Serial mutilator Hiroshi Nozaki also a serial killer?
Hiroshi Nozaki had to have known that he would be the prime suspect. He needed to get out of the apartment fast. But even though it was already dark outside, his roommates wouldn’t get back from work for several hours, so he had time to tidy up a bit.
“Body parts are heavy when they are still half-filled with blood,” he thought.
Draining them would make things easier; he loaded up the laundry machine and let it do some of the dirty work for him. He was tired, after all. The last time he cut up a body was years ago, and he was out of practice.
“And what am I going to do with this blood-drenched futon?”
Somewhere in between the pulsing lights of the bridge, and the hard strikes on the windows from the wind coming off the bay, Nozaki found himself staring at one of his other roommates–the cousin of the woman crumpled in the laundry machine. She had made an early trip home from work to figure out why Honiefaith was late and not answering her phone.
The flesh Nozaki held in his hand confirmed the worst, and she raced out of the apartment to seek help. When the police arrived, Nozaki was gone.
The girls had agreed to live with him and split the 200,000 yen ($2,000) rent. But did anyone warn them about his past? Were the police even aware that he was living in the high-rise apartment building on Tokyo Bay? To be fair, Nozaki wasn’t ever convicted of murder the first time around. He burned his girlfriend’s body and then flushed everything down the toilet, so when the police failed to force a confession out of him, they effectively had zero evidence to pursue the charge with. Instead he did three and a half years in the detention center for dismembering and abandoning a body.
And now he’s killed again. Honiefaith Ratilla Kamiosawa was 22 years old when Nozaki took her life. His first known victim was 27. How many dead women does it take for a killer to be locked away for good? In Japan it seems like the answer is “at least two.”
Without a full confession from Nozaki, we may never know how many times he has killed before. However, this time around it is reasonably certain that Nozaki will be charged with murder as well. He turned himself in after a “botched suicide attempt” and gave medics the keys to the coin locker at the World Trade Center near JR Hamamatsucho station where her deflated body could be found.
Details of Nozaki’s murders, including information regarding the all-important psychological profile of the killer, are scant, but there seems to be a pattern emerging. The gender, race, and occupation of the victims is consistent. He targets females from the Philippines who work in Tokyo’s myriad cabaret clubs.
As an aside: the fact that he murdered a gentlemen’s club hostess may have had something to do with the relative timidity of the sentence he was slapped with the first time around. The increased media attention this time (good luck finding the name of his first known victim) may actually help ensure that he gets what he deserves.
So were we dealing with a uninitiated serial killer? That is a very interesting question, and an impressively difficult one to answer. Definitions of serial killers are difficult to find agreement on in general, and very reluctantly applied in the Japanese context in particular. America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) profiles serial killers as murderers who have killed at least three separate individuals in unrelated crimes. Of course, a number of other factors, such as a sexual element, can also play a part in labeling someone a serial killer. One factor that doesn’t signal that a serial killer is on the loose is a situation where someone is paid to kill people, such as in the case of a contract killer. Mutilation of a corpse, however, tends to fall under that classification. His “attempted suicide” complicates matters a little in that it could be interpreted as a sign of remorse, but speculation is useless at this point as more about the suspect’s mental stability at the time of the crime, his background and relevant stressors, plus his account of the events preceding the murder have yet to be made public.
Nozaki is known to have struck twice, but is it possible that he killed before he was found guilty back in 2000? Whether the death count is two, three, or more, it is probably safe to say that this guy is a serial killer, or budding serial killer (in other words, it’s not solely about numbers.) America may be the country with the most documented instances of serial killers, some of them now immortalized in popular culture through a generous library of Hollywood movies, but, Lo and Behold!, it is not strictly an American phenomenon. Not to give the American police too much credit, but it has been argued that the proliferation of cases in America is partly due to advanced forensic and suspect interviewing techniques, as well as ever-improving intra-jurisdictional reporting and cooperation. The opening of Cold Case investigation units across the country has also helped in bringing several killers to justice. Comparable developments are not apparent in most nations, and that includes Japan.
In the Japanese context, serial killers are still largely considered to be a negative product of Western culture. (An argument used by the Soviet Union to deny the existence of the world’s most prolific documented serial killer.) But Japan has witnessed its fair share of murderers who would qualify as serial killers by any meaningful definition.
Tsutomu Miyazaki is a common nightmare in Saitama. He’s basically the prefecture’s Keyser Söze. Miyazaki, who killed and mutilated four young girls (he reportedly ate part of at least one of them) in 1988 and 1989, just saw his 16-year court case draw to a close. He was handed the death penalty, but it is unclear how long he will continue to live in solitary confinement on death row before that punishment is carried out.
Saitama prefecture is very lucky that this man was caught. As is sometimes the case with serial killers, he got sloppy once he found that killing was easy, and that led to his eventual apprehension. It is not uncommon for this type of killer to be driven by an addiction to the power of exercising the final decision over life and death. Many serial killers think of themselves as gods, and just like the recently apprehended B.T.K. killer from Kansas, Miyazaki went to great lengths to make sure that everyone knew that he exercised complete control over the prefecture of Saitama.
Miyazaki’s reign of terror came to an end when he was attacked by the father of a potential victim while trying to insert a zoom lens into the young girl’s vagina in a park near her home in 1989.
Some domestic media outlets have labeled this man a serial killer, but the label is rarely applied in Japan. What Nozaki has done is reinforce what has long been known about serial killers -unless they are stopped, either through incarceration or death, they will always kill again.
There are countless others on the loose that could be the next Tsutomu—call me crazy but Tatsuya Ichihashi is my bet for next on the list.
What is going on? Japan is a famously peaceful country with, compared to other modern powers, an absurdly low crime rate. The crime clearance rates claimed by police are unheard of, and the Japanese authorities’ praises are sung on a global scale. Or at least until recently.
So then how did a man that was convicted of dicing up a woman end up being freed and allowed to commit the same crime again? Are the police missing the obvious signs? Or are they simply reluctant to acknowledge the possibility that they might have a serial killer on their hands? Serial killers, after all, are a purely Western phenomenon, no?
The correct answer is “no.” Tatsuya Ichihashi is still at large. For those who don’t visit this site regularly, Tatsuya Ichihashi is the prime suspect in the brutal murder of a teacher in Chiba, Lindsay Ann Hawker, last March. He outran a police van’s worth of local cops when they were sent to his apartment to question him, and he hasn’t been heard from since. Hawker’s body was found in a sand-filled bathtub on the balcony of Ichihashi’s apartment. There is no credible evidence at this point that would suggest that Ichihashi had struck before he killed Miss Hawker, but many of the grisly details from the scene of the murder, much as in Nozaki’s case, point to him being a serial killer. Dig a little into his past and it wouldn’t be surprising if one learns that he spent way too much time on his own while growing up (translation: he was neglected as a child and has strong feelings of insecurity and inferiority), has a richly developed fantasy world which is generally a stronger draw for his attention than reality (a daydreamer whose inner world is violent and sexually charged), and had a hobby of torturing and killing insects and animals (purely for the satisfaction of exerting power and control over another living creature). Who knows how long this guy’s “cooling off” period is going to be. It could be a matter of months, or even several years. One thing is for certain, however; unless Ichihashi is caught, he will kill again.
Luckily for Japan, and the expat Filipina community in particular, Nozaki has been caught. With any luck, he won’t be on the streets ever again. One can only hope that Tatsuya Ichihashi will be collared before he decides to take another life.
While there are different accounts of the gravity with the police are handling the search for Ichihashi, we know he is certainly being hunted. It is safe to assume that the hunt would intensify and be taken far more seriously if the authorities made the case for classifying Ichihashi as a serial killer. Look into unsolved murders in the area, see how many could be linked to Ichihashi, and make those suspicions, as well as the likelihood that Ichihashi will torture, maim, and kill again, and those who are assisting or sheltering him (there must be at least a few people at this point) might not be as helpful, which might not only bring one murder suspect into custody, but also help to more quickly apprehend future killers.
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