2 Deaths, a Link and a Mystery

Two years ago, a hiker in the Angeles National Forest stumbled upon a human skull as she searched for a place to relieve herself.

But who it belonged to remained unknown until last weekend when Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigators identified the skull and other remains as those of Kumi Kojima, a 28-year-old Japanese hostess who entertained rich businessmen at a Little Tokyo nightclub.

The discovery has uncovered a mystery that may link the beautiful hostess to one of the most powerful real estate moguls in Los Angeles--a man who without notice or explanation committed suicide in his car earlier this year.

Authorities were able to identify Kojima only because her parents finally reported her missing on Feb. 28, almost three years after she is believed to have disappeared.

When police searched Kojima’s Los Angeles apartment, they found dental records that they were able to match with the long-unidentified skull.

According to a sensational three-part series published in February in a Japanese magazine, Kojima was the mistress of Kiichiro Kobayashi, 42, a top executive at Shuwa Investment Corp., a company that owns about $1 billion in U.S. properties, including the Arco office towers in downtown Los Angeles and others in New York and Orange County.

Shortly after a January interview with the Japanese magazine, Shukan Bunshun, in which Kobayashi grudgingly admitted he and Kojima were lovers and that he paid the rent on her expensive apartment near Beverly Hills, Kobayashi apparently hanged himself. Police in San Benito County, where Kobayashi’s body was found outside his car parked on a deserted country road, said he committed suicide by slamming his tie in the door of his shiny new Lexus.

Bunshun, produced by one of the most respected publishing groups in Japan, is a weekly tabloid not above stretching the truth for a good story, according to people who work in the Japanese media.

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The lead detective on the Kojima case, Sgt. Richard Longshore of the Sheriff’s Department, said the magazine stories may contain some of the best leads available to reconstruct her life in the United States and her possible connection to Kobayashi.

Longshore said he believes the Bunshun series prompted Kojima’s parents to contact the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles and file a missing persons report with the Los Angeles Police Department.

He said many elements in the case are strange: Kojima’s parents did not report her missing until two years after her remains were found; the rent on her apartment has been paid since she disappeared; and Kobayashi committed suicide without leaving a note or any explanation.

“Now we are trying to bring her back to life, to learn how she was, from her friends and associates,” Longshore said this week. “But that’s extremely difficult when you are dealing with a lapse of almost three years.”

Kojima grew up in Gifu prefecture in central Japan, the daughter of a middle-class businessman and his wife. Kojima first came to the United States in 1990 on a student visa and lived in Los Angeles on and off for several years, Longshore said.

While in L.A., she worked at a hostess bar where attractive women typically fawn over wealthy businessmen in dimly lit rooms, entertain them with polite, flattering conversation and ply them with expensive drinks.

It was at the Greco--which closed in 1997--that Kojima met Kobayashi, his boss and cousin, Takaji Kobayashi, and other Shuwa employees, according to the Bunshun article.

Shortly afterward, the magazine reported, she moved into a luxury apartment and started driving a new Mercedes with vanity plates that read, “Agawa.”

Like traditional geisha, who often went into semi-retirement once they found lovers who paid their living expenses, Kojima stopped working at the hostess bar. Also like geisha, she even practiced an art, according to the latest issue of Bunshun, drawing portraits of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe.

“She was about 5-foot, 95 pounds, a beautiful young woman with a variety of looks,” Longshore said. “She could look everything from a very prim Japanese woman, to an extremely attractive celebrity type image, to photos where she was in a blond wig and looked like a party girl. She was very well dressed and had extremely good tastes.”

Though her real name is Kumi Kojima, in the United States she often used the alias Reiko Agawa.

Longshore said it is not uncommon for Japanese nationals to use different names when they come to the U.S.

“We were told, anecdotally, that she chose the name Reiko because that is a cartoon character--a well-to-do, jet-setty young woman who is so into the high life that she doesn’t even know how much a cup of coffee costs,” Longshore said.

Kojima’s parents became concerned about their daughter in May 1996 when she stopped calling them, but there is evidence she was still alive then, Longshore said. Authorities believe she disappeared in July or September of that year.

Friends said she was traveling in Europe, and her rent continued to be paid on time.

In the tiled lobby of the pink Chateau Beverly Apartments on Wetherly Drive, the names Agawa and Kojima still hang by the buzzer for Apartment 403, 32 months after she disappeared.

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“Two years later, Reiko’s apartment is still kept just the way it was,” Bunshun reported in February. “All of her belongings are still there, except her toy poodle named Fendi. . . . Even her answering machine is still working.”

Longshore confirmed the apartment was as she left it. He said her Mercedes has been located after apparently being sold to a new owner. He would not say where the car was found.

He has not determined who paid Kojima’s rent; he said he is waiting for documentation from the apartment manager.

The Bunshun article linking Kobayashi to the missing hostess had not yet hit the newsstands when Kobayashi left town. He began his highway odyssey the day after he was interviewed by Bunshun, and was found dead five days later with receipts in his car from Sacramento and San Francisco, authorities said.

The reasons for Kobayashi’s suicide remain unclear. By all accounts, Shuwa Investments Corp. was not doing well.

Shuwa’s bold plunge into the U.S. real estate market in the flush 1980s--when Japanese businessmen were snapping up landmark office buildings and golf courses in the United States for top dollar--has turned into a humiliating retreat, with the company trying to sell off a portfolio that by some accounts has lost about half its value.

This was a reversal in fortune for Shuwa, which shocked the real estate world in August 1986 by buying Arco Plaza--twin 52-story towers in downtown Los Angeles--for a stunning $650 million. Some brokers credit Shuwa for driving the 1980s boom in property values and surge in downtown development.

Shuwa’s financial crisis is not unique. It mirrors that of many Japanese companies that went on a real-estate buying spree during the go-go years of Japan’s bubble economy.

One former Shuwa employee even compared Shuwa to the Japanese company described in Michael Crichton’s bestseller “Rising Sun,” about the fictional murder of a beautiful young white woman in the corporate offices of a Japanese company in Los Angeles.

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Authorities in San Benito said there were no signs of foul play. But taking his own life seems out of character for a man many former employees describe as unflappable.

Journalist Ryutaro Nakamura, who conducted the Bunshun interview with Kobayashi, described him as a well-built, attractive man who was supremely confident. He said the executive smiled through the entire interview--even as he began to gradually contradict himself--and appeared unruffled.

Longshore said Kojima’s remains provide no clue as to how she was killed.

In March, Kojima’s parents traveled to Los Angeles to visit the site where her skull and bones were found, strewn over an arid, rocky hillside.

“I took them up to where her body was found,” Longshore said. “It was an incredibly emotional moment.”

Despite the linkages outlined in the lurid Bunshun series, Longshore said he has yet to find any evidence connecting Kobayashi to Kojima’s death.

But the mystery has clearly caught the attention of the Japanese media hungry for details on a story involving a beautiful young bar hostess and a rich real estate mogul saddled with debt.

“I tell you, we have had 43 calls from the Japanese media in the last 48 hours,” Longshore said this week.

Journalist Nakamura, who has been following the Kojima story since last year, said the recent developments are almost uncanny. Two years had passed since Kojima disappeared. No body had been found and there was nothing to link Kobayashi to Kojima. The fact that a flood of new information is coming out now, he believes, is no accident.

“I think Kojima’s spirit is pushing our backs,” he said earnestly. “I think her soul is trying to get revenge.”

Times staff writer Melinda Fulmer and Times researcher Chiaki Kitada in the Tokyo bureau contributed to this report.