Newsletter No. 325
News-Analysis
July 11, 2006

 

STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS EXPIRES ON HITOSHI IGARASHI MURDER

Fifteen years ago -- the early morning of July 12, 1991 -- 44-year-old Hitoshi Igarashi, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Tsukuba University, was found dead in the hallway of his university. He was stabbed multiple times in the chest, neck and face, with his head nearly severed. The only clues to the identity of the killer found at the site were the footprints of someone wearing Chinese-made Kung Fu shoes and some type O blood.

The universal assumption was that Igarashi had been killed because he was the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie, and the Italian translator of the book had been attacked just a few days before Igarashi was found dead.

According to the Asahi, as many as 34,000 Japanese police investigators have worked on this case over the years, but they never turned up any solid leads of any kind. The one thing that police have said is that they believe that the “brutality” of the crime indicates that it must have been committed by a foreigner (Japanese, you see, are not as “brutal” as foreigners!).

The Rushdie affair bears some similarity to the recent Danish cartoon affair in terms of the cultural and political faultlines that it exposed. Strangely, however, the cost of this conflict fell most heavily on a well-regarded Japanese scholar of Islam and Iran -- if indeed his murder was in fact related to the Rushdie affair, as we all assume.

At any rate, last night the statute of limitations on the crime ran out, so there will be no indictment and no trial should the killer ever be identified. The mystery of the affair will endure for now -- only the sad nature of the tragedy itself remains beyond dispute.