TOKYO, Sept. 2, 2023—The script is different but the film’s title ‘The Bad Sleep Well’ is a snug fit to the unresolved murder case now unfolding in Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s official residence.
The 1960 Akira Kurosawa film, known to be influenced by William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, was highly politically-oriented and clearly was intended to remind moviegoers about the ubiquity of corruptions and briberies of politicians and bureaucrats pervading during the period when Japan was rebuilding the war-ravaged country to prepare for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic games.
The film portrayed acts of chivalry and cunning performed by the Seven Samurai actor, Toshiro Mifune, against the head of a giant governmental housing development company, yet was outsmarted and killed. The mogul prevailed and smiles at the end.
Thanks to the film or not, Japan gradually began ridding itself of the centuries-old ignominious practice of ‘under-the-armpit’ gift-giving to government officials in ensuing decades, elevating its business ethics to the developed economy level and, though superficially, bribery-free.
The 2023 summer revelation can reverse course of political modernization and transparency, and throwback of the country to the nearly 300 years of Edo period bureaucracy grip of society that would empower politicians to do whatever they want yet even they can be entrapped in that legacy. There already are signs that all parties concerned are haunted: Kishida, for one, is totally powerless on this case and top bureaucrats have no choice but to suppress it with administrative power.
Here’s what’s happening: Deputy cabinet secretary Seiji Kihara, 53, widely recognized as Kishida’s right-hand like Walt Nauta for Donald Trump, leads ‘a dual family life’ of commuting between his mistress and her son and his real wife and family, according to the weekly Shukan Shincho’s June 22 edition. On a March 2023 day, Kihara went to Tokyo Disneyland to celebrate the mistress’s daughter’s birthday with her and daughter and three of them stayed at a nearby hotel. The next morning, they visited the adjacent Disney Sea and Kihara left for the prime minister’s official residence around 10:30 a.m. The mistress, 47, is a single mother who previously worked as a bar hostess. Kihara earlier had denied the relationship with the mistress as well as that the daughter was his own, but over time, he confirmed that the daughter as his own, according to the magazine. Kihara’s lawyer told the magazine that he would tell his wife when visiting the mistress’s residence.
This itself is a major scandal even in Japan, where sexual relationships are far more lax than in other countries, particularly for a political heavyweight.
But the drama – the real story – takes a further turn: His wife, 44, was also a bar hostess working in Tokyo’s Ginza and remarried with Kihara in 2014 – that was 8 years after her previous husband, Taneo Yasuda, 28 (at the time of his death), a night club employee, died a mysterious death in his home in Tokyo’s Otsuka district on April 10, 2006, according to to the magazine’s July 13, 2023 edition. The first finder of Taneo’s body was his father, who reported to police that his son was lying in a pool of blood.
Kihara’s wife, who police later identified as Ikuko, told the father that she was sleeping alone in the second floor bedroom. She had two children with the dead husband. Taneo was stabbed from head to throat and autopsy revealed a large dose of stimulant from his body. The knife was placed – not discarded somewhere like in most murder cases – neatly by the dead husband’s body.
Ikuko did not show up in her husband’s funeral.
Police continued investigating the case and followed Ikuko, who started working as a bar hostess, and in the spring of 2018, interviewed a man who was detained by police for stimulant possession. He eventually admitted hearing from Ikuko, ‘I’ve killed him’ and that when he visited Ikuko’s house, Taneo was lying bleeding blood.’
On October 9, 2018, the same police investigators swooped Kihara’s apartment in suburban Tokyo but did not question Ikuko because her children were home. A month later the police officers were relieved of the assignment, and they told the magazine that it was a message from police higher-up to close the case.
Taneo’s father and his sister submitted an appeal to police to continue investigating the case yet police continues to stonewall. National Police Agency commissioner Yasuhiro Tsuyuki has told reporters that their investigations turned up nothing suspicious and Taneo committed suicide, according to the national daily Asahi July 25.
In the August 13 edition, Shukan Asahi quoted Makoto Sato, former chief investigator of the case and now retired, sharply challenged Tsuyuki’s comments saying that Tsuyuki ‘fooled us and our investigations.’ Sato said police had been investigating the case with a 40-person team because of the extraordinary circumstances.
Tsuyuki’s NPA is threatening to sue Sato for violating municipal public workers’ confidentiality law. Sato told the magazine that if this case, for which so many investigators were mobilized over so many years, is closed by the authority, it would have an irreversible impact on the public trust of Japanese police – which has indeed over years been damaged by police officers’ errant conducts and acts, such as arresting wrong people as criminals and losing arrested suspects from police stations.
Bureaucracy controls widens. NTA commission Tsuyuki, 60, is a so-called ‘career bureaucrat’ who graduated from Kyoto University Law School and joined NPA hopping highly visible posts such as prefectural police headquarters and NPA criminal divisions. He was the chief of a team examine former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s shooting death.
Tsuyuki is a stark contrast to Sato, a so-called non-career cop who chases criminals like a hound dog. Shukan Bunshun and other media warn that if the Kihara case is closed and Kihara, his wife and other accomplices are not nabbed, it would cause serious consequences not just on police moral but government in general as career bureaucrats, many of them eventually join politics, would opt to widen their administrative grips.
For now, Tsuyuki and other career bureaucrats, including another deputy cabinet secretary, Shunichi Kuryu, 66, are seeking evidence of Sato’s public servant confidentiality law violations, such as whether he received money and grafts from Shukan Bunshun and other media outlets. They have failed to date but their men are chasing Sato almost every day, the magazine said.
On the media, that Shukan Bunshun winning the case is all the more important now as it is the single news outlet that confronts the government head-on. All national newspapers have keeping mum on the case.
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