After 27 years, his duty still calls

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.

Along the way, he married Akemi Tani, a former Nisei Week queen, and had four children. Sakoda’s youngest son, Joey, calls his father a devoted family man who never missed his football practices, took them camping and fishing, and insisted they try to eat dinner together every night.

In 1975, as Asian immigrants poured into Southern California thanks to a liberalized immigration law a decade earlier, Sakoda proposed what he regards as one of his proudest accomplishments: forming what would become the nation’s first Asian task force. The idea was to recruit officers familiar with Asian languages and culture to cultivate trust in the communities.

The first assignment was to provide security for Emperor Hirohito’s visit to Los Angeles -- giving Sakoda the rare experience of shaking the ruler’s hand. The officers also uncovered Yakuza-connected fraud among Japanese, Filipino gang activity, gambling and extortion in Chinatown, spousal abuse and prostitution in Koreatown.

In 1976, Sakoda became the first Japanese American lieutenant in LAPD history. A year later, he was honored as the nation’s outstanding law enforcement officer by the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

In November 1981, Sakoda was attending a U.S.-Japan crime conference in Tokyo when the first call came in about an apparent robbery and shooting involving a Japanese tourist couple. The husband, Kazuyoshi Miura, told police that he was snapping pictures when two thugs drove up, robbed them, shot him in the leg and his wife in the head, and escaped.

But the two officers who first responded doubted the story and wanted to book Miura that day as a suspect, Garcia said. The Japanese businessman’s account was contradicted by eyewitness statements and physical evidence, Garcia and Sakoda said. In addition, Miura had a rap sheet in Japan that included arson, and later it was revealed that he cashed out a $655,000 life insurance policy on his wife.

As Miura loudly portrayed himself as a victim of America’s mean streets, the case drew enormous media attention and was transferred from central robbery to the major crimes unit. There, Sakoda hit his worst troubles.

The detectives there focused on two hippies as prime suspects and eventually shut Sakoda out of the case entirely -- getting him banned even from attending meetings, according to both Garcia and Sakoda. They began floating rumors about Sakoda -- that he was personally profiting from the case, for instance, by going to Japan and getting “$10,000 per press release,” said Garcia.

Sakoda said all of the rumors were patently false, and White and Garcia backed him up.

The key detective identified as making the charges at the time did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Sakoda had encountered rejection before and always got past it -- a Catholic school’s refusal to even discuss admission, or the UCLA football team’s failure to notify the all-city center linebacker about spring training. But the LAPD treatment was most hurtful, he said.

“It was like your own father kicking you out of the house,” Sakoda said. “I felt my family didn’t believe me anymore. It was very disheartening.”

He decided to retire in 1984 after 26 years on the force. Never mind the Miura case -- or so he thought.

Three fateful events pulled him back in.

The parents of the dead woman came to see Sakoda during a 1984 visit to Tokyo, begging for his continued help. They gave Sakoda and his wife their daughter’s charm bracelet, a constant reminder of her presence.

White, his LAPD classmate, was hired to head the district attorney’s investigations bureau. After the dead woman’s parents visited then-Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner in Los Angeles pleading for help, White hired the newly retired Sakoda to open the office’s own Miura investigation.

And over at the LAPD, Sakoda’s ally Garcia was promoted to lead detective on the case. Suddenly, the three old friends who had worked in the narcotics bureau together were in key positions to revive the investigation. They worked closely with Japanese police and eventually helped them win the 1994 murder conviction against Miura.

Sakoda retired from the district attorney’s office in 1999 and opened a risk assessment business. Today, he enjoys his seven grandchildren, deep-sea fishing and working out -- at 5 feet 9 and 172 pounds, the trim septuagenarian still fits into his old Army fatigues.

Those who know Sakoda best say his discipline and single-minded tenacity are evident in everything he does. His son Joey, a 33-year-old business consultant, said his father would work out with him many nights, running up and down nearby stadium steps, urging him to push past his exhaustion and finish what he started.

“My dad says life is not a sprint, it’s about perseverance,” Joey Sakoda said. “You’ve got to hang in there.”

So when the Japanese high court overturned Miura’s conviction, Sakoda did not lose hope. He knew there was an outstanding U.S. warrant for Miura’s arrest. He knew Miura could be nabbed if he ever entered U.S. territory.

And when he finally did, visiting Saipan in February, Sakoda had one thing to say:

“Gotcha.”

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teresa.watanabe@latimes.com