Saitama Prefectural Police

The Saitama Prefectural Police are portrayed through investigations in which gathering information is inseparable from managing who learns it, and when. In the Saitama Dog Lover Serial Disappearances, the force’s homicide division built a case around a missing-person report and evidence connected to dog breeders; in a later gang conflict, officers responded to shootings and pursued a suspect whose account of the violence remained in question. Across both episodes, the police are shown as capable investigators, but also as an institution whose cooperation with reporters can be damaged by a premature story and whose pursuit of organized crime involves difficult judgments about evidence, violence, and accountability.

Investigations and Control of Information

When Akio Kawasaki remained missing two months after his disappearance, the Saitama police homicide division formally established a special task force. Ten detectives were working on the case by the time a source brought the investigation to the attention of the Yomiuri Shimbun. The source assured the newspaper that there was no need to rush into print: if it waited, it could obtain an exclusive, while even senior Saitama police officials were not yet aware of the case’s details. The arrangement made the investigation’s confidentiality part of the reporting strategy, not merely background circumstance.

The police had approached Kawasaki’s wife with questions, and her mention of her husband’s disagreement with a dog breeder shifted the officer in charge’s assessment of the case. He warned her to prepare for the worst if Kawasaki had been involved with Gen Sekine. The exchange prompted police to reopen what had been a very cold case. Investigators were also pursuing a comparatively minor fraud charge, a choice the narrator explains as a practical route to obtaining a warrant and questioning a suspect. In the account, that strategy could give homicide investigators access to a suspect before they had established a murder case.

The newspaper’s decision to publish nevertheless damaged its relationship with investigators. On February 19, the Yomiuri Shimbun ran the first story on the disappearances, and other papers scrambled to follow. The publication risked alerting Sekine that he was under investigation and gave him reason to destroy evidence. Police regarded the newspaper as having broken its promise to wait. The chief detective made that anger clear to a reporter, while Kanji Yokozawa, head of the forensic department, placed the Yomiuri Shimbun on his personal blacklist. Their objection was not simply that the case had become public: they blamed the first legitimate newspaper to disclose information they believed was not ready to be known.

Rumors, Sources, and Police-Yakuza Contacts

The book also shows how information about organized crime moved between police and criminal groups, sometimes through channels that were difficult to distinguish from manipulation. Yoshinori Saito, a senior figure in the Sumiyoshi-kai, told a detective in Section 1 that Kaneko was bribing a police officer. Saito did not identify the supposed recipient, leaving detectives to search for a possible informant. A police source who investigated the matter traced the rumor to a power struggle: Saito had wanted to sell methamphetamine to truck drivers in Saitama, while Kaneko opposed the plan partly because he feared it could draw his boss, Nakamura, back toward drug use. According to the source, the accusation was meant to make Kaneko appear to be a police informant and allow the organization to act against him without Saito confronting him directly.

The episode places police intelligence work inside a wider exchange rather than depicting it as a simple one-way flow of information. The source explained that officers assigned to Anti–Organized Crime Division 1 sought basic facts about yakuza organizations, including their offices, membership, and personnel. Because direct questioning could produce little, police might visit an office and glean information from materials left within view or discarded. In this account, even an apparent act of obtaining information without permission could be staged so that the material was discoverable without being formally handed over. Such contacts made intelligence available while preserving deniability, but they also created opportunities for a criminal faction to weaponize the police’s search for a mole.

Gang Warfare and the Investigation of Sugaya

The Saitama Prefectural Police also appear in the aftermath of the 1994 conflict between the Kokusui-kai and the Yamaguchi-gumi. Hostilities began on November 16, when Kokusui-kai members shot and seriously wounded two Yamaguchi-gumi members visiting their Tokyo office. Retaliatory violence spread the following day through several prefectures and reached Saitama. In Konosu, a Kokusui-kai office operated behind the sign of a private detective agency. The group had used such agencies as fronts, and its local organization was described as the third largest crime group in Saitama, with eighteen offices and about 230 known members. Police were stationed outside each office during the conflict.

At the scene, Sekiguchi’s presence protected the reporter from a confrontation with a man trying to seize his camera. Sekiguchi warned him not to provoke the people involved and asked him to visit that evening. The investigation itself faced an uncooperative Kokusui-kai. Sekiguchi described the attacker as unusually audacious: rather than firing at an office door, the gunman had entered, shot two men, and wounded an eighteen-year-old who tried to stop him outside. The building manager drove the three wounded men to hospital. These details distinguished an attack on people from the more familiar pattern of shots fired at a gang office as a warning.

On November 18, someone claiming to be the gunman called the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department and said he would surrender with the weapon. He did so that afternoon. The suspect was Takehiko Sugaya, a twenty-seven-year-old member of the Yamaguchi-gumi. In Saitama, Sekiguchi was assigned to interrogate him. Sugaya maintained that he had acted alone, but Sekiguchi suspected the possibility of a proxy: within the Yamaguchi-gumi, a member who attacked a rival and served a sentence might be promoted, while the actual gunman could sometimes remain free. The victims had survived and could identify the attacker, giving investigators eyewitnesses with which to test Sugaya’s account.

Prosecution and Institutional Significance

Sekiguchi’s interrogation did not end with the gang-war violence becoming old news. Although Sugaya had surrendered and the conflict had subsided, the police still had to establish who had carried out the attack and what charges the evidence could support. Sekiguchi appealed to Sugaya’s sense of pride to obtain the truth. The result was a prosecution for attempted murder as well as violations of gun and firearms laws, and a ten-year prison sentence. The outcome contrasts with the narrator’s initial assumption that a yakuza who wounded another yakuza would receive little public attention and only a relatively short term. Sekiguchi’s response treated the violence as a serious crime demanding more than that minimal outcome.

These episodes give the Saitama Prefectural Police no single, uncomplicated image. Their investigators could work patiently, reopen a cold case, scrutinize a suspect’s claim of acting alone, and pursue charges that substantially increased a sentence. Yet the force’s relationship with the newspaper depended on restraint and trust, both of which could be lost when reporting disclosed an investigation too soon. Its pursuit of organized crime also took place in an information environment where rumors, sources, criminal rivalries, and police contacts overlapped. The institution’s effectiveness, as presented in the book, rests not only on detectives and legal charges but on the precarious handling of information and the ability to distinguish a genuine lead from a story planted to provoke the police.