Asahi: Distraught father loses daughters, then reputation in media circus
Kiyoshi Yamashita was a familiar sight on TV. With emotions ranging from desperation to anger, the burly man begged for "any information" about the disappearances of his two daughters and their grandmother. He granted interviews for as long as 90 minutes as media representatives swarmed his house. "Ask me anything," he told them, desperate to get his loved ones back. But after a few days, and with no breaks in the case, the interviews abruptly ended. "You are always telling lies," he told a TV crew. Yamashita, 43, of Sakaide, Kagawa Prefecture, not only lost his family members, but he had also become an "unofficial suspect" in the media circus...His two daughters, Akane, 5, and Ayana, 3, along with his mother-in-law, Keiko Miura, 58, were killed on Nov. 16, the day they went missing from Miura's home. Web sites, bulletin boards, TV news shows and the print media were rife with speculation about Yamashita until Miura's brother-in-law was arrested Nov. 27 on suspicion of discarding the three bodies..."Without directly saying so, the media gave the impression that a certain person is suspicious," said Yoshiyuki Kono, another victim of media excesses. Soon after the Aum Shinrikyo cult sprayed sarin nerve gas in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, in 1994, police questioned Kono, who had reported the incident. The media jumped in and churned out reports that treated him as a suspect...more...
The Asahi doesn't directly name anyone in the media who raised suspicions about Yamashita but Philip Brasor in this piece identifies Mino Monta as culpable while the actress who wrote about the case on her blog is Natsuko Hoshino.
