In modern Tokyo, one international tragedy reveals a concealed web of disappearances and deaths...
In April 2007, bankrupted millionaire Joji Obara was imprisoned for life by a Tokyo court for manslaughter and six counts of rape. Evidence included videotapes of him raping his drugged victims.Controversially, Obara was acquitted of the killing of 20-year-old English bar hostess Lucie Blackman in 2000 – her remains found encased in stone. WHITE LILIES provides the first analysis of this harrowing chain of events from both Western and Japanese perspectives. Moving through the bars and nightlife of modern Tokyo, it illuminates a world where cultural tradition and an alienated urban culture live side by side. It explores the hostess club scene where Obara came into deadly collision with young traveller Lucie, and his late Australian victim, Carita Ridgway. Obara is revealed as the alienated product of hi-tech society: unable to relate to women personally or sexually, they were objects he viewed through his camcorder. Inextricably linked to Lucie’s death, her family’s appeal against his acquittal will reach the Tokyo High Court in 2010. Meanwhile, young white (‘gaijin’) women express caution about travelling in Japan. But, as a Japanese MP has pointed out, far more Asian girls have disappeared under similar circumstances. In WHITE LILIES, we ask: Is there a hidden Japan, where untraced murders undermine the low crime statistics? And is the far East’s most industrialised nation undergoing a similar wave of psychological alienation and sex crime to the West? |
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