Hiromi Kadokura attends the Nihonbashi bridge-washing ceremony

Hiromi Kadokura attends the Nihonbashi bridge-washing ceremony on a single occasion, apparently by chance, but the visit later acquires investigative importance when a candid photograph places her at the event eight years earlier. The ceremony’s crowd and its ordinary public setting make the image look incidental; the detectives’ questions turn it into evidence about her movements and the guarded identity behind her public life.

The Photograph and Its Discovery

The photograph was part of Terumasa Yaguchi’s archive. For ten years, the freelance photographer had been commissioned by a travel company to document the bridge-washing ceremony. In the image, children scrub the road surface with brushes while adults gather nearby to take pictures. Those activities occupy the background. The photographer’s composition instead gives prominence to a woman in profile: Hiromi Asai, later known publicly as Hiromi Kadokura.

Yaguchi explained that he had been photographing the children when Hiromi appeared in the foreground. He had not noticed her while she was wearing sunglasses; when she briefly took them off, he recognized her as an actress he had admired and took a candid photograph. He described her face as unusually vivid and full of vitality, but said he had forgotten the image until the detectives examined his archive. His account establishes that Hiromi was not merely somewhere in the assembled crowd: Yaguchi deliberately framed her after recognizing her.

The photograph’s importance comes partly from the contrast between its two levels. The public ceremony supplies an apparently routine setting, while Hiromi’s sharply defined presence in the foreground gives the detectives a specific person and occasion to investigate. Kaga tells Yaguchi that the bridge-washing may be connected to a case under investigation and that they reviewed the loaned photographs. Since this was the only one containing an actress, they wanted to know whether that year had been unusual. Yaguchi recalled no special circumstances; to him, Hiromi had simply appeared and he had taken her picture.

Hiromi’s Account

When Kaga shows her the photograph, Hiromi says she is surprised to learn she had been photographed there. She confirms that the image was taken eight years earlier and says she had gone to the ceremony only once. Asked whether anyone accompanied her, she answers that she was alone. Asked whether she went specifically to see the bridge-washing, she denies that this was the purpose: she had been passing by, noticed a large crowd, and wondered what was happening.

Her explanation makes the visit sound unplanned rather than ceremonial or recurrent. The detectives have evidence of her presence, but the account she gives them offers no special attachment to the event or to bridges. Kaga returns the photograph to his pocket after asking whether she has a particular interest in bridges. The exchange remains outwardly conversational, yet the image has already made her past presence a matter for scrutiny.

From Public Appearance to Investigation

The ceremony is significant not because Hiromi describes it as a turning point in her life, but because a surviving photograph preserves a moment that she apparently did not know had been recorded. Yaguchi’s camera captures her without her awareness; years later, investigators use that image to place her at a particular location and ask her to account for the visit. The photograph therefore links public visibility with private uncertainty: the actress is recognizable to the photographer, while the reason for her presence is not established by the image itself.

That distinction matters to the larger inquiry. The investigation concerns the relationships and concealed history surrounding Hiromi, Michiko Oshitani, and Shunichi Watabe. The ceremony photograph does not, by itself, explain those connections or prove why Hiromi was there. Its value is narrower and more exact: it gives the detectives an independently preserved occasion against which to ask questions, while leaving the meaning of the visit unsettled. A chance encounter with a crowd becomes a trace that can be revisited, compared with testimony, and placed within a much longer search for the truth.