from the Internet magazine
The Magic Bullet
Synopsis: The collapse of the police investigation into the shooting of Takaji Kunimatsu is starting to unravel the official coverup of the Aum Shinrikyo affair. Though Japan's mass media blamed Aum for the assassination attempt against the national police chief, the facts of the case tell a different story about the "gentlemen of the underworld" who have controlled Japan for more than a half-century. By Yoichi Shimatsu (See related story "Coverup")
Just 11 days after the Tokyo subway gassing, a gunman fired four bullets into National Police Chief Takaji Kunimatsu and escaped, leaving his target for dead. But the police chief somehow survived surgery. Kunimatsu, one tough cop with a reputation for being Japan's Eliot Ness, resumed his responsibilities, despite massive pressures for his resignation from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. The repeated attempts by the Tokyo police to dislodge Kunimatsu raises an uncomfortable question: Would a cop kill a cop in Japan? The answer, simply put, is that we live in unusual times.
Kunimatsu was shot outside his condominium, located on the east bank of the Sumida River, on the morning of March 30, 1995. When the Kyodo News loudspeaker blared the initial report inside the pink metal coffin across the river, the editorial staff at The Japan Times Weekly realized we had just five days before going to press -- and we were in the middle of blowing the lid off the Tokyo subway gassing case, which a couple of our writers had discovered was not accomplished with sarin but with a mix of nerve gases. With the subway attack boiling away on the front burner, we had to work against the clock to cover the Kunimatsu assassination attempt. Editor Masanori Tabata picked up the phone, then grabbed his trench coat and went behind the scenes, to interview yakuza leaders, a former gangster and contacts in the Tokyo police; this author worked the other side of the fence in Aum territory and in Nagoya's gangland world.
Despite the sleepless nights and deadline pressures, the April 8th edition (printed the previous Tuesday) carried the banner headline: "Assassin of Arakawa." The stories featured an analysis of the entry and exit wounds; a feature story linking the shooting with the Nagoya murder of a reformist executive of Sumitomo Bank; a profile of the police chief; and a semi-fictional profile of the gunman. Nine months later, in an interview with Japan Playboy, a former executive officer with the Public Security Investigative Bureau, confirmed the hypothesis of our April 8 edition -- that the Kunimatsu case was linked to the "murder of a high-level corporate executive."
Nearly two years after the publication of "Assassin of Arakawa," subsequent events have amply reinforced our initial scenario and early doubts about the official story and cast more light on the violent struggle for power in Japan's political hierarchy, in which Aum played a significant though periphery role.
The official account: The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department revised its report several times, sometimes even contradicting their own forensic evidence. Their story starts on the early morning of Thursday, March 30, 1995, as NPA chief Takaji Kunimatsu, accompanied by an unidentified aide, left this condominium (which has an unlisted address) in Arakawa Ward, near the bank of the Sumida River. As they headed toward a limousine, in which a police driver and a body guard are seated, a gunman fires four shots from a high-caliber handgun from a distance of 27 meters behind the chief.
Three bullets hit the chief, according to the MPD account, which earlier reported all four bullets had hit. Witnesses in the condo complex say that the gunman was about 5' 11" tall, in his mid-40s, wore a gauze mask and dark overcoat, and arrived and left on a bicycle. The witnesses said the gun blasts were massive booms that echoed through the complex. Police report they recovered two bullets and a fragment of a third, about 10 months later they claimed to have found the fourth bullet. The police found a pile of cigarette butts where the gunman stood, claiming he had staked out the chief's home for days. A few days later, the police report finding a North Korean military button and coin where the gunman stood. An unidentified man was sighted on a rubber raft in the early morning hours.
Coverup:
The superintendent of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, Yukihiko Inoue, resigned in the wake of the admission that the MPD, which heads the Aum investigation, had covered up the fact that one of its officers had admitted nine months earlier to shooting Kunimatsu. Eight other top officers in the MPD were disciplined, and the National Police Agency assigned a new director to head the department and the Aum probe.
There were serious inconsistencies, however, in the officer's statements, which raises the possibility that his "confession" was actually an attempt to kill the investigation. The 31-year-old officer, identified simply as K, was a member of Aum Shinrikyo. He worked in the Guard Division (which protects the Imperial Palace, before being transferred to the MPD station in Tsukiji, which became the headquarters for the Tokyo subway gassing. (One of the Eidan subway lines was hit at Tsukiji station, affecting many of the staff at Nissan headquarters and Asahi Shimbun.) The officer's name was found on an Aum membership list confiscated in a police raid, and an electrode-studded Aum headgear was seized in his room in an MPD dorm in Bunkyo-ku. After the discovery of his membership in Aum, he was reassigned to a clerical post in the driving license section in Koto-ku. His interrogators reported that his testimony was often incoherent and contradictory.
Officer K was ranked a mid-level marksman, with the ability to hit a foot-wide target at 20 meters. But another account suggested that practice at gunnery ranges is so limited as to be insufficient for hitting a moving target. A police leak suggested that he trained at shooting on the banks of the Sumida River -- an absurd idea, considering the population density of the area and the possibility of gunshots being immediately reported. Officer K said that staked out Kunimatsu's condo in the Acrocity complex from a nearby balcony the previous day. He said the gun was provided by sect minister Yoshihiro Inoue, who ordered him by walkie-talkie to keep firing at the police chief and played a mantra of Asahara's (if he did so, it was in a space of a few seconds). But witnesses saw and heard no radio. Officer K said that Inoue had provided him with the .38 handgun and rode with him to and from the shooting site, and that they were driven both ways by sect construction minister-arms dealer Kiyohide Hayakawa. Both Aum leaders deny his claim. Later, he changed the story to claim that Masahiro Tominaga, 27, a member of Asahara's secretariat, drove him away from the scene.
After shooting the chief and escaping in an Aum vehicle, which took him across the Sumida River, Officer K said he hid his gun in a bag and left it in his locker at the Tsukiji police station. Several days later, he threw the gun into the Kanda River between Iidabashi and Suidobashi rail stations. Police divers and a crane-operating salvage team searched the bottom of the Kanda River for more than 50 days and retrieved hundreds of abandoned bicycles. They gave the search when it became apparent the handgun was not in the river.
Officer's K age and height, noticeably several centimeters shorter than the witness accounts of the hitman who was unusually tall for a 40-year-old Japanese male, do not correspond to eyewitness reports. He later revised his story to say that he "assisted" the unidentified hitman, who he suggested was Yasuo Hayashi, arrested in November. The strands of his tale would point suspicion to guru Shoko Asahara as the mastermind of the assassination attempt.
But investigators and journalists, even the anti-Aum diehards, started to realize that Officer K's story was patently false. Gradually it dawned on some of the investigative reporters that the disjunctures in his tale can be explained and his faulty memory could only be explained if Officer K had undergone intensive brainwashing sessions with a hypnotist and Soviet-style psychiatrists who who implanted these memories in his brain but failed to integrate them cohesively. The motive for such extreme methods to set up an Oswald-like patsy, of course, would be to prevent investigators from finding the actual perpetrators of the crime, who probably have little to do with Aum except control it from behind the scenes.
Untangling the Crime:
Here, we give the bare-bones analysis, and knowing full well the devil's in the details, so we'll provide enough details to satisfy a detective from hell. Our mention of the Hatanaka case refer to the September 14 shooting death of Kazufumi Hatanaka, an executive and member of the board of Sumitomo bank, who at the time had been attempting to rid the bank's Nagoya division of its links to organized crime. Hatanaka was shot at the door of his apartment inside a high-security complex in the early morning hours. He was killed by a single shot through the forehead at close range from a Lady Smith .38 revolver in mint condition. The murder weapon was later surrendered to the police by a former convict who was carrying large debts. Why was the gun returned by the men who order the killing? To close the case and terminate the investigation.
But NPA Chief Kunimatsu refused to close the case or accept that the former convict was the killer, and that is why the police chief was targeted for a hit. Kunimatsu was personally supervising the probe into Hatanaka murder, which was a key turning point in the battle against the epidemic of white collar crime, which has looted the Japanese banking system and comprised nearly every major corporation. This was the highest of the high-stakes investigations, because it could bring down the entire political class and much of the bureaucracy. For Kunimatsu, it turned out to be literally a life-and-death battle.
The River:
Officer K claimed that he threw the weapon used in the Kunimatsu assassination attempt into the Kanda River. Those unfamiliar with Tokyo may not know that the Kanda is Tokyo's narrowest river. If Officer K had thrown the handgun into the much wider Sumida River, which he crossed and where his police station was in closest proximity to, the gun would probably never be discovered. He could have also tossed the gun into the nearby Tama, Edo and Arakawa rivers, each extremely wide and deep. Or he could have taken a launch or walked to the end of a pier in Tokyo Bay or Sagami Bay where the gun would have disappeared forever into the depth. Instead, he claims to have thrown it into a river that is less than 15 meters wide and shallow. Furthermore, the section between Suidobashi and Iidabashi stations is one of the most heavily trafficked areas of Tokyo, with offices, roads and sidewalks on either side, vehicle and foot bridges, and rail and expressway overpasses. No one in their right mind would toss anything into the river at that point. The hundreds of bicycles recovered were washed down by torrential storms from upstream where the traffic is much lighter.
There is a strong reason for claiming to throw a gun into the Kanda, however, if one were planning to recover a rusted handgun, so corroded that the rifling marks were erased, that could be identified as the murder weapon. As in the Hatanaka case, a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver was returned to the police. On the night of Oct. 6, 1995, when Fumihiro Joyu, the popular Aum spokesman, was to surrender to the police, a rightwinger shot five blanks with the long-barrel pistol into the front of the Aum press headquarters in Minami-Aoyama.
This gun, however, was not the weapon used against Kunimatsu. The actual murder weapon belonged to a quirky marksman who either disposed of it himself or, more likely, is keeping it as a memento. Therefore, the handgun had to be somehow chemically treated to prevent identification of rifling marks. Therefore, the Aum investigators concocted the scenario of the river dumping. Time would be required to wear out the rifling marks in the polluted river. A police officer in the MPD, however, got wind of the official skullduggery and reported the facts to the National Police Agency, which moved rapidly to prevent the frameup. Thus, the corroded handgun had not yet been dropped into the Kanda River, and therefore could not be recovered.
The Setup:
The MPD tried to make sure the Kunimatsu probe went nowhere by fingering Aum. They were not only trying to cover up their own role in the assassination but, more importantly, to protect their bosses in the Justice Ministry, in the Diet and in the banking sector.
The hitman was able to fire at will from behind Kunimatsu, because the two NPA security men posted at the spot were missing. A pile of cigarette butts under a balcony on a corner with a wide view is typical of police stakeouts in Japan. (The author once had to clean up such a pile of butts left at his doorway by a detective, who was scanning a nearby ethnic Korean community, a major center of Aum activity, during the early stages of the Tokyo subway gassing probe; Aum's membership was at least one-third Korean.) The pair of bodyguards had been detained that very morning of March 30, 1995, and held at the Arakawa Police Headquarters of the MPD! Kunimatsu's back was left unprotected, just by coincidence minutes before a hitman arrived! Kunimatsu's address was unlisted and kept top secret -- not only was he leading the raids on Aum facilities, he had many powerful enemies. Only top police officials knew his address and his daily routine, and this is why the MPD concocted the story of Officer K discovering the address.
The Magic Bullet:
The police reports played a funny number game: Kunimatsu was hit by four, then three, then four and finally back to three bullets. One bullet lodged, one was found in his shirt and a fragment of a third was found. The fourth bullet was missing, and supposedly recovered about 10 months later.
But the initial medical report by Kunimatsu's surgeons showed seven (7) bullet wounds. If one lodged, that would leave 3 entry wounds and 3 exit wounds. In other words, he was hit by four bullets -- unless there was a "magic bullet," like the one in the Kennedy assassination! The MPD also reported that the bullets were hollow-point Copperclads. Yitzhak Rabin was hit by tiny .22 caliber hollow-points that left gaping exit wounds that could not be sealed. If Kunimatsu had been hit by such ordnance, he would have died nearly instantaneously from massive gaping wounds. But the actual bullets penetrated cleanly, and surgeons reported difficulty in distinguishing between entry and exit wounds.
The Weekly immediately challenged the police reports and deciphered why they provided disinformation to the press, which bought the ludicrous story. We will now examine the evidence about the gun and the bullets. The seven wounds and the clean penetration strongly suggest that Chief Kunimatsu was wearing Kevlar body armor with a metal shock plate over the breastbone. The hitman knew this, and therefore attacked from the back with a Teflon-coated bullet fired at high-speed, which could penetrate the Kevlar fabric. One bullet penetrated through the back and another in an upward trajectory through the buttocks, and after exiting, both hit the shock plate from inside and fell into the chief's clothing. One was later recovered in his clothes; the other probably was lost in the hospital loading area and probably fell on the pavement and picked up by the tires of a hospital vehicle. This accounts for the missing fourth bullet. Another bullet entered through the groin and exited through the buttocks. And one bullet was fired into the front of the body armor, was curled back and slowed by the impact and lodged inside the torso. That accounts for all bullets and wounds.
The chief survived for another reason, beside the clean bullet exits. The assassin could not get a clean shot to the head because it was hidden behind an umbrella, in a light rain that had not been forecast, and, after he fell to the ground, because his head was shielded by his aide.
KTW ammo:
Witnesses at Acrocity said they saw the hitman using a long-barrel black revolver, and heard four booming blasts that echoed through the complex. The firing of normal .38 ammunition sounds like a crack, not a boom. What accounts for the loud boom? It was not caused by the gunpowder ignition. What the residents heard was a bullet breaking the sound barrier, that is, moving at a speed of more than 1,100 feet per second, as it left the gun barrel.
What this means is that the gunman either obtained special ammunition or packed his own cartridges with high-explosive powder. The faster-than-sound speed is needed to penetrate the Kevlar fabric, or even break through a shock plate. Also needed is a Teflon coating on the bullet, as in KTW ammo (named after its inventors Dr. Paul Kopsch, Dan Turcus, Don Ward of Lorain, Ohio; available from North American Ordnance Corp. to only authorized police and military officers.) Access to this type of ammunition would indicate that the assassin was connected to the U.S. military special forces or a SWAT police unit. Or, perhaps he merely painted the Teflon onto the rounds. The KTW and Russian assassin bullets employ a flat cone-shaped copper-clad bullet that mushrooms on impact and infolds itself through the Kevlar fabric, while moving at a high-speed. Unlike a hollow point, it does not split outward into sharp edges; instead it mushrooms like a piece of putty.
The Getaway:
The police report indicated the hitman escaped on a bicycle, riding it to a nearly subway station. But the surveillance video at the station showed no person fitting the identity. The bicycle was never recovered.
The Weekly staff were the first to learn how the hitman made his getaway (but did not report it at the time, as it was key to the case, and urged the witnesses to report to the police -- which turned out to be a mistake on our part, as we still had some minimal trust in the MPD then). Two indigent men sitting on the river bank saw that morning a black Mercedes-Benz speeding from the direction of Acrocity. Obviously based on this report, Officer K said two Aum members drove him away from the scene of the crime. But Officer K did not know then that the homeless witnesses saw only two men in the car -- one in his 40s (the hitman), and the other, a heavy-set driver in his mid-50s or older. Officer K's story was revised to only one driver, Tominaga, but that suspect looks much younger than his mid-30s.
Hitman's Profile:
The paramilitary style of the attack on Kunimatsu indicated the hitman had a military background, perhaps in a special forces unit. The pride in his weapons -- the armor-piercing firepower displayed at Acrocity and the mint-condition Lady Smith in Nagoya indicates a highly proficient marksman. Our profile, simply put, is of an Asian American, Vietnam veteran, late 40s, family probably belongs to a militant Buddhist sect, now in a third country with lots of money to spend. A top marksman with revolver, though not a professional assassin; no extensive criminal record.
Grim Consequences:
The foreignness of the hitman was suggested by several former gang members, who said nobody in Japan is trained to that level of accuracy, rapidity and coolness in shooting a handgun at a moving target. This foreign quality was also noticed by the Weekly staff, who suggested that Japanese killers never damage the head of their targets -- they will sever the neck, but leave the face unmarred. Japanese gunman will usually aim for the torso. Whoever shot Hatanaka was obviously raised abroad and trained in Western assassination techniques.
We later learned that the MPD seriously considered this theory developed by the Weekly. Within a month, three female clerks at a North Kanto convenience store were shot in the head during a robbery. We suspect it was to increase the number of incidences of head shots so that the Hatanaka case would not stand out as being unusual. We leave any conclusions about police involvement in the pistol attacks to our readers.
Patrons:
The attack on Kunimatsu was part of a major power struggle for control of the Diet and political establishment, which led to the murders of several corporate executives in the Kinki region. The political battle centered in the Osaka-Nagoya-Kobe crime triangle, and at the heart of the triangle was the Sumitomo Bank. As one former gang member told the Weekly: "Sumitomo was our piggy bank, and we called (the former bank president) The Emperor."
Hatanaka led a reform campaign to cut Sumitomo's ties with the underworld. At the Osaka headquarters, he succeeded to some degree in breaking the bonds with the Yamaguchi-gumi, the nation's largest crime group, which opted to cooperate with the anti-gang law. But Nagoya proved to be a tougher nut to crack, as it was the center of an underworld group that pioneered in the transition from extortion to white-collar crime (looting banks and major corporations). Nagoya is the stronghold of the Sumiyoshi-rengo, traditionally a major force in drug smuggling.
The Aichi region was also the most lucrative source of illegal donations for "money politics" in Japan, being the districts of former Komeito boss (the Soka Gakkai's party) Koshiro Ishida and former Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, who led the campaign to build the Kansai International Airport, the biggest construction project at the height of the Bubble Economy. The two politicians from Aichi are now principals in the Shinshinto Party, of which several Diet members were linked to the Aum affair. The repercussions continue to affect the Japanese economy, the latest bad news being the multi-trillion yen bailout of Heiwa Bank. The murder of the Heiwa Bank president can be said to have started the wave of assassinations of corporate executives that culminated in the attempt to assassinate Japan's top policeman. Is it any wonder that Japan's corrupt news media blames everything on Asahara!
The recent toppling of the MPD officials is the first major break in reopening the entire series of investigations, and public opinion and international encouragement is needed to support a major housecleaning of Japan's political, business and banking establishment and to bring the assassins to justice.
