Lucie Blackman

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Lucie Blackman (d. 2000) was an English woman working illegally as a hostess in Roppongi, Tokyo, who disappeared mysteriously in July 2000. Her dismembered body was found a year later, buried in a shallow grave at a beach in Miura, Kanagawa in June 2001. Property developer Joji Obara ^[1] was charged for drugging, raping and killing Blackman, as well as the rapes of six other women and the murder of another hostess. Blackman was 21 years old at the time of her death.

The mysterious disappearance and later finding of Blackman's body received an enormous amount of press coverage in Japan and internationally, especially in British newspapers. British Prime Minister Tony Blair even made mention of the murder during an official visit to Japan. Blackman was, however, not the first foreign woman employed in Japan's mizu shōbai (literally "water trade") to suddenly disappear. Mizuho Fukushima, a member of Japan's Upper House parliament and a high-profile women's rights advocate, said in an interview with TIME that many Asian women had disappeared previously but the media "barely covered this problem until Lucie's case. All of a sudden it was news when a white girl disappeared." [1]