By CATHERINE MASTERS
The young Japanese men made Nozomu Shinozaki sit on the floor and stood around him. Why had he set fires in the compound where they lived, they demanded. Why had he stolen from them?
The 22-year-old with Asperger's syndrome, intellectually slow and socially inept, didn't give good enough answers. The men began kicking and beating him. After three hours he was dead.
Shinozaki's case has been likened to The Lord of the Flies, William Golding's novel about children who fend for themselves on an island after their plane crashes. With no adult supervision their social structure breaks down and one is killed.
The persecutors of Shinozaki were not children and instead of an island they were in a secluded institution in West Auckland. They were isolated in a country they did not understand and their own customs were totally foreign to police, who found elements of the case virtually incomprehensible.
It was a weird case and it kept getting weirder. The tight-knit Japanese community in New Zealand closed ranks and the Weekend Herald understands the police investigation was hampered at almost every turn.
Nine fellow students were initially charged with Shinozaki's murder after the punishment beating, which took place in the early hours of February 26 last year. Most were in their early 20s and the oldest, at 28, was also a staff member.
But police, faced with interpreters who did not want to get involved and witnesses who fled, were forced to drop the murder charges.
It is understood this is partly because interpreters made a hash of translating the Bill of Rights.
Five of the students walked free and refused to testify. Other witnesses had returned home or had gone to Australia and refused to return.
The remaining four faced lesser manslaughter charges, which they admitted in court earlier this month.
Ryu Fukushina, 24, was found kneeling beside the body with blood on his shoes. Ryuji Hiraki, 28, said when the body went limp, four others were still kicking Shinozaki.
Nobu Oshima, 20, was annoyed with Shinozaki because he had been suspected of starting the fires and Masato Fujita, 21, admitted he was irritated because one of the fires had been next to his room.
They are now awaiting sentence in the care of Katsuo Kanamori, the director of the academy, who originally faced charges but was not convicted.
Shinozaki was so severely beaten that fat was released into his bloodstream - something the pathologist who performed the autopsy said he had seen in fewer than a dozen of more than 1000 homicides he had worked on.
In court, the police prosecution admitted the case was "but a shadow of its former self". What had happened to the inquiry?
The students of the Columbus Academy were considered "different" back home. In conformist Japan being different brings shame and embarrassment on families.
Their parents may have loved them, but to avoid shame sent them away, leaving others to deal with their range of conditions, from serious psychiatric and psychological problems, to those with learning difficulties and others who were simply naughty, disruptive misfits.
A source close to the case said one accused tried to explain, saying "we are just people that can't live there [Japan]".
Organisations such as the Columbus Academy exist around the world for the misfits of Japanese society.
Parents paid well for them to be looked after by the academy, run by Kanamori. He was charged with perverting the course of justice, allegedly after telling students not to co-operate with police. The charge was dropped due to insufficient evidence.
He was later charged with assaulting Shinozaki by grabbing his testicles, but the evidence was muddled and he was found not guilty.
Kanamori once claimed the academy catered for the "lost souls" of the Japanese education system and provided a place where students could have a sense of escape and experience childhood.
The Outward Bound-type promotion disguised what was, in reality, closer to a run-down boarding house. It turned out to be unregistered and there were discrepancies with visas and permits.
About 50 students lived at the end of a long, padlocked driveway in West Harbour, crammed into small rooms described in court as squalid.
Conveniently out of sight and out of mind from their homeland, society here also mostly ignored them.
Some, though, were worried. Teachers at West Auckland schools they attended were concerned by their excessive sleepiness.
Neighbours were concerned about noisy parties and one found a student hiding in his garden, apparently afraid.
At various times neighbours and schools made complaints and one or another organisation would visit and inspect the premises. But nothing much changed.
Life went on according to Japanese custom inside the cloistered compound, with the intercom on a locked front gate and warning signs of snarling guard dogs.
It took Shinozaki's death for authorities to really take notice.
But was his death preventable?
No one can really be blamed for what happened, said a source, who like many in this case was unwilling to be named.
"People were uneasy, but there was no reason to think anyone was in physical danger. I don't think anyone could have anticipated this."
The Government launched an inquiry and 11 agencies began investigating. The academy was unwilling to co-operate. Records were destroyed or hidden. Nurses sent in were bailed up by the guard dogs and one was bitten. Eventually the academy closed, most of the students dispersed and the Government has put new rules in place to govern any similar institutions.
As for the murder investigation, the police are still smarting. They refuse to speak to the Herald, but are apparently still livid at the refusal of 12 witnesses to give evidence.
They are also understood to be strongly suspicious of Japanese authorities, who are said to have discouraged witnesses from returning to New Zealand and were so unhelpful as to be obstructive.
Police were rebuked for not going through proper channels for approaching a witness and when they wanted to set up a video link to Japan to interview witnesses, they were told that this was illegal in Japan.
The Herald, too, found it impossible to speak to officials at the time of the death.
Instead, reporters began to take a stream of anonymous telephone calls and emails from nervous ex-Columbus Academy staff members and former language school teachers, telling, in broken English, very similar stories.
They talked of boys and girls sharing rooms and unwanted pregnancies. They mentioned drugs and booze; even assaults and intimidation.
Kanamori, who also goes by the name of Soon Keuk Kim, yelled at the students a lot, they said.
Rooms were filthy and "stinky", and students had to work after school for little or no pay in two restaurants that were owned by the academy.
These too are now closed, but Kanamori is said to still have business interests in New Zealand.
One source from Japan juggled information between the Herald and the police. He had a lot of detail, some of which checked out, but police at one stage said they were suspicious of him.
He claimed a young man had tried to commit suicide but was never taken to hospital - another source told us the same thing. Others spoke of girls being regularly taken for abortions.
We traced the origins of the academy to Whangaparaoa, where it was smaller, and trouble seems to have followed it around.
The Herald was told of a "Ms M who behaved as an infant", who had set fire to her room at the house rented in Whangaparaoa. We found the then owner of the house who said: "They left in a hurry." The owner found there had been a fire. He said the four students he thought would live in the house turned out to number 10.
Neighbours told him of parties and when he went to mow the lawns he saw piles of beer bottles and rubbish.
"I think 99 per cent of the trouble was because they were unsupervised."
One of the neighbours said the disabled girl, Ms M, was "pushed around and picked on and yelled at all the time".
After the fire the academy moved to West Harbour, starting off initially in Luckens Rd. It then bought properties in West Harbour Drive, joined them and locked the world out.
After Shinozaki's death, several Japanese news crews converged on Auckland. They said the case reminded them of an infamous case in Japan in the 1980s, when a school set up to cater for problem students emphasised physical punishment and discipline.
The head of the school was sent to jail for six years after four students died, one of them after taking a beating.
Kenichi Asano, a visiting professor of journalism, told the Herald of the extraordinary pressure that students were under in Japan.
To be different from the expected norm is to be miserable. Suicides by school children are common, along with bullying and beatings, sometimes leading to death.
"They are suffering much. In Japan, you have to be the same as other people. It's so difficult to say you are homosexual or lesbian, for example."
He believes, though, that the parents of the Columbus Academy students would have sent them to New Zealand not out of shame, but out of love, to keep them from the school system at home and to keep them out of appalling mental health institutions and hospitals.
In Japan women have tests to see if their unborn child will be handicapped; if positive they abort them, he said.
The students at the Columbus Academy "are not supposed to be born in Japan".
Bullying is so rife in Japanese schools it has spawned a phenomenon known as hikikomori, where students withdraw and lock themselves in their rooms for months, or even years.
Professor Kenji Kameguchi, from the University of Tokyo, thought at least some of the students sent to the Columbus Academy would have to be victims of hikikomori.
"The parents would probably be hoping for some kind of magical resolution in a different culture."
There is little doubt Shinozaki was bullied in this country. There is also little doubt he could be pretty annoying - in fact, more than annoying.
At the time of his death he was facing charges for indecently assaulting girls.
While his condition meant he probably did not mean to upset anyone, an anonymous letter containing school reports sent to the Herald said he was prone to invading people's personal space.
He frequently went beyond the bounds of appropriate behaviour.
Coupled with being picked on, life must have been bewildering.
But teachers also said he was cheerful and tried hard and he had his photograph printed in the Herald, taking part in sumo wrestling at an Auckland club.
But during his time at the academy, about five years, he never went home and his parents never came to visit him.
They did come to New Zealand after his death. They were kept hidden by the Japanese Embassy and left soon after, declining to return for the trial.
But a source said it was apparent they had love and affection for their son and when they returned home they took his ashes . "I don't doubt they were trying to do the best for him."
But she is baffled that despite what happened, his parents, and parents of the other accused, still think Kanamori is marvellous and support him.
"That's something I find very difficult to understand. I would have thought parents would have gone in there guns blazing saying 'what on earth was going on' and 'how did this situation arise?' and the finger would have been pointed. But this does not seem to have happened."
Lost souls of Japan
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