Husband on the run

Press, 31 August 1984, Page 15

Husband on the run

From

PETER McGILL

in Tokyo

It started when two Japanese visitors to Los Angeles, Kazuyoshi Miura and his wife Kazumi, were shot during an apparent robbery. Kazuyoshi escaped with a slight leg wound but Kazumi was shot in the head and reduced to a coma.

After flying his wife back to Japan by a United States military plane, Miura started a huge public uproar which had Japanese housewives sobbing into their rice bowls. He appeared on television. He wrote to President Reagan complaining that law and order had broken down in the United States. When his wife finally died a year later, Miura sent a photograph of their daughter to the United States newspapers with “Give Mammy Back” printed on it.

Expressions of sympathy and outrage poured in. JapaneseAmericans in Los Angeles took up a collection to mark their regret. Miura vowed that, if the California police failed to find the killer: “I will go after him and kill him myself.” He appeared to be the

model of a devoted husband, his wife the victim of gun-toting Yanks.

Then in January this year the Japanese magazine “Shukan Bunshun,” in a story headlined “Suspicious Bullets,” revealed that Miura had bought $600,000 in life assurance on his wife just before the Los Angeles trip. Moreover, he had had a mistress who had mysteriously disappeared in Los Angeles in 1979. Since then Japan’s mass media have been pursuing the story and detail after detail of Miura’s past has been revealed. The “model husband” became a debauched womaniser, fond of kinky sexual practices, and a potential double murderer. The decomposing body of his former mistress has been found outside Los Angeles. No criminal charges have been made against Miura but he has faced what one critic describes as a “kangaroo court” of the press.

Hundreds of Japanese reporters have been swarming over Los Angeles in search of clues. No spicy tit-bit of Miura’s past life is too small to miss the headlines and prime television time. His house at Tokyo, where he lives with his fourth wife, has been besieged by journalists: when he put up a wooden screen to fend them off, they propped ladders against his roof and shouted questions through the windows. One television station broadcast a seance in which members of a Buddhist cult “interviewed” his dead wife, Kazumi. Now Miura’s lawyers are sueing “Shukan Bunshun” for libel in the original story. A Japanese tour operator is offering a “Suspicion Tour” of Los Angeles at $6O a head. In a Tokyo bar, the waitresses wear name-tags of the women allegedly involved in the case. Copyright — London Observer Service. r