New Book Delves Into The World Of Hostessing And The Murders
Of Two British Women In Tokyo

Close to a decade after her death, Lucie Blackman continues to haunt all of us who spent those scorching summer months of 2000 chasing shadows, the Japanese police and her family. From early July, it seemed that everyone was trying to find the 21-year-old Briton who had swapped stewardessing for British Airways for hostessing
in Roppongi.

We did not know it – although some certainly suspected it – but this young woman, who was equal part trusting, equal part pressured into bringing clients to the Casablanca hostess club, was already dead.

It would take three months for the man eventually convicted of causing her death to be arrested, and it was not until February of the following year that the Japanese police found Blackman’s body. But in that time, every journalist working for a British news outlet received a very thorough grounding in Tokyo’s sex industry, the curious world of hostessing and dealing with editors back in London who simply could not grasp the concept of outwardly ordinary men paying vast sums of money simply to have an attractive foreign woman light their cigarettes, keep their whisky glasses full and flatter their egos.

And when you look at it through their cultural prism – one foreign editor happily informed me that he had never felt any need to travel further east than Moscow – I suppose it is easy to understand why hostessing becomes synonymous with prostitution and the perpetual inability of the Tokyo police to converse with the media is interpreted in London as a sign of a cover-up.

Ten years down the line, those of us who still work here are all definitely older but hopefully a little wiser as well. Unfortunately, stereotypes and assumptions are apparently hard to shake, and there are those who still paint with extraordinarily broad brushes.

Clare Campbell has written a book – Tokyo Hostess: Inside
the Shocking World of Tokyo Nightclub Hostessing – that is performing creditably in the nonfiction sales charts. The book claims to explain Blackman’s reasons for coming to Japan, the events that led up to her disappearance, her family’s fruitless search, the arrest of Joji Obara and his eventual conviction on a string of charges involving the drugging and raping of young women.

Trouble is, it’s so full of basic, easy-to-verify errors that I can’t help but ask myself whether Campbell has actually got it right when she presents other information in her more-than-slightly breathless tabloid manner.

(And lest anyone thinks I’m being sniffy here, I make no apologies for chipping in with articles to every single Fleet Street tabloid in the 18 years that I have been in Japan – primarily because they pay a damn sight better than the broadsheets. But I do draw the line at breathless.)

We are told of parties on “Fujisaw” beach, letters containing “1187 million yen” in cash and the “legendary property tycoon Minoro Mori.” The banquettes in the Casablanca club are described as being of black leather (they were red and upholstered on the day I was there, a week after Blackman disappeared – although I admit they may have been black leather when Campbell arrived in 2007.) The murder of Lindsay Ann Hawker is also dragged into the narrative, with Campbell stating that she was working in a language school in the Tokyo suburb of Keiwo, instead of Koiwa. Jake Adelstein undergoes the double indignity of being identified as a reporter with The Japan Times (it was the Yomiuri) and repeatedly referred to as Edelstein. Knowing Jake, he won’t mind, but that’s not really the point.

Ironically, Campbell is not above pointing out spelling errors in British newspapers in the days and weeks after Blackman’s disappearance, as well as accusing them of “sparing no cliche” and “weary stereotyping.” Yet she falls back onto stereotype herself by describing hostesses as “freckle-faced fantasies” and the beach where Blackman’s remains were eventually found as “a beautiful and fearful place all at once.”

In parts, the book reads more like a novel; thoughts and words are portrayed as those of Blackman before she leaves Britain and in her early weeks in Tokyo and, on the first page of the prologue, plastic bags are described as flapping “like stranded jellyfish in the unkempt bushes” of Obara’s house in Den-en-Chofu. His cars are “glamour chariots from another age.”

Still, I must admit that I learned a thing or two about the seamy side of Tokyo; apparently, a hostess who has hair held back from her face is willing to perform oral sex.

What Campbell does do well is recreating the emotions and bewilderment of the rest of Blackman’s family, although Jane Steare, her mother, declined to cooperate with the book and is made out to be some sort of New Age believer in the occult who consults with soothsayers in an effort to bring her daughter home. Instead, it is left to Tim Blackman and Lucie’s younger sister Sophie to relate what they went through.

There is the incredulity at the failure to treat Blackman’s disappearance as a police matter until more than a week after the event, the authorities’ failure to immediately interview other hostesses or management at the Casablanca club, their refusal to check credit card bills from the club and their inability to trace phone numbers for “technical reasons.”

Eventually, after pressure at the highest levels of government, it is the mobile-phone records that are suddenly free of any technical hitches and are used to identify Obara. Yet even now, despite two courts finding Obara guilty of a gamut of crimes against women, the appeals process is dragging through Japan’s legal system.

While most of Tokyo Hostess focuses on the Blackman case, Campbell also works in the equally unpleasant death of another British woman, Lindsay Hawker, although the parallels between the two cases are pretty much just that: They were British women who were killed in Japan. Their individual motivations for coming to this country are glossed over, as are the jobs they had – although there is an attempt to pull the two careers together as Campbell claims that “so many girls chose to go to Japan, either to work as teachers, hostesses or frequently both.” I imagine that would be a pretty draining workload.

The only real connection between the deaths of Blackman and Hawker is that they were unfortunate to come into contact with dangerous and violent Japanese men with sex on their minds.

I have spoken with the two women’s families numerous times in the intervening years and have the utmost sympathy for them all. Japan is a relatively safe country, and events such as these are far from everyday occurrences. Their daughters were just in the wrong places at the wrong times.

Yet while Blackman’s family may have found a degree of closure with Obara’s conviction, the Hawkers are still seeking their daughter’s killer. Tatsuya Ichihashi, the only suspect in the case, famously evaded eight police officers (despite not having had time to put on his shoes) and has been on the run since March 2007.

At first, the Hawkers went along with the police in the belief that they were doing all they can. That has slowly morphed into disbelief regarding how the investigation is being conducted.

The last time I saw Bill Hawker, he had just come out of a briefing in which the police had informed him that they had a new weapon in the hunt for Lindsay’s alleged killer: life-size cutouts of Ichihashi that they were going to erect at train stations. He asked them how many they had. The police replied “two.” Bill asked “Two hundred? Two Thousand?” No, the police replied, just two.

I firmly believe that Blackman’s body was only found because her parents and sister came to Japan, stood on street corners with “missing” posters, appeared on TV shows and continued to chivvy the police. Without that, the police here would have been happy to leave Lucie on file as a “missing person.” And Obara would almost certainly have still been drugging and raping hostesses.

I sincerely hope that the Hawkers get the justice they deserve for their daughter.