Man Arrested over Body Found in Bag in Eastern Japan

Yomiuri Shimbun

04-05-2025

The Yomiuri Shimbun
Police officers search the home where a body was found in Kawasaki on Friday.
YOKOHAMA (Jiji Press) — Japanese police on Saturday arrested a man, 27, for allegedly abandoning a body that was found in a bag in his house in the city of Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture, eastern Japan.
The body was identified as that of Asahi Okazaki, a 20-year-old part-timer and Kawasaki resident, who was once a girlfriend of the suspect, Hideyuki Shirai, according to the Kanagawa prefectural police department.
Shirai admitted to the allegations in police questioning and said he was once in a dating relationship with Okazaki. The Kanagawa police will continue their investigations into the case, suspecting that Shirai knows about circumstances surrounding the death of the woman.
Okazaki's body was found under the floor of the suspect's house, according to investigative sources. The prefectural police department suspects that the man hid the body to prevent it from being found.
As part of the investigations, the police plan to ask relatives of Shirai who were living with the suspect.
Shirai allegedly abandoned Okazaki's body in his house sometime between Dec. 20 and 30 last year.
According to the sources, Shirai traveled abroad early last month. When he arrived back at Tokyo's Haneda Airport on Saturday, investigators from the Kanagawa prefectural police department asked him to come voluntarily for questioning.
Kanagawa police officers found the body in the bag when they searched the man's house Wednesday on suspicion of violating the stalking regulation law. Part of the body had been skeletonized.
An autopsy found that the body had signs of being burned and that more than a month has passed since the death. The cause of death remains unknown.
According to Okazaki's relatives and others, she went missing on Dec. 20 last year. Before that, Okazaki often consulted people around her and police, complaining that she had been harassed and stalked by Shirai.
On Dec. 23, Okazaki's father reported to police that his daughter went unaccounted for.
On Saturday, the 51-year-old father visited a police station in Kawasaki with dozens of others including relatives and lodged a protest, claiming that the prefectural police department's investigations were inappropriate.
According to the father, a glass window at the house of Okazaki's grandmother where the victim was taking shelter from stalking by the suspect was broken on Dec. 22 last year, but the police said that no foul play was suspected.
'They didn't take any photos or fingerprints. They just left the scene without doing anything,' he complained.
The father also said that even after he reported his daughter's disappearance and submitted a victim report, the police continued to claim that her case did not appear to be a criminal incident.
Meanwhile, an official at the Kanagawa police department said, 'We recognize the seriousness of the incident and will work to identify any issues for which improvements should have been made.'
Since Okazaki went missing on Dec. 20, the prefectural police questioned Shirai on a voluntary basis seven times by late March this year.
Police officers also visited Shirai's house. But his relatives did not allow officers to check the situation under the floor where Okazaki's body was discovered, saying that they were in the middle of a meal.