Kikuchi

Kikuchi is the department chair whose actions helped remove Mami Hamaya from the National News Department after she defended careful reporting on mental illness and disability. He requested her transfer, then told her that refusing it meant resigning or being fired and that she would never report again at the company. The book presents him as a consequential manager within a workplace that punished her outspokenness, while stopping short of claiming that he alone caused her suicide.

Position and Departmental Context

Kikuchi appears in the account as the chair of the National News Department and Hamaya’s boss. His authority was practical as well as symbolic: he could request her reassignment and communicate a decision that would end her reporting career within the company. The book gives little personal background about him, and does not describe his private motives. What it does show is how a department’s power over a reporter’s work could turn disagreement about coverage into a threat to her professional future.

The conflict arose amid coverage that often treated one violent crime by a person believed to be mentally ill as grounds for broad suspicion of people with mental illness. Hamaya objected to that generalization and argued that reporting should not reinforce prejudice. After Mamoru Takuma attacked children at Osaka University of Education Ikeda Elementary School, the narrator says, Hamaya continued to distinguish the evidence of a premeditated crime from sweeping claims about mental illness. Her position was reasonable, in his view, but it provoked unreasonable reactions within the department. One hostile characterization of her was, “She’s as crazy as the nuts she’s defending.” The passage does not identify Kikuchi as the speaker; it establishes the atmosphere in which her insistence on responsible coverage was recast as troublemaking.

Hamaya’s Transfer

On August 29, Kikuchi requested that Hamaya be transferred. The move was announced at a department meeting on September 12: she was, in the narrator’s description, more or less being pushed out of the National News Department and assigned to Human Resources. The sequence makes the announcement the culmination of a decision already set in motion, rather than a sudden change presented without warning to management.

A month before the meeting, Kikuchi had called Hamaya and told her he intended to move her to Yomiuri Weekly, a publication owned by the company. She resisted, explaining that if she left the National News Department, nobody there would properly handle reporting on people with mental and physical disabilities. The narrator reports that Kikuchi regarded her reply as insubordination. The exchange exposes the gap between Hamaya’s understanding of her objection—as a commitment to an area of reporting she considered neglected—and the chair’s response to it as a challenge to authority.

A few days before the meeting, Kikuchi summoned her to his desk and stated the choice in stark terms: “You are leaving the department and being assigned to Human Resources. You either accept this or resign or be fired. You will never work again as a reporter while you are in this company. That’s all.” He dismissed her without another word. According to the narrator, she was given no reason or explanation for the reassignment. The force of the ultimatum lay not only in the immediate transfer: it foreclosed her future as a reporter inside the company, whether she accepted the post, resigned, or was fired.

The Consequences for Hamaya

That evening, Hamaya described the exchange to Jake Adelstein over dinner at an Italian restaurant in Aoyama. When she repeated the warning that she would never work as a reporter again, she broke down crying so intensely that Adelstein feared she was choking. She put her head on his shoulder, and he stayed with her until she could no longer cry. The scene records the consequence of Kikuchi’s words through Hamaya’s immediate distress, rather than through speculation about his state of mind or intentions.

The book places this episode within a wider institutional dispute over what journalism should do with a case that seemed to confirm a popular fear. Hamaya’s refusal to soften her position was treated by senior editors as defiance, and her transfer removed her from the department where she had argued she was needed. Kikuchi’s role is specific: he requested the move and delivered the career-ending warning. The evidence does not establish that he designed every part of the department’s response, or that he shared the views of the colleagues who disparaged her. It does establish that he exercised the authority through which the response became an immediate professional threat.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

Later, when Adelstein passed through the department, its atmosphere was unusually somber. Kikuchi was at his desk in a hushed conference with senior management. The passage does not disclose what they were discussing, so it cannot establish what he knew or thought at that moment. Its quietness contrasts with the earlier bluntness of the ultimatum: the manager who had spoken to Hamaya without explanation now appears amid subdued colleagues, while the narrator learns what has happened to her.

Adelstein went to Hamaya’s funeral on a miserably hot day. He saw Kikuchi there and wanted to strike him, but also wrote that he knew it was not Kikuchi’s fault. He could not look at him, and was unable to stop wondering whether he himself had failed Hamaya as a friend by being absorbed in a run of scoops and only half listening to her shortly before her death. That unresolved reaction does not absolve Kikuchi of the actions the account attributes to him; it distinguishes the documented transfer and ultimatum from the narrator’s uncertain judgment about responsibility for the suicide.

Kikuchi’s narrative importance therefore comes less from a developed personal portrait than from the concentrated authority he represents in Hamaya’s workplace story. A dispute over how to describe disability and violence became a transfer, then a warning that her chosen profession was closed to her. The account leaves his motives and the full departmental deliberations unstated, but preserves the words and institutional consequences that made his intervention pivotal.