Detectives Link 2 Lives Cut Short

Sheriff’s investigators have established that a top executive at Shuwa Investment Corp., a huge player in the Los Angeles real estate market, paid the rent for a 28-year-old Little Tokyo nightclub hostess whose skull was found in the Angeles National Forest.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. Richard Longshore, lead detective on the case, said the investigators’ findings confirmed what had been alleged in a Japanese magazine about the executive, who is now dead.

The disclosure was a significant development in a case that has been a sensation in Japan and has attracted attention in the real estate community because of the importance of Shuwa, which owns about $1 billion in property in the United States.

The skull of Kumi Kojima, who entertained rich businessmen, was found by a hiker two years ago. Other remains were found later.

But her identity remained a mystery until February.

That month, her parents reported her missing. And the magazine Shukan Bunshun published a three-part series saying that Kiichiro Kobayashi, 42, a top executive at Shuwa, was paying Kojima’s rent and continued to pay it after her disappearance.

Kobayashi admitted to the magazine that he and Kojima were lovers and that he paid the rent on her expensive apartment near Beverly Hills.

Records obtained by detectives this week show that Kobayashi bought and made payments on Kojima’s Mercedes through August 1996, when she is believed to have disappeared, Longshore said.

After the magazine disclosures, Kobayashi apparently committed suicide. His body was found in San Benito County, which lies between the Salinas and San Joaquin valleys. Police there said he hung himself by slamming the door of his shiny new Lexus on his tie. The car was parked on a deserted country road.

“Now we are trying to bring [Kojima] back to life, to learn how she was, from her friends and associates,” Longshore said. “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 fawned over wealthy businessmen in dimly lighted rooms, entertained them with polite, flattering conversation and plied 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 after meeting Kobayashi, the magazine reported, Kojima moved into a luxury apartment and started driving a new Mercedes with vanity plates that read “Agawa.”

“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 taste.”

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

“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 first became concerned about their daughter in May 1996, when she stopped calling them. 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 in Los Angeles, the names “Agawa” and “Kojima” still hung by the buzzer for Apartment 403 the weekend her remains were identified.

Kobayashi apparently began a 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. Authorities in San Benito County said there were no signs of foul play.

By all accounts, Shuwa was not doing well. The company’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 retreat, with Shuwa trying to sell off a portfolio that by some accounts has lost about half its value.

Earlier this month, Shuwa sold two office buildings in Century City for about $200 million, according to brokers and tenants familiar with the sale. The buyer, a group that includes San Jose-based real estate firm Divco West, also reportedly purchased Shuwa buildings in Boston and Chicago.

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

Times staff writers Melinda Fulmer and Jesus Sanchez and Times researcher Chiaki Kitada in the Tokyo bureau contributed to this story.