Lucie Blackman was working as a bar hostess in Tokyo at the time of her disappearance.
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What is most troubling, says Fukushima, are the foreign women, mostly Asian, who have disappeared or died under mysterious circumstances over the years. "They are undocumented, so we don't have good numbers," she says. "The media barely covered this problem until Lucie's case. All of a sudden it was news when a white girl disappeared."
It also helped that the Blackmans worked every possible angle in pushing their investigation. A friend of Tim's who had once worked as an airport limo driver in London had given several rides to Sir Richard Branson, legendary founder of Virgin Enterprises. The driver phoned Sir Richard's office and, a few days later, Virgin offered to help the Blackmans open a Tokyo office for their investigation.
Tim and Jane Blackman called and e-mailed the British foreign ministry, until they worked their way up to Prime Minster Tony Blair's office. By coincidence, Blair was scheduled to be in Japan on July 21 for the Group of Eight economic summit in Okinawa. Blair raised the issue of Lucie's disappearance with his Japanese counterpart, Yoshiro Mori. The high-level contacts brought immediate results. Soon after the G-8 meeting, Tim Blackman says, "I was told by the police that they had suddenly solved all of the technical and legal problems in tracing the phone calls."
Meanwhile, leads began to pour into a hot line the Blackmans had set up in Tokyo. Three foreign women came forward with remarkably similar stories. Each had been working at Roppongi hostess clubs within the past few years and gone on a dohan to a seaside restaurant with a wealthy, well-dressed Japanese businessman. Each of the women reported blacking out and waking up hours or days later in this man's apartment. He used a different pseudonym with each girl, calling himself "Kazu," "Yuji" or "Koji."
By the end of July, Lucie's face was on the front pages of Japan's and overseas newspapers. TV reporters descended on the Blackmans, following their every Tokyo move. Many articles dwelled on the seamier aspects of Roppongi and speculated that Lucie had been caught up in drugs or an S&M cult. By the time her body was discovered, her face was known to virtually everyone in Japan. Her disappearance had been as obsessively covered locally as the O.J. Simpson trial had been in America, exploring as it did similarly complex racial issues, only this time through a Japanese mirror. The blondness of the victim, the assumed Japaneseness of the murderer, so many issues could be read into this case: How does Japan deal with foreigners? How does this society dehumanize women? And most importantly, what does the crime say about Japan's moral state? The media had a field day discussing these and other issues as Lucie became a cause for national soul-searching and head-scratching, yet another reminder that something, ineffably, was very wrong.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police would eventually assign more officers to this case than it had to the 1995 sarin gas attack in the city subway system that had killed 12 and injured 5,500. They finally got their suspect on Oct. 12 when a 48-year-old Japanese businessman named Joji Obara was detained in connection with Lucie's disappearance. On April 6, Obara, who has steadfastly maintained his innocence, was charged with her death: a rape that apparently turned into murder. Police officials, speaking off the record to the Japanese press, suggest he may have raped as many as 200 women over a two-and-a-half decade span, a crime spree to which, TIME has learned, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police had been alerted before Lucie's death.
While Joji Obara awaits trial for killing Lucie, and the case mounts against him as one of the most prolific serial rapists ever caught, he has become a symbol to some Japanese of the malaise of the post-bubble economy and its moral aftermath.
If there is one career path that captures the essence of post-bubble Japan, it is "failed real estate speculator." During the '80s and early '90s, real estate speculation had been the frothy center of Japan's double-espresso economy, with developers and brokers becoming that era's version of the more recent dotcom billionaires. Speculators like Joji Obara were the heroes of Japan's go-go era, driving their Bentleys and Rolls Royces, living in their mansions, dating their exotic blond girlfriends. This was the period, remember, when Japan was going to take over the world. Men like Joji Obara cast themselves as the Fibe Mini warriors on the vanguard of this Japanese invasion. Naoko Tomono, a journalist who has written extensively about Lucie's case for the weekly magazine Shukan Bunshon, offers a surprising insight into how some men in Obara's age group perceive his infamy as a serial rapist: "They respect him as a man comfortable going to expensive bars and picking up Western girls." Susumu Oda, professor of psychiatry at Gakuin University, who has worked with authorities on other high-profile criminal cases, says Obara is a "peculiar symbol" of men of his generation, "because he was obsessed with Caucasian women."