Lucie Blackman was working as a bar hostess in Tokyo at the time of her disappearance.
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Obara's decline — his firm collapsed, his banks called in their loans — is also a parable for Japan's economic journey. And like most of his countrymen, the downturn didn't affect his lifestyle. His lavish habits continued; he kept his Ferrari, vintage red Rolls Royce Silver Cloud, his condominiums by the sea in Miura. Driving his Ferrari around Roppongi, he was a curious figure with his droopy mustache and surgically altered, Westernized eyes. At 1.7 m tall, he wore shoe lifts and took regular doses of human growth hormone under the mistaken belief it would make him taller.
It is at Obara's Den'en Chofu mansion that the shabby decadence of his post-bubble lifestyle comes into stark focus. The mod 1960s design rises up behind a gated drive, with surveillance cameras poking out from bushes. At the height of the bubble it was worth more than $25 million. Liens were filed against this property when his firm went bust in the early 1990s. Obara continued to frequent the house up until his arrest, letting it slide, like some Dorian Gray portrait of Japan's national psyche, into a state of advanced decay, with rust flaking off the exterior ironwork and bricks crumbling from the walls. A Maserati, a Bentley and an early 1960s Aston Martin are parked in the yard. The cars have flat tires. There is trash everywhere. Keeping watch by a side door is a life-size statue of a German shepherd, with bared ceramic fangs and a pink tongue that glistens in the sunlight.
When police searched the home, they also found a real German shepherd frozen in a solid block in a large freezer next to a bouquet of roses and some dog food. Obara would later say he had preserved it with the hope that, one day, science would enable him to "reanimate my loving pet into a clone dog." Strange as it was, the dog fits a pattern Obara had of hoarding personal detritus. There were stacks of old car batteries, trashed TV sets, receipts, journals and personal tape recordings dating back to the 1970s. The biggest haul comprised more than 200 videotapes showing dozens of apparently unconscious women being assaulted by Obara, who, in many of the tapes according to a police source, wears nothing but a Zorro mask. (There are similarities between Obara's alleged crimes and videos and the theme commonly depicted in Japanese pornography of men having intercourse with sleeping women. Called yobai, there are even sex shops in Tokyo called "image clubs" where men pay to fondle and have intercourse with prostitutes feigning sleep. These contemporary forms of yobai are a bastardization of folklore myths about young men taking brides in their sleep. Yobai was even a theme of a novel by Nobel Prize-winning writer Yasunari Kawabata.)
Joji Obara was born in 1952 to an impoverished Korean family in postwar Osaka. His father had been a scrap collector, then a taxi driver who worked his way into owning a fleet of cars and a string of pachinko parlors from which he amassed a fortune. Perhaps mindful of the discrimination faced by Koreans, when the young Obara — then known by his Korean name Kim — was asked to pen a farewell sentiment in his junior-high class yearbook, he wrote: "Upbringing is more important than family name."
At 15 he was accepted into Japan's most élite high school, a Yokohoma prep school affiliated with prestigious Keio University. To facilitate Obara's entry to the school his father purchased the Den'en Chofu mansion and sent the boy to live there with a maid. When Obara was 17, his father died, leaving holdings in Tokyo and Osaka to his son.
By 1981 Obara had graduated from Keio University (alma mater of newly elected Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi) with degrees in politics and law, become a naturalized Japanese citizen and legally changed his name to Obara. Once he had expunged his Korean lineage, Obara, with his wealth and his educational background, could have entered the nation's ruling élite, becoming, perhaps, a top bureaucrat or corporate chieftain. Instead he became a man of his times, leading a desultory, undistinguished existence, punctuated by his disastrous forays into real estate speculation. He formed an investment company, Plant, in 1988, relatively late in the bubble cycle. When the economy collapsed, nearly taking Obara's assets with it, his mother, who still controlled the lucrative pachinko operations, helped bail her son out, at one point paying off a creditor nearly $33 million in cash. Following these business failings, Obara's company reportedly became a front for the Sumiyoshi yakuza — branded Japan's second-largest organized crime syndicate by the national police — who kept him afloat by employing him as a straw man for their money-laundering operations.
Obara hid from cameras his entire life. Few photos of him have been unearthed other than a grainy 1970s shot. Former employees at his real estate company say he forbade them to take pictures of him. During the day he invariably wore sunglasses. Cell phone records obtained by police after his arrest indicate he had become a nocturnal creature, making most of his phone calls between sundown and sunrise while he restlessly cruised between his seacoast apartments and central Tokyo residences.
Prior to his arrest in connection with Lucie's disappearance, Obara had one notable brush with the law. In 1998 he was arrested in a women's restroom in a beach town called Shirahama in Wakayama prefecture. Obara was in drag, and he was attempting to videotape a woman using the toilets. He was charged with a misdemeanor and fined $75.