Maybe it was memories from the murdered woman's bracelet.

Or maybe it was her father's anguished plea for justice.

Certainly it was the Japanese values of bushido, the samurai code that promotes a fierce sense of duty and obligation, honesty and fidelity to self, to truth, to endurance.

Veteran Los Angeles County lawman Jimmy Sakoda mentions all of this in trying to explain why he has pursued a murder case for 27 years, a relentless quest that has produced comparisons to the lingering mystery of the still unresolved Black Dahlia homicide.

The case of who killed Kazumi Miura on a Los Angeles street has haunted and shaped Sakoda's life -- helping end his career with the Los Angeles Police Department but launching another with the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, fueling nasty rumors about him here but bringing him celebrity status in Japan, including a coveted decoration for meritorious service last year presented by Emperor Akihito himself.

Nearly three decades after Miura was shot in one of the biggest trans-Pacific whodunits ever, the case -- and Sakoda -- are back on center stage. Next week, the district attorney's office is scheduled to face off against celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos in arguing whether Miura's husband, Kazuyoshi Miura, should stand trial in Los Angeles for her murder.

Miura was convicted of her murder in Japan in 1994, acquitted on appeal four years later and arrested on a U.S. felony warrant in February in the U.S. territory of Saipan, where he is being held pending an extradition request from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Geragos said his client, who proclaims his innocence, was acquitted of all charges in Japan and cannot be tried for them here because of double jeopardy laws; prosecutors say a 2004 California law allows the prosecution of those who have been cleared in foreign courts.

Sakoda has been rehired by the district attorney's office to serve as a senior investigator on the case, a decade after his retirement.

For him, the developments bring the case full circle.

"I really think this thing is following me, it's almost spooky at times," Sakoda, 72, said in a recent interview. "Who would ever think 25 years later I would have this thing back on top of me?"

The case's dramatic twists and turns mirror his own life.

The eldest son of Japanese American farmers, Sakoda was born in Seattle and brought as an infant to Los Angeles. In 1942, following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Sakoda and about 120,000 others of Japanese descent were placed in internment camps. His family ended up at the Tule Lake camp.

The formative experience steeped Sakoda in traditional Japanese values. For three years, he was schooled in Japanese language, history and culture. He learned the Japanese martial arts of kendo and judo, and the strict discipline that went with them at the time: When he goofed off, Sakoda recalls, he was forced to stand holding two buckets of water.

He learned bushido values: "character and integrity, respect for others, especially parents and older people. Do your best, don't ever give up," he said. "I was in Boy Scouts -- the creed is pretty similar."

Sakoda would eventually be tagged "samurai detective" among LAPD buddies. Frank Garcia, an LAPD detective who worked the Miura case with Sakoda in the mid-1980s, said a fellow officer proclaimed Sakoda "Daiichi (No. 1) Samurai Detective" at a Little Tokyo karaoke bar, and the name stuck.

Sakoda attended UCLA, served two years in the Army and returned to enroll in Los Angeles City College. There, a friend coaxed him into taking a law-enforcement class and an LAPD recruiter asked them to apply to the police academy.

He balked. World War II was just a decade old. Besides, police are "white, 6-feet-plus, blue-eyed blonds," he told his friend. He went for it anyway. Sakoda finished in the top 10% of his 1958 graduating class, ranking first in physical fitness, and was elected class president.

"Everybody liked him," said classmate Jack White, a former LAPD commander and former chief of the investigations bureau in the district attorney's office. "He just had an air about him that said sincerity."

Sakoda was one of just a handful of Asian Americans among 8,500 officers on the police force. Among other assignments, he worked in the narcotics and vice, patrol, and juvenile units.