Obara's sexual assault videotape

Joji Obara’s videotapes turned a concealed pattern of sexual assaults into a substantial body of physical evidence, but they could not answer the central question of what had happened to Lucie Blackman. More than a hundred recordings showed women who appeared unconscious and unable to resist; Lucie was absent, and the surviving sequence contained no recordings from around the period of her disappearance.

Recording and Recovery

In one documented instance, Obara took a woman to his Zushi apartment after meeting her in front of the Akasaka Tokyu Hotel. He filmed her against an ocean backdrop, then, after she had been drugged at the apartment, recorded a sexual assault. The account presents the recording as part of the crime, not merely as a record made afterward.

Police later collected videotapes from Obara’s former home in Setagaya Ward and from a condominium in the Zushi area of Kanagawa Prefecture. The collection comprised more than a hundred tapes in two formats, 8 mm and VHS. Their presence in separate residences connected the recordings to locations associated with Obara, while the tapes themselves preserved evidence of repeated assaults.

What the Tapes Established

The women shown in the recordings were mostly Caucasian, and all appeared to be unconscious and unable to resist Obara’s assaults. The number and repeated circumstances visible on the tapes gave police evidence of a pattern extending beyond a single victim or incident. Separately, analysis of drugs found in Obara’s homes identified several kinds of sleeping pills; police considered that these might also have been used in assaults on Japanese women. The tapes therefore formed part of a wider investigation, though the drug findings were a distinct line of evidence.

News that Japanese women might also have been among the victims intensified media attention. At the end of October, the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor’s Office indicted Obara on the first of many charges. The account identifies the videotapes as the most damning evidence in the investigation, while making clear that Obara continued not to speak to police.

The Missing Images

The tapes offered no recording of Lucie. Although they were arranged in semichronological order, none came from around the period when she vanished. Their sequence could document assaults at other times, but it left the investigation without a visual record connecting Lucie to those events or establishing what had happened to her. Her absence from the collection was thus an evidentiary limit, not proof that she had not been victimized.

The recordings’ force and their incompleteness coexist: they helped expose repeated crimes, yet did not resolve the disappearance that had brought the investigation into focus. The tapes could show the scale and method of Obara’s assaults, but they could not supply Lucie’s whereabouts or make Obara disclose them.