Abe Sada Incident"Edit
Newspaper photo taken shortly after Abe's arrest, at Takanawa Police Station, Tokyo on May 20, 1936
Site of the "Abe Sada Incident"
Ishida and Abe returned to Ogu, where they remained until his death.
During their love-making this time, Abe put the knife to the base of Ishida's penis, and said she would make sure he would never play around with another woman. Ishida laughed at this. Two nights into this bout of sex, Abe began choking Ishida, and he told her to continue, saying that this increased his pleasure. She had him do it to her as well. On the evening of May 16, 1936, Abe used her obi sash to cut off Ishida's breathing during orgasm, and they both enjoyed it. They repeated this for two more hours. Once Abe stopped the strangulation, Ishida's face became distorted, and would not return to its normal appearance. Ishida took 30 tablets of a sedative called Calmotin to try to soothe his pain. According to Abe, as Ishida started to doze, he told her, "You'll put the cord around my neck and squeeze it again while I'm sleeping, won't you ... If you start to strangle me, don't stop, because it is so painful afterward." Abe commented that she wondered if he had wanted her to kill him, but on reflection decided he must have been joking.[32]
About 2:00 in the morning of May 18, 1936, as Ishida was asleep, Abe wrapped her sash twice around his neck and strangled him to death. She later told police, "After I had killed Ishida I felt totally at ease, as though a heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders, and I felt a sense of clarity." After lying with Ishida's body for a few hours, she next severed his genitalia with the kitchen knife, wrapped them in a magazine cover, and kept them until her arrest three days later.[33] With the blood she wrote Sada, Ishida no Kichi Futari-kiri (定、石田の吉二人キリ, "We, Sada and Kichi(zō) Ishida, are alone") on Ishida's left thigh, and on a bed sheet. She then carved 定 ("Sada", the character for her name) into his left arm. After putting on Ishida's underwear, she left the inn at about 8 am, telling the staff not to disturb Ishida.[34]
After leaving the inn, Abe met her former lover Gorō Ōmiya. She repeatedly apologized to him, but Ōmiya, unaware of the murder, assumed that she was apologizing for having taken another lover. In actuality, Abe's apologies were for the damage to his political career that she knew his association with her was bound to cause. After Ishida's body was discovered, a search was launched for Abe, who had gone missing. On May 19, 1936, the newspapers picked up the story. Ōmiya's career was ruined, and Abe's life was under intense public scrutiny from that point onwards.
[35]
Abe Sada panicEdit
The circumstances of the death of Ishida immediately caused a national sensation. The ensuing frenzy over the search for Abe was called "Abe Sada panic".
[9] Police received reports of sightings of Abe from various cities, and one false sighting nearly caused a stampede in the
Ginza, resulting in a large traffic jam.
[25] In a reference to the recent failed coup in Tokyo, the
Ni Ni-Roku Incident ("2–26" or "February 26"), the crime was satirically dubbed the "Go Ichi-Hachi" Incident ("5–18" or "May 18").
[27]
On May 19, 1936, Abe went shopping and saw a movie. Under a pseudonym, she stayed in an inn in
Shinagawa on May 20, where she had a massage and drank three bottles of beer. She spent the day writing farewell letters to Ōmiya, a friend, and Ishida.
[34] She planned to commit suicide one week after the murder, and practiced necrophilia. "I felt attached to Ishida's penis and thought that only after taking leave from it quietly could I then die. I unwrapped the paper holding them and gazed at his penis and scrotum. I put his penis in my mouth and even tried to insert it inside me ... It didn't work however though I kept trying and trying. Then, I decided that I would flee to Osaka, staying with Ishida's penis all the while. In the end, I would jump from a cliff on Mount Ikoma while holding on to his penis."[36]
At 4:00 in the afternoon, police detectives, suspicious of the alias under which Abe had registered, came to her room. "Don't be so formal", she told them, "You're looking for Sada Abe, right? Well that's me. I am Sada Abe." When the police were not convinced, she displayed Ishida's genitalia as proof.
[37]
Abe was arrested and interrogated over eight sessions.[38] When asked why she had severed Ishida's genitalia, Abe replied, "Because I couldn't take his head or body with me. I wanted to take the part of him that brought back to me the most vivid memories."[39] The interrogating officer was struck by Abe's demeanor when asked why she had killed Ishida. "Immediately she became excited and her eyes sparkled in a strange way."[40] Her answer was: "I loved him so much, I wanted him all to myself. But since we were not husband and wife, as long as he lived he could be embraced by other women. I knew that if I killed him no other woman could ever touch him again, so I killed him ..."[2] In attempting to explain what distinguished Abe's case from over a dozen other similar cases in Japan,
[41] William Johnston suggests that it is this answer which captured the imagination of the nation. "She had killed not out of jealousy but out of love."
[42] Mark Schreiber notes that the Sada Abe incident occurred at a time when the Japanese media were preoccupied with extreme political and military troubles, including the
Ni-Ni-Roku incident and a
looming full-scale war in China. He suggests that a sensationalistic sex scandal such as this served as a welcome national release from the disturbing events of the time.
[27] The incident also struck a chord with the
ero-guro-nansensu ("erotic-grotesque-nonsense") style popular at the time, and the Sada Abe Incident came to represent that genre for years to come.
[43]
When the details of the crime were made public, rumors began to circulate that Ishida's penis was of extraordinary size; however, the police officer who interrogated Abe after her arrest denied this, saying, "Ishida's was just average. [Abe] told me, 'Size doesn't make a man in bed. Technique and his desire to please me were what I liked about Ishida.'"
[40] After her arrest, Ishida's penis and testicles were moved to
Tokyo University Medical School's pathology museum. They were put on public display soon after the end of
World War II, but have since disappeared.
[44]
What?
