Last week, police searched the home of 27-year-old Shirai Hideyuki in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture. They were looking for evidence that he was involved in the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend, 20-year-old Okazaki Asahi, who had gone missing four months earlier.
Police found the skeletal remains of her body. It quickly came out, however, that they could have found the victim much earlier. The cops, it seems, failed to act on the mountain of evidence that Shirai was involved in her disappearance.
The case is yet another example of how police in Japan refuse to act on stalking allegations until it’s too late. In this instance, they refused to act even after a crime had occurred. Why did police ignore Okazaki’s nine complaints of stalking, the suspicions of Shirai’s family, and Shirai’s own testimony and suspicious behavior for a third of a year?
“Stop right there”: Three voluntary searches yield nothing
Okazaki’s ordeal started in December 2024. On the 9th, she reported to police that Shirai was lingering outside her grandmother’s residence – her second such report. She would call an additional seven times.
On December 20th, Okazaki went missing. Two days later, they told police that she had likely been kidnapped by Shirai, and pointed to a broken window in her room. However, police determined it had been broken from the inside and ruled there was “no suspicion of foul play.”
Police questioned him on December 23rd and did a cursory search of his residence. As officers approached a crawlspace under the floor, he shouted, “Stop right there!”
No one seems to have deemed this suspicious.
Officers would question him again on the 26th and 27th. They would proceed to question him again on January 6th, January 16th, and March 25th.
Police say that Shirai admitted to stalking his ex-girlfriend during an interview on March 25th. However, it later came out that he had also described stalking her in an interview on December 26th, six days after she’d gone missing. He admitted he had loitered outside her residence between the 12th and the 17th.
When pressed, cops said they didn’t reveal this to the public because they feared it might “interfere with the investigation.”
Police would conduct three limited, warrantless searches of Shirai’s property with his permission before the stalking confession on March 25th. None of them yielded any clues as to Okazaki’s whereabouts.
Additional evidence from the alleged murderer’s own family
This wasn’t the only evidence that Shirai was involved in Okazaki’s disappearance.
One of Okazaki’s friends provided video evidence of Shirai outside where Okazaki lived eight days before she went missing (which would be December 12th). The video corroborates Shirai’s own testimony.
In addition, Shirai’s own family contacted police in the middle of January. They told the cops that, while they didn’t have concrete evidence, they suspected Shirai had killed Okazaki.
Police say they ignored the report because it didn’t give them any concrete clues as to Okazaki’s whereabouts. However, it seems they had more than enough evidence to search Shirai’s residence.
Police wouldn’t conduct a search with a warrant until April 30th. They found bones that they later determined belonged to Okazaki Asahi. They arrested Shirai on May 3rd upon his return from Los Angeles. According to reports, Shirai finally admitted to murdering his ex-girlfriend.
“You killed her”
So why did cops wait four months to perform a full search of his premises?
According to a police insider, Shirai told them he had contacted Okazaki after the stalking. That led them to believe the two may have made up and were back together. The unnamed official didn’t provide any further evidence for what sounds like a highly loaded assumption.
The Kanagawa Rinkō Police Station has previously defended its handling of the case. They claim that Okazaki didn’t want to file stalking charges against Shirai and that there was no indication she regarded his actions as stalking.
A Prefectural Police spokesperson said they would review the office’s handling of the case.
That response hasn’t satisfied the victim’s family. Over 90 people, including Okazaki’s father, gathered at the Rinkō station on May 3rd to protest the handling of the case. Protestors reportedly shouted, “You killed her!” at officers.
An ineffective anti-stalking law
This is far from the first instance in which Japanese police did little to protect a female stalking victim. We wrote recently about Tokuyama Tomomi, who was murdered by her ex-husband after he was released from jail for attacking her violently in her snack bar in Nishitokyo. We wrote last year about Kawano Miki, whose ex-boyfriend murdered her near Hakata Ekimae in Nakagawa, Fukuoka Prefecture.
News agency Jiji also rounded up a sizable list of similar incidents dating back to 1999, when a 21-year-old woman in Okegawa, Saitama Prefecture, was murdered by her ex and his brothers after reporting him for stalking.
That case led to the passage of Japan’s anti-stalking law. However, the law doesn’t seem to have done much to protect women. In 2012, a 56-year-old mother and her grandmother were murdered. The victim had filed stalking reports with three separate prefectural police departments, which did nothing.
Japan’s stalking law has been revised three times – in 2013, 2016, and 2021 – in response to incidents that were clearly stalking but didn’t fall under the existing law.
Unfortunately, as this latest incident shows, these revisions have done little to keep women in Japan safe from the men who menace them.
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Sources
去年末“ストーカー”認める…警察が事案扱わなかった理由は 川崎・女性遺棄事件. TV Asahi News
「警察は何の勉強してるんだ」26年前の桶川ストーカー殺人事件遺族の訴え. TV Asahi News
ストーカー被害、凶行やまず 規制法、たびたび改正. Jiji.com
〈川崎・20歳女性死体遺棄〉「あさひを返せ！」県警の“必要な措置講じた”説明に親族、友人ら90人が署に集まり猛抗議、機動隊も待機…父親は「嘘ばかり、謝れば済むことなのに」. Shueisha Online
