MIE (TR) – On November 24, 1998, journalist Noriko Tsujide, then 24, left the Ise City office of publisher employing her at the time. She never returned home.
On Sunday, the 26th anniversary of her disappearance, family members and police handed out flyers to raise awareness about the unsolved case.
News outlets, including NHK, covered the event. However, these reports did not reveal that the police at one time had a person of interest in the case. Yet they could never pin him with a crime.
Last person known to have seen Tsujide alive
Four years ago, a reporter for the weekly tabloid Shukan Josei visited the Ise home of the last person known to have seen Tsujide alive.
The person is a middle-aged man, who will go unnamed. A woman, presumably the unnamed man’s wife, answered the door.
As was previously reported, police received 105 pieces of information on the case, but no useful clues were obtained.
The only solid lead for police was that this man knew something about the incident. According to the reporter, he came to the door wearing a gray hoodie with a puzzled look on his face. He was a little plump, had good skin and had a well-proportioned face. As soon as he saw the reporter, a strange look came over his face as he opened the door a little.
She never returned
In Tsujide’s family home in Tsu City, a wall is decorated with photos of the various places in Asia she visited while at Ritsumeikan University. In Bangladesh, Myanmar or China, Tsujide aimed her SLR lens at each country’s local people and rural landscapes she encountered during her travels.
Her mother, Michiyo, looks back fondly on those days.
“She was the kind of child who would suddenly say, ‘I’m going overseas tomorrow,'” Michiyo remembers. “She would come back home from Kyoto on a moped, and, from my perspective, she was a bit ‘dangerous.'”
As a child, Tsujide hoped to become a journalist. After graduating from university, she got a job at a local publishing company, Ise Bunkasha. By November 24, 1998 a year and a half had passed since she took up the job.
Although he had just returned from a trip to Thailand the night before, she arrived at work at 9 a.m. as usual. After completing her work, including the review of past interviews and the checking of photos, she left work just after 11 p.m.
However, she never returned.
The next day, Tsujide’s navy blue Nissan March was found in the parking lot of an insurance company, located about one kilometer from Ise Bunkasha. The doors were locked, there was no one inside and there were no signs of an any break-in. However, the insurance company reported the car to the Ise Police Station, saying that it was unusual that it had parked diagonally, outside the lines of the parking space.
Investigators took a look at the car and noticed that the driver’s seat had been slid back a lot further than when Tsujide would have driven it. They also found that the stereo system had been shut off. Perhaps strangest was that a cigarette butt was on the floor, this despite the fact that she was not a smoker.
“He’s cool, isn’t he?”
Despite these abnormalities, police treated Tsujide as a “runaway,” saying she likely just decided to start a new life in another place. As well, the police did not respond to her parents’ requests for an investigation.
Tsujide’s father met with the deputy police chief through a connection, but the deputy chief was reluctant to proceed. However, an investigation began a month later. It was around this time that the existence of the unnamed man emerged.
The man was originally introduced to Tsujide by the Owase City Hall. At the time, Mie Prefecture was promoting the area through large-scale events such as the “Higashi Kishu Experience Project.” Tsujide, then an editor and reporter for the magazine Ise-Shima, was looking for a reporter with connections in Higashi Kishu.
Thereafter, the Owase City Hall introduced Tsujide to the man, who ran a tropical fish store in the neighboring town of Miyama and served as vice president of the local Junior Chamber of Commerce.
Tsujide came to trust the man, who taught at nature events for children and treated women in a gentlemanly manner. She once showed a photo of his face to a colleague and said, “He’s cool, isn’t he?” Issue number 103 of Ise-Shima, published in June 1998, contained an article by Tsujide featuring him. In the editor’s note for the issue, Tsujide wrote, “[The man] looks so happy. I think nature has the power to make people smile.”
“Parted ways in the parking lot”
The Ise Police Station took the man in for voluntary questioning on January 26, 1999. They interrogated him until February 3.
According to Shukan Josei, the man initially said that he last saw Tsujide seven months before the incident. “I know Tsujide well, but I haven’t called her or seen her recently,” he said.
However, when the prefectural police checked call records, it was clear that they had exchanged several phone calls on the afternoon of November 24, which was before Tsujide went missing. The calls continued until the evening.
During the questioning, he admitted to calling Tsujide and meeting her in a parking lot at around 11:00 p.m. on November 24. “Tsujide got in my car and we started talking, and the mood got heated, so we had sex in the car,” he said. “After that, we talked a little and parted ways in the parking lot. I don’t know what happened after that.”
Such a claim lacked credibility, a former investigator on the case told Shukan Josei. “If what happened in the car was true, nothing would have happened to Tsujide,” the former investigator said.
Police did not act immediately
On the day Tsujide’s disappearance was discovered that her mother, Michiyo, filed a missing person report with Ise Police Station. However, the police did not act immediately.
“Even if someone disappears,” the former investigator says, “there is a high chance that they will return after a few days, so it was difficult to investigate the case immediately. At that time, there was no department to deal with domestic violence or stalking like there is now. So they took a relaxed approach and left it for three weeks.”
In the end, Tsujide’s mobile phone call history was seized on Christmas Eve, one month after the disappearance. His call history was seized after New Year’s Day. It was only at that point that it was discovered that the two had been in contact. The search for the car in which he said he “had sex” with Tsujide was conducted even later, two months after the incident.
“The car had already been thoroughly cleaned,” the same former investigator says, “and we examined it as much as we could, but not a single hair was found.”
Police interviewed people close to the man and searched his house, but could not find any solid evidence that he was involved in Tsujide’s disappearance. He was in possession of used sanitary products from a woman. The blood type was the same as Tsujide’s. However, his partner at the time had a blood type that was also B. Since the sanitary products were later returned to him, DNA testing was not possible.
The search for Tsujide was also difficult. With the possibility that the body may have been buried, a forest road construction site was excavated, but due to budgetary constraints it was not possible to search all of the multiple locations. An underwater search, another possibility, was also not carried out.
“There was talk of searching caves under the sea, but there are over 1,000 of them,” the former investigator says. “Even if we sent in a large number of divers, it would take 100 days. Looking back, I wish we had made the effort to investigate. That’s the only thing I regret.”
Sex worker in Tokyo
The man continued to insist that he had nothing to do with Tsujide’s disappearance, though he did purchase several books on criminal law and criminal procedure shortly after she vanished. In any case, police arrested him on February 10, 1999 on suspicion of unlawful confinement of a sex worker in Tokyo. The case was taken up by the Tsu Police Station.
From around 1:00 p.m. on December 16, 1997 to around 5:00 p.m. the following day, the man, who regularly met the woman whenever he came to Tokyo, allegedly left the woman tied up inside her apartment in Minato Ward.
The motive was that he had become enraged at her request to break up with him. However, the report of the confinement case was not filed until February 5, 1999, more than a year after the incident, which indicated it was clearly an arrest on a separate charge with the Tsujide disappearance as the main target.
On March 4 of the same year, he was indicted at the Tsu District Court for the confinement case. He was detained at Tsu Police Station until July 22, when he was transferred to Mie Prison. For more than four and a half months, he continued to be questioned about the Tsujide disappearance. During that time, his lawyer, Tetsuro Muroki, instructed him to remain completely silent.
The first hearing in the confinement case was held at the Tsu District Court on March 26, 1999, and he pleaded not guilty to the charges. The following September, the court found the man innocent of the charges, saying that the presented evidence and claims of the woman were insufficient to warrant a conviction.
Polygraph test
The Tsu Police Station attempted to subject the to a polygraph test on April 29, 1999. However, when the detective tried to attach the test equipment to him, he grabbed both of his arms and shook them, causing him to suffer epidermal detachment on the inside of his right elbow.
Muroki photographed the injury in the visiting room the following day. At the trial for the aforementioned unlawful arrest and confinement case, he complained about the illegality of the arrest on the separate charge and the assault by the detective.
The prosecution then submitted a videotape of the polygraph test at Tsu Police Station to deny that the detective had assaulted X during the polygraph test. However, the video included numerous problematic acts that were of such concern to the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, which later received a petition for human rights relief from the man.
As well, the interrogation included the various assaults and intimidation that was as if the man was actually under arrest for the murder of Tsujide.
Human rights violations
In light of this, the JFBA Human Rights Committee issued a warning and request to the Mie Prefectural Police Chief, the National Police Agency Commissioner, the Mie Prefectural Public Safety Commission Chairman and the Tsu District Public Prosecutor’s Office Chief Prosecutor on February 7, 2001.
In its warning to the Mie Prefectural Police Chief, the Human Rights Committee stated that the actions of the Tsu Police Station against the man were “unconstitutional and illegal human rights violations. We warn them to strictly refrain from illegal investigations in future interrogations of suspects and to respect the suspect’s right to remain silent and the right to meet and communicate with their lawyers to the maximum extent possible.”
It also requested the National Police Agency Commissioner and the Mie Prefectural Public Safety Commission Chairman to strengthen guidance and supervision to prevent similar human rights violations from occurring in the future at the police stations under their jurisdiction.
The man also filed a lawsuit for damages against the sex worker and two witnesses in the arrest and confinement case, seeking 30 million yen in damages. He also filed a lawsuit for state compensation against the national government and Mie Prefecture, seeking the same amount. He also filed a complaint with the Tsu District Public Prosecutors Office against three investigators from the Mie Prefectural Police for assault and cruelty by special public officials and causing injury, claiming that he had been assaulted during interrogation.
He eventually withdrew his lawsuit for damages. But since he also indicated that he would file a similar lawsuit against the media, the police and the media were reluctant to pursue him after that.
“It is a disgrace for the police to be asked to pay criminal compensation,” the same former investigator on the case tells Shukan Josei. “That’s why the higher-ups of the prefectural police send orders for him to never be touched by anyone again.”
Abduction by North Korea
In September 2008, ten years after Tsujide’s disappearance, the Sankei Shimbun reported a Chinese-North Korean source familiar with North Korean affairs as having mentioned Tsujide’s name, which insinuated that she could be among the Japanese suspected of being abducted by North Korean agents. It was also reported that a Japanese university professor investigating the abduction issue had met a North Korean defector in South Korea who knew Tsujide.
On the same day that the report was released, the Investigation Committee on the Issue of Missing Persons held a press conference with Tsujide’s parents. As well, the committee added Tsujide to the investigation committee’s “public list of missing persons.”
A source from the investigation committee also asserted that Tsujide had written to a mailing list before her disappearance that she “wanted to go to North Korea to interview [Japanese Red Army member Takahiro Konishi] and then disappeared.” Furthermore, in March 2014, the Mie Prefectural Police requested that the Tsujide family add her name to the National Police Agency’s list of “missing persons whose abduction by North Korea cannot be ruled out.”
However, the mailing list that Tsujide used as the basis for her own entry into North Korea contained no concrete information. As well, the university professor who claimed to have met the North Korean defector who knew Tsujide retracted his statement several years later, saying it was a case of “misunderstanding.” In addition, journalist Takashi Ito, who interviewed Konishi in September 2014, said that Konishi had never met Tsujide and did not even know her name.
In July of the same year, when the Nihon Keizai Shimbun ran a scoop about a “list of Japanese people still living in North Korea.” Reporters flocked to the Tsujide family’s home, but Tsujide’s mother refused to be interviewed. “There is no possibility of abduction, so we asked the reporters to go home,” she said. The family no longer believes in the theory that Tsujide had been abducted by North Korea.
“Please don’t enter the premises”
During his detention, the man submitted a written statement to the Tsujide family, signed by Muroki, stating that he would tell them everything if he were to be acquitted in the case of the confinement.
That never happened.
As the reporter for Shukan Josei stood at the man’s door four years ago, he instantly tried to close the door. When the reporter tried to open it again, the man said in a low voice, “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“You said you’d talk if you were found not guilty, right?” the reporter asked.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” he said. “Please don’t enter the premises.”
