Japanese Whose Wife Was Slain in L.A. Held in Tokyo

A 38-year-old Japanese businessman, Kazuyoshi Miura, whose young wife was fatally wounded in a 1981 street shooting in downtown Los Angeles, was arrested today in Tokyo for questioning about what police said was a previous attempt to murder her in the New Otani Hotel here.

A waitress and one-time porno film actress, Michiko Yazawa, also was arrested. According to Japanese press reports, she confessed last year that she had attacked the wife with a hammer-like tool Aug. 12, 1981, at the urging of Miura, who had given her 600,000 yen (about $2,400) to travel to Los Angeles.

The wife, Kazumi Miura, 28, suffered only slight head injuries in the attack in her New Otani Hotel room, but a month later she was fatally wounded in the head during a street attack in which her husband suffered a slight leg wound. Miura told police that he and his wife were shot and robbed by two men. Miura was the beneficiary of $655,000 in insurance on his wife’s life.

Two Japanese investigators were in Los Angeles recently to confer with Los Angeles Police Department detectives who have been investigating the shooting, the alleged attack in the New Otani and the apparent 1979 murder of a former lover of the Tokyo businessman. The decomposing body of a woman found here in May, 1979, was identified from dental X-rays as Chizuko Shiraishi, a former business associate and lover of Miura.

Miura was arrested in a downtown Tokyo hotel where he was being interviewed by a reporter. Scores of other Japanese reporters, who had been tailing Miura in anticipation of the arrest, were outside the hotel as detectives took him in custody.