Tsurugashima is the setting of an early homicide investigation in Jake Adelstein’s reporting career, a place where a distant call from the police press club became his first sustained encounter with a murder scene. The city’s heavy industrial outskirts, the long trip from Urawa, and the difficulty of finding witnesses give the assignment its defining character: a reporter learning the work amid a scene that offered little immediate information.

Setting and Assignment

Around one in the afternoon, a call from the police press club reported that a man had been found stabbed to death in a station wagon in Tsurugashima. The Saitama Prefectural Police had announced the discovery and appeared likely to establish a Homicide Special Investigation Unit. Adelstein and the other new reporters were sent out to conduct interviews at the scene and at the deceased man’s workplace, establish who he was and when he had last been seen, and obtain a photograph.

Tsurugashima was a long way from Urawa. The reporters travelled there with colleagues or by taxi because new employees were not yet permitted to drive company cars. Nishi Irima police were handling the initial investigation, while the chief of Investigative Division One from Saitama Prefectural Police headquarters was being dispatched.

The Homicide Scene

The dead man was Ryu Machida, forty-one. His wife had found him around eleven the previous night in the backseat of a station wagon parked in the middle of a heavy industrial area. He had been stabbed in the left breast and apparently bled to death. Machida had last been seen three days earlier, when he went to work; after he failed to return home, his family reported him missing and asked the local police to search for him.

The car sat within a large area cordoned off with yellow tape. The surroundings were nearly empty of people, and Adelstein walked from door to door seeking anyone who might have seen something. Residents were startled by the young foreign reporter, and those who responded generally had little to offer. Other reporters, including Yamamoto, also struggled to find leads, canvassing nearby parking areas for people heading to work.

Significance in the Reporting Narrative

Tsurugashima marks the transition from newsroom instruction to the uncertain practice of crime reporting. The assignment demanded immediate fieldwork—interviewing, identifying the victim, and securing a photograph—but the scene supplied no easy answers. Its distance from Urawa and the near-absence of witnesses made the reporting task concrete: access to a crime scene did not itself yield a story, and the reporters had to search the surrounding community for what it could reveal.