Tokyo trial to begin Tuesday

TOKYO -- A real-life crime mystery involving the death and disappearance of two Japanese women in Los Angeles is making legal and social history in Japan. Though hardly talked about in the city where the crimes took place, the “Los Angeles Suspicions” case, as it is called here, raised the ratings of daytime TV programs and the circulations of popular weekly magazines--Japan’s equivalent of tabloids.

“Suspicions” has something to satisfy every taste--sex, violence, money, travel, and even a debate on civil liberties. But without a doubt, the most important ingredient has been Kazuyoshi Miura, a 38-year-old businessman who, before his arrest in September on charges of attempted murder, turned his notoriety into a profitable career.

With Miura’s trial scheduled to begin Tuesday, public interest is expected to reach yet another peak.

Miura first appeared on Japanese television more than four years ago, when he denounced the United States as a country of violence and demanded that Los Angeles police find the men who he said had shot his 28-year-old wife, Kazumi, and put her into a coma. According to Miura, he and Kazumi were attacked Nov. 18, 1981, in broad daylight on Fremont Avenue near the Harbor Freeway. At the time, Miura was viewed as a hero, and he even managed to enlist the help of the Japanese government in having his wife flown by a U.S. Air Force hospital plane from County-USC Medical Center to a university facility outside Tokyo. Kazumi never regained consciousness and died in November, 1982.

Today, the former “model husband,” who is charged in an earlier unsuccessful attack on his wife, has become the target of mass vilification rarely seen before in Japan.

Printed Allegations

It has been about two years since the weekly Bunshun magazine alleged in a series called “Los Angeles Suspicions” that Miura lost not only his wife but also a lover in Los Angeles--and that he had profited from the deaths of both women.

According to the Bunshun series, Miura collected the equivalent of $600,000 in insurance money after the death of his wife and the yen equivalent of $17,000 in cash from the bank account of his lover after her 1979 disappearance.

Free-wheeling weeklies and daytime TV programs homed in on every aspect of Miura’s private life, from a conviction for arson in his youth to nude photographs of him attending a group-sex party. At one point, Miura’s house was surrounded day and night by reporters, one of whom later recalled walking up and down in front of Miura’s window with a sign reading, “Miura, did you kill them?” Miura fled to London, only to be tracked down there by Japanese reporters and television crews.

The scoop of a private network, film footage of Miura peering out of the window of his London hide-out, is estimated to have attracted 30 million viewers in a country with a population of 120 million.

Unusual Response

But if Miura’s treatment by the media was unparalleled for its intensity, his response was unusual, too. As Kenichi Asano, author of “The Crime of Crime-Reporting,” said in an interview, “Some people would have committed suicide, but Miura seemed to have thrived on it.”

Sporting wrap-around sunglasses, polo shirt, and tight-fitting jeans (Japanese men his age would be more traditionally dressed in drab, gray suits) Miura made appearances on late-night TV talk shows, wrote numerous articles, two books, and even played the part of a police detective in a TV serial. A Japanese publisher estimated that Miura grossed $50,000 from his book “Unclear Times,” a rebuttal of “Los Angeles Suspicions.” In a pre-arrest interview, one of the few for which he did not take money, he said that he received the equivalent of $2,000 for each TV appearance.

He added, however: “I normally give people a figure that is less than what I actually got. This is because the TV stations deny giving me any money at all, so I cannot go around saying I’ve been paid.”

Miura took a television crew to Tokyo’s domestic air terminal, where, in front of cameras, he recalled in great detail the fur coat his former lover, Chizuko Shiraishi, was wearing in March, 1979, when he bid her farewell on a trip to Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost main island. The weekly Bunshun magazine had alleged that he had sent her not to Hokkaido but to Los Angeles and that she never returned.

Lapse of Memory

When Shiraishi’s decomposed body, which had been lying for more than five years in the Los Angeles morgue, was identified in October, 1984, shortly after his TV appearance, Miura said he had a lapse of memory. “It was careless of me,” he said.

Miura’s Sept. 11 arrest by Tokyo police in the driveway of a first-class hotel was televised, as was his marriage last summer in an all-expenses-paid Hindu-style ceremony in the South Pacific resort island of Bali. His new wife, Yoshie, has also begun to emerge as a public personality; a daytime TV program had rated her among the 10 most important women of 1985.

Last Oct. 3, when Miura and a former woman friend were charged in Tokyo with attempted murder, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner named Miura as the sole suspect in the 1979 slaying of Shiraishi and in the 1981 murder of his wife, Kazumi. Los Angeles Police Department spokesman Lt. Dan Cooke, however, said that police “do not have sufficient information to name anyone in these murders.” The Los Angeles investigations remain open.

Prison Sentence

Last week Michiko Yazawa, Miura’s former friend, was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for attempted murder in connection with an attack on Kazumi by a female assailant in the New Otani Hotel in Los Angeles in August, 1981, three months before Kazumi’s fatal shooting. Yazawa confessed to hitting Kazumi with a hammer-like iron object, which she said Miura had provided her. She told the court that Miura had promised to marry her and to split some of the money he would get from insurance he had taken out on Kazumi’s life. Yazawa also said that she and Miura had chosen Los Angeles as the scene of their crime because they thought they would be out of the reach of Japanese police there.

Miura has accused Yazawa of fabricating her confession, and his lawyer, Futaba Igarashi, has said that Miura will plead not guilty Tuesday.

The charges against Miura and Yazawa are in a number of ways a departure from the past in Japan. To begin with, they were arrested under a reinterpretation of a Japanese statute that permits Japanese courts to try nationals for crimes committed overseas. The law had previously been used to re-evaluate the sentences of Japanese convicted by foreign courts who returned to Japan after serving prison terms abroad.

It was also the first time here that media disclosures have become the starting point of a major criminal investigation. The role of the weeklies and private television networks, which vied with one another to cover “Suspicions,” has sparked a debate on civil liberties. (In contrast, Japan’s prestigious national dailies and the country’s public broadcasting agency limited their coverage of the case to official announcements, such as the identification of Shiraishi’s body.)

Journalistic Ethics

Liberal critics, such as author Asano, have raised questions about the methods of reporters for the weeklies and private television networks that covered Miura. “Regardless of the outcome of the investigation,” said Asano, “the reporting is hysterical, illegal and contrary to journalistic ethics.”

The Asahi Journal, a liberal weekly, attacked reporters who laid siege to Miura’s house for “subscribing to the theory that if Miura is truly innocent he should prove it.” Likening such thinking to a medieval witch-hunt, the magazine concluded, “Under such conditions one would have to be a witch to be able to dispel suspicions against himself.”

While Bunshun’s chief “Los Angeles Suspicions” writer, Takanori Abe, is willing to concede that there were excesses in the media’s coverage of Miura, he said in an interview that “the choice was between being too careful about Miura’s human rights and ignoring the rights of the dead Kazumi and Chizuko.”

Said Yoshimi Ishikawa, author of several Japanese-language books on California: “In Japan, people have come to the conclusion that Miura is guilty and they cannot understand why he is not thought of the same way in Los Angeles. They explain to themselves that Miura was not arrested there because Los Angeles police are lazy, or else they are busy, or else they are afraid to move against Miura because he was a Japanese tourist.”

Question of Values

A Nihon University law professor, Hiroshi Itakura, suggested that there is real concern among Japanese that murder-for-insurance might catch on. Said Itakura: “There is a feeling in Japan that the United States is a loose country, a place you can get away with many things. People are asking what will happen to our values if all of a sudden you can take someone to America, have him killed there and collect the insurance.”

Defense lawyer Igarashi has charged that “Miura has long ago been convicted in the press.” She complained that because of adverse publicity, it took her 50 days to find partners to help her mount a defense on Miura’s behalf. In response to suggestions that Miura compounded his troubles by appearing on television and making contradictory statements, Igarashi said: “He had no choice. He had to close down his business as a result of adverse publicity.” Miura had been an importer of U.S.-made fashion goods.

As for Miura, a movie he appeared in before his arrest is scheduled for release the day after his trial begins. In it, he shouts abuses at a news reporter, splashes a glass of whisky in his face and throws him out of his shop.