Some murders are shocking in their strangeness, others fit a sickeningly
familiar pattern: but the cases that intrigue us most are those that combine
elements of the known and the unknown, seeming to confirm in us something we
hadn’t realised that we already knew. The death of Lindsay Hawker, the
English-language teacher strangled in Japan ten days ago, is one of these
cases.
For her family and friends it is a crushing tragedy: for the wider world,
viewing the unfolding events through the lens of the media, it has a
compelling ghastliness.
There is the victim herself — young, popular, beautiful, and profusely
photographed, out with friends, alongside her devoted boyfriend, sipping a
drink by a swimming pool. There is the suspected murderer, 28-year-old
Tatsuya Ichihashi — lean, “a loner”, and only ever pictured in a single
image, a glazed face staring out of a police mugshot. And then there is the
third character, both a participant in, and the setting for, the drama — the
country of Japan itself.
It is difficult to put a finger on it, but for many people it is somehow
naggingly appropriate that this murder took place in Tokyo. How many times
in the past ten days, foreign friends — both here and at home — have
commented “how Japanese” the story is, without ever being able to say
exactly how. The case seems to speak to unarticulated but deep-seated
Western stereotypes of a culture that even in the 21st century remains a
mystery. A jumble of images and ideas are called to mind — concerning
stalkers, repressed and perverted sexuality, Japanese pornographic comic
books, and notions about the way Japanese men regard Western women.
It is as if, far from being an appalling aberration, the death of Lindsay
Hawker was an accident waiting to happen. Japanese, too, have an anxious
sense of this — especially since the words of her father, Bill Hawker, that
the murder of his daughter has “brought shame on your country”. Last weekend
Japanese television nervously sent a film crew on to the streets of London
to ask passing Brits whether Lindsay’s death had sullied their image of
Japan.
There is one obvious reason why the Hawker murder induces a sense of déjà vu:
the killing seven years ago of another young British woman. Lucie Blackman
was a bar hostess rather than an English teacher, but for sheer
grotesqueness the details of her death surpass even those of the latest
case. Lindsay Hawker’s naked body was found on the balcony of an apartment
in an earth-filled bathtub. Her suspected killer had a conviction for wallet
snatching. The man charged with killing Lucie (the verdict in his case is
due in three weeks) was accused of multiple rapes and one other killing over
several years. Lucie’s body was found cut into eight pieces and buried in a
seaside cave.
But two murders in seven years is hardly decimation. In fact, by the standards
of any comparably developed Western capital, Tokyo is a fantastically safe
place to live.
Imagine a city in which burglary is rare, car break-ins are virtually unknown
and women walk the streets alone, without anxiety, at all times of the day
and night. Japan has a population more than double that of England and
Wales, but in 2005 it recorded 2.56 million crimes, according to police
figures, fewer than half the 5.6 million reported in our society. Most
remarkably, only 3.5 per cent of these were violent crimes, compared to 21
per cent in Britain. One of the reasons why Japan’s police frequently appear
so bumbling (like the moment last week when Tatsuya Ichihashi dodged nine
officers to escape in his stockinged feet) is that they have so little
practice fighting real crime.
But there is much more to it than bare statistics. The first thing that
visitors to Japan notice is the drastically unfamiliar atmosphere on the
streets, the body language of individuals and the mood of the crowd. An
intense and thrilling energy drives Tokyo, but it is one narrowly channelled
by the constraints of convention and conformity. This is the source of the
famous Japanese restraint and politeness, but it greatly complicates the
business of reading people and understanding situations.
The notion that Japanese men are “obsessed” with Western women is a lazy cli-ché
- from my perch in Tokyo, cocky, skirt-chasing foreign men with an appetite
for Japanese women are far more obvious than the famous Japanese train
gropers who are tediously cited whenever the subject of crime in Tokyo makes
the British news. Japanese pornography and manga comics are certainly
distinct in their preoccupations, as a rudimentary Google will reveal, but the idea that Japanese onanists are greater consumers of porn than their
counterparts in the West is something which, in the absence of solid
scientific research, I find difficult to believe. And anyone who believes
that this is a sexually repressed country should spend a Friday night in a
district such as Roppongi, where young Japanese women feed on foreign men
with equal enthusiasm and ferocity.
Japanese men rarely make the overt displays of aggressive masculinity that
Westerners deploy from time to time to impress or intimidate. They seldom
preen or strut: to a relative newcomer such as Lindsay, with no command of
Japanese, they might appear “sweet”, “shy”, even “boring”. In almost 15
years here I have seen only three fist fights in Japan. Each one exploded
out of nowhere, with no preliminary shouting or goading or facing off — and
came to an end with equal abruptness.
The effect of this for many foreigners is to disable the instincts for caution
and suspicion that guide and protect us at home. This is what Lindsay Hawker
shared with Lucie Blackman, another decent, respectable English girl who
would never have contemplated working as a hostess in a London nightclub.
Japan is safe: we know it’s safe — and so we end up doing things that we
would never risk at home.
There is so much that is still mysterious about the death of Lindsay Hawker.
When exactly did she meet Tatsuya Ichihashi? Was it at her Nova
English-language school? Why did she chose to leave the coffee shop where
they had their English conversation lesson and go to his apartment on that
Sunday morning? And what exactly happened between the time of their arrival
there and the discovery of her naked body, bound and buried, the following
evening. But I can easily picture her, finishing her coffee with the polite,
sweet, shy young man with whom she had just spent an undemanding hour.
Perhaps he explains to her that he has forgotten his wallet with the money
he owes her. Would she mind coming to his place? He is sorry, but
it’s only round the corner. How harmless such a suggestion might have
seemed. And then the walk back, and the door closing behind her, and the
sudden change in him, and the unspeakable aftermath.
Many young women would have done such a thing in similar circumstances. Many
more will in the future, and only the minutest fraction of them will ever
come to grief. This, I suspect, is the sad and mundane truth about the death
of Lindsay Hawker: not that she was rash or idiotic, but that — in a safe,
but complex, society — she was very, very unlucky.
‘A kind of recklessness’: three stories of teaching in Japan
HANNAH SHEPHERD, 21 Fukuoka City, Kyushu
I read the story about Lindsay Hawker when I had just got back from
hitchhiking around Japan, and I suddenly realised that it was something I
would never do back home.
I went with a male friend who speaks Japanese, so I did feel slightly safer —
but still, I wouldn’t ever consider it in the UK.
I felt comfortable almost the whole time, whether it was single guys who
picked us up, or couples. I’m actually a bit of a worrierer but everyone
here is so incredibly friendly it that if I was ever going to do it, Japan
seemed the safest option.
One family I’m sure belonged to the Yakuza — the Japanese mafia.
They had this huge Western car, there was this big, Soprano-style guy
and a wife chain-smoking over the top of the baby on her lap. But even then
I just felt somehow that it was funny.
We did get picked up by single men as well, but there’s a difference between
men over here and men back home. They are generally shier, and that can come
across as naivety and trustworthiness.
WILL PAVIA, 27 Near Hiroshima
It seemed to me that the entire population of Japan existed in a perpetual
state of caution: they were always telling us, and each other, to be
careful. A walk in the countryside was fraught with potential hazards, we
were told, travelling into town was risky, and things became progressively
more dangerous the further afield you travelled.
I liked to shock my employers by telling them that I was going on holiday to a
foreign country where there was a lower standard of living, and I had not
arranged any accommodation. They looked at me as if I were some sort of
desperado.
In many of my fellow foreigners, these constant exhortations to be careful
bred a kind of recklessness, because Japan seems so safe. I left my house
unlocked and my car keys in the ignition. There were persistent stories of
people who left wallets stuffed with cash on park benches and returned days
later to find them still there: even if the stories were apocryphal, they
were entirely believable.
I found myself becoming strangely overconfident. Foreigners in Japan are often
accorded instant and entirely undeserved credit. Despite all evidence to the
contrary, strangers would tell me within minutes of introduction that I was
tall, young and handsome, that my faltering Japanese was flawless, and that
I was obviously extremely cool. It seemed to mean that we expatriates could
get away with things that we would consider rash at home.
Complete strangers would ask me to stay at their houses, so they might give me
supper and practise their English. In the seediest bar, in the roughest
parts of town, and in the company of the most obnoxious alcoholics, I felt
safe.
Reading the papers, we saw that Japan was just another country, with its own
social issues, drug problems and crime; but standing in a school gymnasium
in Matsukasa, watching children practise crossing the road, it seemed
impossible that such things could exist.
RACHEL BORER, 27 Shimane prefecture
There was a real community feel there. Everybody is so nice to you, you think
it wouldn’t be in their nature to attack you. Once I was in a small karaoke
bar for a celebratory dinner. As I was leaving, I stood up to shake the hand
of this 72-year-old and he placed both of his hands on my breasts.
I didn’t say anything because I knew it would go all round the village. You
don’t want to rock the boat because you don’t want to be seen as that awful
foreigner who makes scenes in such a normally polite and friendly society.
You let people get away with things you might not back home, but equally you
begin to think that they can’t really be quite so serious after all. There’s
such trust. People go shopping and leave their cars running. They don’t
believe crime will happen, so they send their tiny children off to school on
their own, but then they give rape alarms to five-year-olds, as if under the
surface of this community spirit the Japanese themselves know that bad
things do happen.
Every so often someone would become infatuated with one of the teachers. There
was this very pretty blonde girl who just couldn’t tell people she wasn’t
interested and already had a boyfriend, and so she’d give English lessons,
and let the hairdresser cut her hair for free to be polite.
Lots of the people you meet very rarely see a foreigner so you feel as if
you’re representing not just your country but the world abroad.
But everyone gives private lessons out there anyway. They’re so lucrative, and
Nova, the language school company, was known as No Vacation because it paid
badly and worked people so hard.
