious man.

## 36

FInishing up this week’s report with another toilet-related story, worker’s dismantling for disposal an old porta-potty on the morning of the 26th reported to police in Narita City, Chiba Prefecture that they had discovered a dead body in the toilet. The body was dressed and wearing shoes but in places the flesh had rotted away, revealing the bones. Police are attempting to establish the identity of the body.

That’s all the news we have time for this week. I have enough unused stories left over to easily fill up another 15 or 20 minutes. I might start tweeting those out through the course of the week, I think, so if you’re interested you might consider following the podcast on Twitter @hanzaipodcast. As always, you can reach me at hanzaipodcast@gmail.com

If you have a podcast you would to swap promotional spots for, please get in touch with me and we can arrange something.

Thanks very much for listening and I’ll talk to you again soon.

A murdererer apprehended in 1939 Tokyo through the old-fashioned detective methods of wearing out shoe leather and risking hemorrhoids and eye strain while sitting through hours and hours of careful examination of documents. A surprise killer with a surprise motive, nabbed by men armed with magnifying glasses and dogged determination.

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TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS:

Think globally. Act locally.

Now there is a phrase which when it comes to compacting the most meaning into the fewest words has no real competition this side of the Gospel of John, Chapter 11, Verse 35.

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

It lacks the philosophical punch of the loftier “Think globally, Act locally”, maybe, but it is an easily remembered set of practical instructions.

Think globally. Act locally.

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Like the right thing to do all the time?

Well, today we’re going to take a look at a case where not enough local thinking and too much reusing turned out to be the wrong thing to do.

INTRO

Our historical true crime case for Episode 6 is “The Tragic End of Dr. Do Little” or “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished”. The story begins on August 1st 1939 in a grass-covered vacant lot along the Oume Kaido, the road which runs from central Tokyo out to the suburb of Oume to the northwest. It was in this empty lot, located in the Mabashi section of Tokyo’s Suginami Ward that three bundles were discovered. The bundles were wrapped in kraft paper and between the three of them contained a disarticulated human skeleton.

Detectives from the Suginami Police Station responded to the vacant lot where the bundles of bones had been discovered and began examining the surrounding area. They quickly realized two very important things. One was that a search of the immediate surroundings and interviews of people in the area would turn up no clues or witnesses and the other was that they were going to need outside help on this one. The area covered by the Suginami Police Station in 1939 had over 147,000 people living in about 33,000 households and there were very few detectives assigned to the section handling murders and missing persons investigations. Police records from a few years earlier, in 1935, indicate there were only 8 men working out of Suginami homicide.

One interesting aspect of Japanese policing is that overall Japan has a pretty large police force when you consider the relatively low crime rate. While a case may come up that can overwhelm the personnel assigned to any given local police station, chances are that other stations have personnel working lower priority cases that can be put on the back burner for a while. The national and prefectural organization of the police also makes it easy and in fact common for personnel temporarily to be shifted from one jurisdiction to another, sometimes en masse. The Suginami detectives put in a request to Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters for more men to come help them out. There was no way the small handful of detectives from Suginami could possibly burn all the shoe leather that was going to need to be burned to solve this one in a timely manner.

A pathologist examined the bones and concluded that they were from a man in his late 30s, probably about 165cm tall. He wasn’t a manual laborer and he seemed to have been well nourished and healthy. Chemical analysis was performed on the soil found on the bones and the results showed the presence of lime and iron in levels that caused detectives to suspect that the soil came from beneath a house. The teeth were examined and the upper incisors had gold inlay work which looked to have been done about 5 years prior. The quality of the inlay work revealed a level of skill that made investigators believe it must have been done by a dentist in a large city.

Other than the bones, the only items of physical evidence police had to work with was the paper which had been used to wrap them. With no witnesses and with no identification of the victim, any clues which would lead them to a solution of the case were going to have to come from these pieces of plain Kraft wrapping paper. Detectives began an a minute examination of the paper.

On one of the pieces of wrapping paper, they found a blue border, about the size of a postcard. It looked like an outline left after a shipping label had been ripped from the paper. Fortunately for the detectives, the paper had gotten damp at some point while the shipping label was still on it and in spots the ink had faintly bled through onto the wrapping paper beneath.

Police were able to make out the Chinese character for “ward” in the address. This was a good sign, as only a handful of major cities in Japan have “ward” as part of their address, with Tokyo being one of them. Every city, town, and village in Japan which didn’t have “ward’ subdivisions was automatically eliminated and there was a strong chance that the paper had been on a package mailed to an address inside Tokyo itself. Japanese addresses are traditionally written top-to-bottom, right-to-left, and in increasing specificity as you go. Imagine if you will a big outer circle, filled with several smaller circles, then with each of those smaller circles also filled with several smaller circles, and each of *those* also filled with smaller circles. Now assign a name to the larger ones and numbers to the smaller ones and write them down in order from largest to smallest. In overly simplistic terms, that’s how Japanese addresses work. We have house numbers, but we don’t have street names or street numbers. There are a few named streets, but the street names are irrelevant to the addressing scheme.

So what we have so far is a strong educated guess that the address is a ward….an administrative subsection….of Tokyo. Which one? They couldn’t tell, since that part hadn’t bled through. They’ve only got it narrowed down to 7 million people in one and half million households in Tokyo….and that’s not counting the business addresses. Moving down what looked to be about 3 characters below “ward” detectives could faintly make out what looked like the kanji for “temple”. To the left of that line and farther down, there was a dim “24”. To the right of where the label had been removed the word “kozutumi”…”small parcel” had been rubber stamped onto the paper.

That’s it. Those are all the clues detectives had to work with. Any leads or any developments in the case were going to have to start with no more than that. With an attitude of “The merely difficult we do right away: the impossible takes a little longer” the detectives decided on the three practical steps they would take to tackle the case.

1. They would check missing persons reports from the previous year, manually sifting through the reports in that pre-computerized era to select out the ones whose physical characteristics matched those of the victim. The soil found on the bones indicated a strong possibility that the bones had been discarded by someone who had moved and needed to get rid of a body they had buried in their crawlspace. Investigators working the missing persons angle would keep a sharp eye out for those from families which had moved recently. Making the already large problem even larger was the fact that there was no way of knowing whether the missing person was from Tokyo or not. Nor, if fact, was there even any way of knowing for sure that there was a missing report on the victim to begin with. There was always the possibility this line of investigation could turn out to be a complete wild goose chase.

2. They would contact dentists and try to establish identity through dental records. These days we’re all used to the idea of using dental x-rays to identify human remains. They’re pretty much the next best thing to DNA when it comes to making a positive identification. But what was the situation like in Japan in 1939? The first practical clinical applications of dental x-rays in Japan were done in 1924, with each x-ray exposure costing about 2 yen. That sounds ridiculously cheap to our ears today, but let’s remember that at the time a laborer made somewhere around 1 yen per day. Our victim’s work looked to have been done 5 or so years before, in about 1934. That was the same year that papers on dental x-rays began to feature prominently in the professional journal put out by Japan’s dental association, so it’s a pretty good bet that there were no x-ray images of the gold inlay work on the victim’s incisors. Investigators were going to have to go by the dentists” hand-drawn records of their work and they were going to have to traipse all over Tokyo to do it. Further, they had no better way to narrow things down than that the patient was a man in his late thirties and that the dentist was well-skilled. Detectives assigned to this needle-in-a-haystack search certainly had their work cut out for them.

3. They would examine the wrapping paper and try to determine which post office it had been mailed from, and try to determine the addressee in hopes that it would turn out the address was that of either the killer or the victim. Even if they did manage to find the address, there was the possibility that the person had nothing to do with the case. Detectives would start on the assumption that the parcel had been mailed from a post office in Tokyo, but that was only an assumption: there was nothing on the paper that told them definitiely it had been posted from inside Tokyo. If it had been sent from a Tokyo post….of which there were hundreds, all of which had to be checked until they were certain they had the right one….that would narrow things down for them a bit. But the parcel could possibly have been sent from any post office in Japan. How many were there in 1939? There were 12, 938 of them and that year alone they handled over 101 *million* parcel deliveries. No doubt the Suginami detectives were fervently praying the package had been sent from inside Tokyo.

That’s the situation the detectives faced as they fanned out across Tokyo in the stifling August heat to begin their manhunt.

On the 5th day of the investigation detectives got their first break in the case when they determined that the “small parcel” rubber stamp imprint on the Kraft paper matched up with a stamp from the Kotenba-machi Post Office in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi. Now they knew for certain where the parcel had come from. The next step was to break out the magnifying glasses and start examining their records of shipping labels until they could match up the handwriting on the character for “ward” on one of them with the faint writing on the wrapping paper. Diligent work revealed that the handwriting matched the writing of a clerk at a wholesaler of cord and twine in Nihonbashi’s Bakuromachi. ‘

Detectives headed for the wholesaler’s and started going through their sales records. The fact that that the character for “ward” is used only in the addresses of a few major cities in Japan had given them the outermost of the set of circles within circles. The finding of the rubber stamp at a post office confirmed that Tokyo was the right city. As Tokyo is currently constituted, 23 wards make up the central metropolitan area. Japan has historically rearranged and regrouped and renamed its various prefectures, cities, towns, and villages to the point their own mothers wouldn’t recognize them and you may be pretty sure that no matter the current name of wherever you happen to be standing in Japan, it used to be called something else and probably not all that long ago either. Tokyo is no exception. Even in the midst of World War II bureaucrats were busy rearranging the administrative subdivisions of Tokyo. The current division into 23 wards came about in 1943. At the time of our story, in 1939, there were 35 wards which made up Tokyo.

The next somewhat legible character that had bled through the damp shipping label onto the wrapping paper was three characters down and looked like the character for “temple”. Now it was a simple process of elimination to get to the next circle within a circle. All they had to do was go through the list of names of areas within each ward and see how many places they came up with that character as the third one. This would naturally at the same time tell them which ward they were looking for, even though those characters were entirely illegible. By this process detectives were then very quickly able to determine that the package had been sent to an address in Kouenji, Suginami Ward. Detectives sat down and started going through the wholesaler’s records, making note of every customer they had with an address in Kouenji. When they finished, they had a list of five. Now things were definitely looking up. With the slim clues of two faintly legible characters and the imprint of a rubber stamp and five days of dedicated drudge work they had succeeded in narrowing the search down from anywhere in the entire country and then down to one of the more than one and a half million addresses in Tokyo and then down a mere five candidate addresses. By further scrutiny of the records they were able to determine that the package had been sent to a man named Shirakawa Kan at the Umeya Bakery in Kouenji. The process of checking out post offices, comparing the rubber stamps at each of them, checking records to see who had sent the package, then checking the records of the sender to determine who had received that scrap of paper used to wrap one of the three packages of bones found thrown in the vacant lot had taken the hard-working team of Tokyo detectives five days to complete.

They had narrowed the scope of their search down to the single address to which that piece of wrapping paper had mailed at some point in the past, but detectives had no way of knowing if that paper was tied with the killer or with the victim. Or it might turn out not to be connected to either of them and instead be an investigative dead-end. The other lines of investigation, those working the dental records and missing persons reports angles would have to continue. The team tracking down the address visited the Umeya Bakery to interview Shirakawa Kan, the man to whom the package had been addressed.

They found him to be a man in his 40s who gave the impression of being an honest and hardworking upright citizen. He spent his days running the Shirakawa’s family business. In response to questions about the Shirakawa household, Kan told investigators that he had a younger brother named Seizou and that Seizou had been to prison three times. Where was Seizou now, detectives wanted to know. Kan said that he didn’t know where Seizou was. He said Seizou had suddenly disappeared from the family home about two years earlier and that he had heard a rumor Seizou was running a soba restaurant in Osaka, but he really wasn’t sure. Kan had filed a missing person report on Seizou with the police, though. Maybe the bones were his?

This information was a boon to the teams working the missing persons records and the dental records investigations. Now for the first time they at least had a candidate name to work with. Instead of looking through *all* the records of every dentist in Tokyo who had a reputation for doing good work and comparing the inlays in the dead man’s teeth with drawings of the work on the records of every adult male patient, they could speed up the process exponentially by working the telephone lines until they found a dentist who had a patient named Shirakawa Seizou. They found what they were looking for. It turned out the gold inlays had been done by a dentist on Miyazono Street in Tokyo’s Nakano Ward a few years ago, when Seizou was 37 years old. Comparison of the teeth with the dentst’s records confirmed that the bones in the vacant lot were indeed those of Shirakawa Seizou, the man reported missing by his brother two years earlier. The identification was strengthened when a forensic pathologist matched up a photo of Seizou’s face with a photo of the recovered skull and found the features to match.

Investigators started checking out the Shirakawa family. Several people who worked at the Umeya Bakery lived on the premises, together with the Shirakawa family. It seemed unlikely that Seizou could have been killed at the bakery, as there was too much chance of the killing being discovered. The patriarch of the Shirakawa family, Mitsuzou, didn’t live at the bakery in Suginami Ward, detectives learned. He lived alone at a house in Yamato-machi in Nakano Ward, where he had often been visited by Seizou, who was his third son. Seizou had lived with the old man for a while, neighbors told detectives, further telling them that the two often had arguments and that Mitsuzou frequently complained that Seizou was going to be the ruination of the entire family. Neighbors informed police that they had observed Seizou with a bandage on his forehead around the time of one of these fierce father and son arguments and said that it had happened in 1937, remembering the date because it had happened around the same time war had broken out with China. Also around that same time, they said, Mitsuzou and Kan had been seen digging up the ground in front of the house in Nakano Ward. People in the neighborhood had noticed a strange foul smell in the area for a while after that.

On the seventh day after opening their investigation, police arrested father Shirakawa Mitsuzou and his eldest son Shirakawa Kan on charges of murder and unlawful disposition of a corpse. The two readily confessed their guilt.

Detectives learned that Seizou had graduated from a veterinary school in Tokyo’s Azabu area and then gone to Nagano Prefecture, where he had married into an old family and established his veterinary practice. Despite being set up for what should have been the start of a rosy future, Seizou ruined it by a lazy no-good worthless bum who eventually turned to theft to gain the money to fund his drunken dissipation. He was caught and sent to prison. After getting out of prison the first time, he wandered around aimlessly and ended up back in the pokey twice more for fraud and embezzlement.

In 1937, at the age of 35 the young man who had left his father’s home a freshly graduated young doctor of veterinary medicine with a promising future returned to it a drunken shiftless lout and moved back in and lay about sponging off his 74 year old father. That alone would have been bad enough and a sufficient embarrassment to the old man, but Seizou compounded things by having visits from friends from his prison days. Mitsuzou had worked hard and built up a successful family business which he had passed down to his eldest son. He had set Seizou up to have a successful life in a respected profession. Mitsuzou had a solid reputation and the respect of all who knew him. Family was family and he was sort of stuck with neighbors seeing Seizou back at home as a drunken bum, but having Seizou’s shady criminal companions paying visits to his house was a bit much for Mitsuzou. Nakano wasn’t an area that had much going on in the way of shady characters and these guys would stand out. By way of background research for this episode, I went into Japan’s national archives and dug up the Tokyo Metropolitan Police annual report for 1939 and took a look at what kinds of crimes were being committed in the area under the Nakano Police Department’s area of responsibility. They covered an area with about 119,000 residents living in 26,766 households. For the entire year of 1939 there was only one reported home burglary out of those almost 27,000 homes. There were 13 arrests for forgery and 39 arrests for gambling and 110 arrests for fraud. There would be only one arrest for murder in the area for that whole year. The kind of characters Seizou was associating with would stand out to neighbors like a sore thumb.’

Seizou and his felonious friends were cooking up plans to go to Hokkaido and commit an armed robbery there. That turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for Mitsuzou. He knew that if he didn’t do something to prevent it, his worthless son would just go on being a public nuisance forever. So he did something to prevent it. He used a hatchet to kill Seizou as he lay sleeping.

After killing Seizou, he then told his eldest son Kan what he had done. At first Kan offered to take the blame for the killing on himself and tell police that he had done it. After talking it over, though, the two decided that they would just bury Seizou beneath the floorboards of the house and file a missing person report on him. After all, Seizou was a wayward ex-convict who had just suddenly drifted back into the family home on a breeze and no one would think it odd if he just drifted back out on another one.

With the war going on in China, Kan had recently received his draft notice and would soon have to go off to serve in the army. Mitsuzou would have to come back to run the bakery again so it was decided Mitsuzou would move into the living quarters at the bakery in Kouenji and sell the house in Nakano Ward….the house where the body of Seizou was buried. You can’t just leave your buried bodies lying about a property when you move. Not only is it impolite, it is dangerous to your own continued liberty. After all, there is no way of knowing when the next or some future owner is going to do some demolition, construction, or renovation that is going to turn up the evidence of your wrongdoing and bring you unwanted attention from John Law and the Do RIght. Boys. No, you have to dig them up and move them and that’s just what Mitsuzou and Kan did. They dug up Seizou, chopped him into pieces, and wrapped the pieces up in three bundles, reusing paper from packages received at the bakery. They loaded the bundles onto a bicycle and took them out to the grassy vacant lot along the Oume Kaido and threw them into the weeds.’

In 1939 nobody reduced, reused, or recycled because they were worried about the environment, or depleting natural resources or promoting sustainable this, that, or the other. They did it out of the simple frugal habits which are second nature to those who have lived through times of economic hardship. Mitsuzou and Kan had the presence of mind to remove the potentially incriminating shipping label from the wrapping paper they reused to bundle up all that was left of the moral remains of Seizou, but it was that act of unthinking, instinctive frugality that led to their arrests a short seven days later. That single arrest for murder in all of Nakano Ward for all of 1939 mentioned earlier? That was the arrest of Shirakawa Mitsuzou for the murder of Seizou. Whether because of his advanced age or in tacit recognition that the killing of a career criminal such as Seizou had turned into was commendable homicide even if it wasn’t justifiable homicide, the old man was sentenced to only two years in prison for the murder. For his part in helping dispose of the body, Kan was sentenced to ten months.

That’s all for Episode 6. If you enjoyed it, please do me a big favor and rate and review it on iTunes. It would really help in getting the podcast noticed and help it grow. Unlike some of the true crime podcasts out there which essentially just record themselves reading a Wikipedia page to you and calling it a podcast, I actually spend several hours each week researching and preparing what boils down to a little 15 or 20 minute story. It can easily take up to ten hours to research, write, record, edit, and publish one of these. If it isn’t asking too much, give me back a minute or two or your time by rating and reviewing the show, please. Follow on Twitter @hanzaipodcast or e-mail hanzaipodcast@gmail.com Thank you for listening and I’ll talk to you again soon.’

Hanzai News for the week ending March 22, 2018

In this weeks news:

• Murder
• Marijuana
• Meth
• Minors
• Police Officers Arrested
• Public Prosecutor Prosecuted
• School Teachers Arrested
• School Explosion
• Drug Dealing Porn Star
• And More!

Follow on Twitter @hanzaipodcast

E-mail hanzaipodcast@gmail.com

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

# Hanzai News for March 22, 2018

## 1

Aichi Prefectural Police on the 14th announced the arrest of a 41 year old Buddhist priest in connection with an incident at a yakiniku restaurant in Toyohashi City the previous evening. It is alleged the priest attached a miniature camera to the underside of the water tank in the restaurant&s unisex toilet in order to take images of female customers using the eatery’s Japanese style squat toilet. An alert employee of the restaurant noticed the suspect repeatedly visiting the restroom and thinking it suspicious took it upon himself to examine the facilities, whereupon he discovered the hidden camera. The priest admits to the charges.

## 2

An unemployed 79 year old woman in Hyogo Prefecture has been placed under arrest on suspicion of unlawful disposition of a corpse. She is said to have left the body of her husband in her home between February 8th and March 13th. Police responded to the home after being contacted by neighbors who said they hadn’t seen the husband for quite a while. Officers entered the home around 3:30 the afternoon of the 13th and found the man dead in the living room. The 88 year old man’s body showed no signs of external injuries. The widow denies the charges, telling police that her husband is still alive.

## 3

In Okayama City a 42 year old woman, Kimura Kaori, has been arrested on suspicion of causing her ex-husband’s death in December of last year by hurling a kettle of boiling water on him. The attack took place at the suspect’s home on the evening of December 3rd. The 42 year old victim of the scalding died of his wounds in hospital two weeks later. Kimura admits to throwing the boiling water on her ex. Police are attempting to establish a motive.

## 4

Officials of the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force have announced a 20 year old sailor has been disciplined for putting lewd notes into the mailbox of a woman he was attracted to. The sailor, stationed in Maizuru City, has been suspended for 10 days.

According to JMSDF officials, between June and September of 2017 the young man placed notes in the mailboxes of two women, both of whom lived in the same apartment building. He was arrested under suspicion of stalking in connection with notes left for one of the women and his case was deferred by prosecutors.

## 5

Aomori Prefectural Police and Kuroishi City Police will charge a 49 year old exterminator with professional negligence resulting in injury or death. The charges are in relation to an explosion at a Kuroishi elementary school the afternoon of September 18th, 2015. The explosion, which killed one adult and injured seven adults and children after 3 p.m. that afternoon when the exterminator lit a bug bomb to fumigate the 1.2 meter high crawl space beneath the floor of the school’s kitchen.

Police investigation after the blast revealed that LP pipes running beneath the kitchen showed signs of rust and decay. The crawl space had sustained heavy flooding twice in 2013 and 2014 when water drain pipes leaked into the area. The water was pumped out and the drain pipes repaired, but it is believed that the LP gas pipes were damaged while they were submerged in water and that leaked LP gas had built up in the crawl space.

Police looked into charges of neglect on the part of school maintenance staff for not discovering the damage to the LP gas pipes or the gas buildup, but as examination of the crawl spaces beneath the school are not a part of their normal maintenance procedures it was found impossible to build a case for professional neglect.

The husband of the part-time kitchen worker who died in the explosion expressed his satisfaction that investigation into the unfortunate incident but remarked that he can’t understand why the people in charge of maintenance aren’t being held accountable for not spotting the gas leak.

## 6

A third grade elementary school boy has been referred by Kanagawa Prefecture police to juvenile authorities in Osaka Prefecture after he was found to have created and distributed a computer virus. The 9 year old is said to have learned how to make the virus by watching online videos. Similar referrals were also made regarding a fourth grade student in Tokyo and a 5th grade student in Yamanashi Prefecture, both of whom downloaded the virus.

The youth said he just wanted to surprise his friends.

## 7

Unemployed 25 year old Nakamura Toshihiro of Osaka is going to have no trouble resisting his urges to grope women for the next 3 years and 2 months, as he will be spending that time in prison.

Nakamura’s has previously been imprisoned for groping and released on parole in September of 2016 and living in a halfway house when he was placed under arrest again for sexual assault charges the following month after fondling a high school girl and entering the home of two elementary school girls.

The sexual assaults are said to have taken place while he was returning to the halfway house from attending a course on preventing sex offenders from re-offending.

## 8

A 48 year old member of the Yamaguchi-Gumi Yakuza has been arrested in Osaka on charges of crashing a stolen Kei-truck into the shutter of a restaurant operated at the time by a rival faction of the gang in Kobe. The restaurant was closed at the time and no one was injured.

## 9

Japan’s National Police Agency reported on the 15th that there was a nearly 17% jump in the annual number of reported cases of revenge porn, With 1243 cases being brought to police attention in the last year. Surprising no one, in nearly 92% of cases the victims were female and about 80% were young, with those in their 20s outnumbering those in their 30s by more than two to one. The youngest were 11 year old elementary school 5th and 6th grade children.

## 10

The manager of a fishing tackle shop in Akashi City, Hyogo Prefecture, grabbed the arm of a man who was attempting to shoplift a fishing pole valued at 32,000 yen. The would-be thief threatened the 53 year old manager with a knife and then made good his escape on a bicycle, leaving the fishing rod behind at the scene and also succeeding in upping his charges from shoplifting to armed robbery if the police get their hands on him. No one was injured in the 2 p.m. incident.

## 11

In our second report of surreptitious photographing of women in toilets today, we have a story of a 46 year old Osaka man who has been arrested on charges of trespassing into a ladies’ restroom in the building where he works and photographing women by holding his smartphone over the top of the stall door. He was arrested on suspicion of engaging in the activity on September 19 of last year and on the 6th of February this year. The man had been working in the building in Himeji City since 2007. His coworkers expressed their sincere regrets that it became necessary to arrest someone in the suspect’s position and said they are working with their superiors to ensure they handle the situation properly.

His coworkers, it should be said, are his fellow public prosecutors.

## 12

In more law enforcement lowbrow high-tech hijinks, three Hiroshima Prefecture police patrolmen have been disciplined for taking cell phone photos of a female subordinate they had ordered to strip naked at her home in December of 2017. In light of the fact that the photos weren’t shared online, officials treated the incident as a prank rather than a crime. Two of the officers had their pay reduced 10% for 6 months and the remaining officer had his pay similarly reduced for 3 months. The three, who ranged in age between 22 and 27 years old, have since resigned from the police force.

## 13

Officers assigned to police riot squads will soon be sporting a more modern look. Starting in April 2018, riot squad officers throughout the country will begin receiving what is the first redesign of their uniform in 62 years, their current uniform having been designed in 1956. There are plans to purchase 14,300 uniforms by the time of the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics in 2020.

## 14

Osaka police have referred charges of professional negligence resulting in death against 3 employees of a facility for handicapped children.

The three employees were busy bathing 26 children at once when they failed to notice that an 8 year old boy in the bathtub had drowned.

## 15

In more news from Hyogo Prefecture, Police in Nishinomiya have arrested a 56 year old man who walked into a Lawson’s convenience store at 7:40 a.m. the morning of the 15th and sucker punched the 19 year old clerk, yelling “This is a robbery. Give me the money!” He was nabbed at the scene and will be charged with attempted armed robbery.

## 16

52 year old Hokkaido fisherman Onishi Kazuhiko enjoyed a big night out on the town recently. It ended poorly in the predawn hours of March 14, though, when the catcher of fish was caught by the catchers of crooks.

At about 2:30 a.m. the Kei truck being driven by Onishi struck a taxi in Kushiro City, injuring the 60 year old cab driver. Onishi then fled the scene and was discovered about 30 minutes later at a location 2km away where he had started a fight. Officers responding to the scene soon placed him under arrest for various charges, including drunk driving, driving without a license, causing an injury, and leaving the scene of an accident.

## 17

At 7 o’clock the morning of the 15th in Fukui City a woman out for a walk reported to police that she had discovered a human skull on a slope about 250m from a library. Officers responding to the scene soon found the remainder of the skeletal remains. The area is popular with joggers and it isn’t known why they failed in their traditional duty of spotting human remains. Perhaps they thought it was the turn of people out walking their dogs.

## 18

Kobe seems to be a popular destination for deadbeats who don’t pay their taxi fares. Regular listeners may remember we earlier had a story of a man who ran up a huge tab riding from Nagoya to Kobe, despite having only 17 yen on him. This week we have a 35 year old man who took a taxi from Osaka to Kobe and ran up a 9,420 far which he had no intention of paying. Upon arriving in Kobe, the passenger instructed the driver to take him to Kobe’s Nada Police Station, saying that he had been arrested by them before and indicating his preference to favor them with his company again.

## 19

Remaining in Kobe for one more story, Police in that city on the 16th arrested a 30 year old man in connection with the stabbing death of his 57 year old father on March 16th.

At about half past seven that evening, police and fire officials received calls from the killer saying he had stabbed his father in the stomach multiple times at their home. The father was found sprawled on the floor of the kitchen of the apartment he shared with his two sons and he died at a hospital an hour later. Police who had initially arrested the man’s younger son on attempted murder charges switched the charges to murder and are attempting to discover the motive for the attack.

## 20

A 33 year old Tokyo adult video actress, Asou Nozomi, is being prosecuted on various drug related charges after marijuana and cocaine were found in her home, together with 56 grams of methamphetamine. The meth is said to have a street value of 3.6 million yen. In addition to the drugs, scales and other paraphernalia were also confiscated and officials believe she was involved in drug trafficking.

## 21

Two people are dead and one injured following an apartment fire in Tokushima City on March 15th. The fire is believed to have been started by elementary school children who lit some cardboard near the apartment’s stairs. One of the two children ran home immediately after the fire started and admitted his involvement to his parents.

Two residents of the 360 square meter apartment building died in the conflagration which completely consumed the structure and a 70 year old female resident suffered burns to both hands.

Police will refer the children to youth authorities.

## 22

A 22 year old American Marine stationed in Okinawa has been sentenced to one and a half years in prison, suspended for three years, for what must have seemed like a good idea at the time. The Marine used stage money to make purchases and pay taxi fares, giving fake $100 bills in payment and receiving Japanese currency as change. The charges stem from 5 separate incidents which took place in July of 2017, in which taxi drivers were deceived of a total of 35,000 yen and $90 and in which a convenience store was duped out of 9,900 yen given out in change.

## 23

Tokyo Metropolitan Police announced on the 19th that a female officer in her 20s would be disciplined by being suspended for 6 months after it was learned she had been dating a Yakuza member and providing him with information regarding police investigations.

It was subsequently announced that the officer, who worked in the Shinjuku Police Station, had resigned her position and that her case had been referred to prosecutors.

## 24

Kyoto cops have arrested an unemployed 27 year old man on charges of growing marijuana in his own apartment between October of 2017 and February 19th of 2018. The man’s budding agricultural ambitions drew the attention of police when he was earlier arrest on February 12th in possession of 7 ready-rolled joints. Investigation of his dwelling following that arrest turned up the 4 pot plants he was raising there. Police say he purchased the seeds online and researched marijuana growing methods on the internet. The suspect maintains that the marijuana was for his own personal use.

## 25

Another story of an apartment fire, this one on the 15th in Saitama City. A 70 year old man has been arrested on arson charges for deliberately setting fire to an occupied building, a company dormitory for unmarried workers. Approximately 50 square meters were damaged by the fire. Fortunately, there were no injuries.

## 26

In the third story of smuggling gold into Japan from Southeast Asia in the one month this podcast has been active, three women from Taiwan have been apprehended in Hakodate for attempting to sneak 10.5kg of gold into the country in their brassieres. See? This is why you don’t turn the podcast off halfway through.

The three women, aged between 20 and 47, each had two 1.75 lumps of gold measuring 11cm in diameter and fashioned into the shape of bra pads. The gold was discovered when a female Customs officer who patted them down thought their breasts were unusually firm. Maybe including a 47 year old in the plot wasn’t such a good idea.

The woman say they were promised 72,000 yen each to smuggle the gold into Japan.

## 27

A 48 year old Tokyo man is facing multiple charges of extorting and molesting children in Nara Prefecture. According to Nara Prefectural Police, his modus operandi was to deceive young girls into thinking he was private security at bookstores and had discovered them shoplifting. In one case, he is said to have secreted a 1,000 yen bill between books in the young girls’ section of a bookstore and then waited and watched for a girl to take the money and leave the story, after which he followed her outside and introduced himself to her as a plainclothes security guard to the 12 year old 6th grade elementary school girl. He asked her address and home phone number and then followed the girl to her home, where he put his arms around her and rubbed her back outside her front door.

In addition to that December 17th, 2017 incident, he is also being charged for a similar crime in February of 2018. Police are continuing their investigation to determine if there may have been other victims.

## 28

A 46 year old elementary school teacher is facing charges of child rape and child pornography. The Kyoto teacher is charged with having taken an 11 year old 5th grade girl to a hotel in Osaka on January 31, 2016, knowing that the girl was under the age of 13, and engaging in lewd acts and taking video of his crime. He is also facing trouble for a January 6th, 2018 visit to a Kyoto hotel with a 13 year old girl.

## 29

In what is becoming the theme of the this week’s crime news, Police in Hiroshima Prefecture have referred to prosecutors one of their own, a police inspector in his 50s who is charged with having used his cell phone to take sneak shots of a teenage girl on the street. Examination of his phone revealed similar shots of another girl. After facing internal discipline from the department the inspector resigned from the police force and is now awaiting further disposition of his case from prosecutors.

## 30

Just when you thought I was out of these, a 32 year old junior high school teacher in Osaka is in hot water with the law for surreptitiously filming in the girls’ restroom. The teacher is charged with trespassing for entering the girls’ room of the school’s gymnasium and leaving his cell phone there, recording video, where it was discovered.

The teacher admits that he was recording the goings-on in the girls’ toilet, but claims it was because he wanted to record audio of them gossiping and find out what they were saying.

## 31

A 43 year old former teacher in Toyohashi City, Aichi Prefecture is facing prosecution on charges of physically abusing the elementary school students in his care. He is charged with grabbing two 2nd grade student by the hair and smashing their faces into a blackboard and hitting a boy over the head with a ruler. He is said to have repeatedly physically abused 9 students, hitting their heads with a broom, pinching their faces, and in other ways engaged in unsanctioned contact.

The Prefectural Board of Education in February suspended the teacher for 6 months and he later resigned.

## 32

In our final story for this week, let’s get away from people abusing their positions of trust and authority and instead end with some good old-fashioned thievery.

A Shinto shrine in Nago Castle Park in Okinawa’s Nago City has for the last two years has repeatedly been the target of thieves who remove money from the offering collection box. Starting about 5 years ago, local officials spotted signs that people had tried breaking the lock off the collection box and began double locking and even welding the box shut after each time they removed the accumulated cash.

The shrine is mostly targeted after New Years and the school entrance examination season, during which times it receives greater numbers of visitors and thus greater donations. Robberies during these times can net the thieves an estimated 200,000 yen and officials make an effort to get around to the shrine two or three times a week to collect the cash before bandits have a chance to make off with it. They have filed multiple police reports with the local Nago Police Department buy have yet to hear back from them of any progress in the case. The area around the shrine is said to be largely devoid of people outside of the New Years and school examination seasons.

The collection box has already been broken into once this year, with a welded lock being broken off the box and the money stolen.

An official lamented, “The money from the collections is supposed to go for the upkeep of the shrine, but it costs so much to get somebody out here to do welding that we’re essentially just using all the collection money to buy new locks and pay for welding every time we open the box”.

Even leaving out at least a third of the current crime related news stories collected over the last week, we still ended up with the longest news roundup so far. I’m starting to think in the interest of brevity I might have to start collecting tales of misbehaving teachers and police officers into their own separate weekly or monthly crime report. There are so many of them…and they do deserve covering…that they crowd out the regular criminals. What do you think? Let me know via Twitter @hanzaipodcast or via e-mail hanzaipodcast@gmail.com

Also, starting from this news report the Hanzai Podcast is moving from SoundCloud to being hosted on BLubrry instead. You may find the show at hanzai.blubrry.net. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll talk to you again soon.