Lucie Blackman was working as a bar hostess in Tokyo at the time of her disappearance.
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The last time Sophie Blackman saw her older sister alive had been at 4 a.m. the day Lucie left for Japan. Before going to the airport, Lucie had climbed into Sophie's bed. She had intended to give Lucie a card wishing her good luck, but instead she produced an 18-page letter. "Lucie had a beautiful soul," says Sophie. "I wanted to tell her what she meant to me."
Unlike her sister who hadn't really figured out what she wanted to do with her life, Sophie had worked as a cardiac technician at a local hospital for more than a year. She found the work rewarding. It probably also helped train her to react swiftly and with methodical detachment in a crisis.
Lucie's mother Jane had been preparing a care package for Lucie of cold medicine and her favorite "pick-and- mix" snacks from Woolworth's when Phillips called the Blackmans' house on July 3. Lucie's parents, Tim and Jane, both in their mid-40s, had separated five years earlier. Tim lived one-and-a-half hours away on the Isle of Wight in an apartment with his girlfriend. The girls lived with their mother and 17-year-old brother, Rupert. They were renters, not owners, but comfortably middle class. Everyone except Rupert worked. Jane was a therapist for cancer patients. Tim had a small home-building company.
That Monday when Jane Blackman received the call, she phoned Sophie at work. Sophie made arrangements to fly to Tokyo. Tim Blackman, planning for the worst, went to his bank and secured a line of credit for $29,000. Ultimately, he would spend nearly $145,000 — most of it contributed by relatives — searching for Lucie.
Sophie left for Tokyo the next day and arrived on July 5. Tim Blackman came a few days later, after turning over day-to-day operations of his business to his partners. Sophie remembers not sleeping for her first eight days in Tokyo, sweating from the intense heat and becoming disoriented in labyrinthine train stations. In their first two weeks, she and her father printed and distributed 30,000 posters with Lucie's picture on them. They talked to anyone who might have known her. They met with police. They held a press conference. Sophie says, "We wanted to make it impossible for anyone to say, 'We're not investigating this.'"
That was the problem, as far as Tim saw it. Among all the possible leads, the most traceable should have been the four calls that had been placed during and after Lucie's dohan — in particular, the three that Lucie had made on a cell phone provided by her "date." Tim says: "The authorities told us that they were unable to get any information due to privacy laws, and they said the technical means of doing so was beyond the capability of Japanese telecom companies."
Tim Blackman also wondered why the owner of the club where Lucie had worked was unable to provide police with any solid information about the customer his daughter had met while working there. "My daughter was introduced to this man at the club she worked in a few days before she disappeared. How could the club owner not know anything about him?" The family couldn't help but wonder if the police had other motives for dragging their feet. "My sister was working in Japan illegally," says Sophie. "We were afraid that some people might take the attitude that whatever happened serves her right."
Of the roughly 300,000 illegal foreign workers estimated to be in Japan, about a third are women employed in the mizushobai, or water trade, the catchall phrase for the sex-entertainment industry. While most of the economy has stagnated in the 10 years since the bubble collapsed, the water trade has boomed.
Most English-speaking Caucasian women working in Roppongi's hostess clubs don't realize they are part of the mizushobai. Within it they occupy a privileged position compared with the tens of thousands of Asian women who work in storefront shops churning out sex acts for prices listed on menu boards. Nor do hostesses encounter the obvious dangers faced by the hundreds of South American women, some as young as 16, who openly work as prostitutes on central Tokyo's backstreets.
Within the mizushobai, Caucasian hostesses are essentially paid the most for doing the least, but this does not shield them from stigma. "Some hostesses don't consider themselves part of the mizushobai because they are not having sexual intercourse," says Mizuho Fukushima, member of the Upper House of Japan's parliament and a high-profile women's rights advocate. "But people outside consider what they are doing part of the sex industry." Before she entered government, Fukushima in 1989 helped establish a private center called Help, which has assisted more than 2,000 women — most of them Asian but including an increasing number from Russia and South America — who have suffered from abuses such as coerced prostitution, physical intimidation and assault. Fukushima says, "I have taken foreign women who have been beaten up to the police or to the immigration department who have said to my face, 'What are you doing here? These women are here illegally.'" She adds that the officials try to justify turning away such cases, arguing: "What were these women expecting when they came here illegally?"