TOKYO (TR) – An office lady (OL) of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) was found strangled in a vacant room of a Shibuya apartment building on March 19, 1997, and nearly three decades later, nobody has been held accountable for her death, reports Smart Flash (Oct. 31).
The victim, Yasuko Watanabe, had been witnessed soliciting clients in the hotel district near the scene in the years before her murder, a double life that stood in stark contrast to her image as a career professional at one of Japan’s most powerful corporations, and which drew intense public scrutiny at the time.
A Nepali man found to be residing illegally in an adjacent building was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing. He served 15 years before the conviction was overturned in 2012, when a retrial found that biological material recovered from the victim’s body did not match his DNA.
The retrial exposed a damning prosecutorial scandal: evidence favorable to the defense, including the presence of a second, unidentified man’s DNA, had been withheld by prosecutors for years. The wrongful conviction case drew fierce criticism from legal observers and civil liberties groups across Japan.
Investigators were left with a case riddled with loose ends from the start. Among the most glaring: the victim’s commuter pass turned up not at the Shibuya crime scene but in the garden of a private residence in Sugamo, on the other side of the city, with no explanation ever made public.
The six-story wooden apartment building where the body was found, constructed some 60 years ago, still stands on the same Shibuya street, largely unchanged since the night of the murder. Residents continue to rent rooms there, and the izakaya on the ground floor has operated without interruption. In a neighborhood swallowed by relentless redevelopment, the building looks frozen in time, and so does the investigation.
With 29 years now elapsed and the real perpetrator never identified, pressure is mounting on Tokyo Metropolitan Police to show meaningful progress on one of the capital’s most notorious unsolved homicides.
