TOKYO — Photos of the dead teenager’s corpse show a deep cut on his right arm, horrific bruising on his neck and chest. His face is swollen and covered in cuts. His jaw, and his legs, are pocked with small burns the size of a lit cigarette.
But local police in Japan’s Aichi prefecture saw something else when they looked at the body of Takashi Saito, a 17- year-old sumo wrestler who arrived at a hospital in June. The cause of death was “heart disease,” police declared.
As is common in Japan, Aichi police reached their verdict on how Saito died without an autopsy. No need for a coroner, they said. No crime involved. Only 3 percent of the unnatural deaths in Aichi are investigated by a medical examiner, a minuscule rate even by nationwide standards in Japan, where fewer than 1 in 10 such cases trigger an autopsy.
Forensic scientists say there are many reasons for the low percentage, from inadequate budgets to a shortage of pathologists outside the biggest urban areas. There also is a cultural resistance in Japan to handling the dead, with families often reluctant to insist upon a procedure that invades the body of a loved one.
Saito’s death has given credence to complaints by frustrated doctors, former pathologists and former cops who argue that Japan’s police culture is the main obstacle. Police discourage autopsies that might reveal a higher murder rate in their jurisdiction and pressure doctors to attribute unnatural deaths to health reasons, usually heart failure, they allege.
Odds are, they say, that people are getting away with murder in Japan, a country that officially claims one of the world’s lowest per capita murder rates.
“You can commit a perfect murder in Japan because the body is not likely to be examined,” said Hiromasa Saikawa, a former member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police security and intelligence division.
He said senior officers are “obsessed with statistics because that’s how you get promotions ” and strive to reduce criminal cases to keep their almost perfect solution rate.
Japan’s annual police report says its officers made arrests in 96.6 percent of the country’s 1,392 murders in 2005.
But Saikawa, who says he became disillusioned by “fishy” police practices and in 1997 left the force after 30 years, claims that police try to avoid adding murders to their caseload unless the identity of the killer is obvious.
“Doctors are afraid of the police. They are afraid of retaliation,” Saikawa said, adding that officers indirectly pressure doctors to sign death certificates without an autopsy. “They worry the police could prosecute them for malpractice.
“There is no one refereeing the police,” he said. “It’s scary.”
