The "Abe Sada Incident"
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 the 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.[33]
About 2 a.m. on 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.[9][34] With the blood, she wrote, Sada, Kichi Futari-kiri ("Sada, Kichi together") 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 a.m., telling the staff not to disturb
Ishida.[35]
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."[36]
After leaving the inn, Abe met Goro Omiya. She repeatedly apologized
to him, but Omiya, unaware of the murder, assumed that she was
apologizing for having taken another lover. Abe's apologies were for
the damage to his political career that she knew his association with
her was bound to cause. On May 19, 1936,
the newspapers picked up the story. Omiya's career was ruined, and
Abe's life was under intense public scrutiny from that point onwards.[37]
[edit] Abe Sada panic
The story immediately became a national sensation, and the ensuing frenzy over her search 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.[26] 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").[28]
On May 19, 1936, Abe went shopping and saw a movie. She stayed in an inn in Shinagawa on May 20, 1936,
where she had a massage and drank three bottles of beer. She spent the
day writing farewell letters to Omiya, a friend, and Ishida.[35]
She planned to commit suicide one week after the murder. "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... 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."[38]
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.[39]
Abe was arrested and interrogated over eight sessions.[16]
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....."[41] In attempting to explain what distinguished Abe's case from over a dozen other similar cases in Japan,[42]
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."[43]
Mark Schreiber notes that the Sada Abe Incident occurred at a time when
Japanese media was 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.[28] 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.[44]
When the details of the crime were made public, rumors began to
circulate that Ishida's penis was of an 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 not long after the end of World War II, but they have since disappeared.[9][45]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sada_Abe