Father of Slain Japanese Woman Offers Reward

As a youth growing up in Japan, Yoshitsugu Sasaki had a dream of visiting the United States. But it was a nightmare--the murderous attack on his beautiful daughter in Los Angeles--that first brought him to this country and her hospital bedside more than four years ago.

Since then Sasaki has returned to Los Angeles six more times to press the investigation into her death.

The slaying of 28-year-old Kazumi Sasaki Miura shocked the Japanese public and inspired the Tokyo news media at first to hail her businessman-husband, Kazuyoshi Miura, as a hero, and later to revile him as villain.

On Friday, at a crowded news conference at the Japanese American Cultural Center in downtown Los Angeles, the 53-year-old Sasaki formally offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person who gunned down Kazumi Miura.

And, in a gesture typical of his concern for others, Sasaki also formally apologized to the Japanese-American community in Los Angeles for any embarrassment the notorious case may have caused.

“I don’t want to cause anybody any trouble,” he said in an earlier interview with The Times, “but I do want to end this case finally and bring the killer of my daughter to justice.”

Kazumi Miura was shot in the head on Nov. 18, 1981, during what initially was reported as a street robbery. She died in a Japanese hospital more than a year later.

Miura--who had demanded cash compensation from the U.S. government for his wife’s medical expenses and succeeded in having her flown home at no cost in an Air Force hospital plane--was at first lionized by the Japanese media for standing up to the American Establishment.

But his image began disintegrating early last year when the Tokyo-based Weekly Bunshun magazine reported that Kazumi Miura had been insured for $655,000, with her husband as beneficiary. The magazine also reported that Chizuko Shiraishi, a former lover and business associate of Miura’s, had vanished mysteriously in 1979.

Miura later admitted that he had withdrawn $21,000 from Shiraishi’s bank account after she disappeared, but claimed it was money she owed him. Then, in March of 1984, a body that had been discovered five years earlier in Lake View Terrace was identified through dental X-rays as that of the missing woman. The cause of her death has never been determined.

Discredited by Japanese Media

By the time the 38-year-old businessman was arrested by Tokyo police last September--this after a former girlfriend and one-time pornographic film actress, Michiko Yazawa, confessed that Miura had paid her to kill his wife during a visit to Los Angeles three months before the fatal street shooting--he had been thoroughly discredited by the Japanese press and television.

Yazawa and Miura are now awaiting trial in Tokyo on charges of attempted murder under a rarely invoked law that permits prosecution of Japanese citizens suspected of crimes against countrymen committed in foreign nations.

The person who pulled the trigger in the 1981 shooting has never been identified, although on Oct. 3, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner named (but did not file charges against) Miura as a suspect in the deaths of both his wife and Shiraishi.

Information Sought

Jimmy Sakoda, head of the district attorney’s new Asian Investigative Unit, said at Friday’s news conference that anyone with information about the deaths of Kazumi Miura or Shiraishi should phone his office at (213) 974-3632.

Sasaki, manager of a small iron foundry, said he will pay the reward--upon conviction of his daughter’s killer--from the proceeds of the just-published second book he has written about the case, which also paid for his current trip.

Several earlier visits to Los Angeles, he said in the interview, were paid for by a Japanese television station, and another by donations from 120,000 Japanese citizens who signed petitions Sasaki brought to Los Angeles, urging cooperation between Japanese and American authorities in the case. “I couldn’t afford to pay for them all,” he said through a translator, “(but) my motive was pure, I did what I had to do.”

Slender and soft-spoken, his eyes showing weariness and sorrow, Sasaki said that although he had never liked Miura--”I advised Kazumi against marrying him”--he still has “mixed feelings” about him today.

“The time came when it was obvious he should be arrested,” he said, “but at the same time he was once my son-in-law, and I also have a granddaughter by him. When I think about that . . . it is very difficult to accept.”

He also said that while he is “disappointed” that the Los Angeles police have not solved his daughter’s murder, he added that “I understand their problems.”

Sasaki will fly back to Japan on Monday and hopes he will never again have to return on a mission of sadness. But he does want to come back some day.

“I want to pursue the dream that I had when I was young,” he said, “to really visit the country I dreamed about.”