Every year in Japan, around 80,000 people are reported missing and never seen again. It is thought many disappear deliberately, leaving behind families, friends and careers. Their reasons for walking out on their lives can range from debt and sexual impropriety to family conflict or depression. Those who disappear are called jouhatsu, which means evaporated.
When it dawned on the Tokyo-based crime writer and journalist Jake Adelstein that his friend and accountant, Morimoto, had not only disappeared, but had taken some of Adelstein’s money with him, he decided to investigate. In the opening episode of the new podcast series, The Evaporated, he and the Japanese-American reporter Shoko Plambeck talk to two of Morimoto’s clients who suspected something was amiss when he appeared at meetings wearing designer suits that should be beyond the means of someone on an accountant’s salary. They subsequently discovered he had been embezzling funds from his firm and was deeply in debt. Adelstein goes on to track down a doorman who worked in Morimoto’s building and who reports seeing movers emptying his apartment in the dead of night.
It is here that things get interesting, as we learn about the companies that help people vanish. In the second episode, Adelstein and Plambeck meet Miho Saita, owner of a yonige-ya, or a night-moving company. What initially appears exploitative ends up sounding almost altruistic as Saita reveals how she founded the business after escaping from an abusive marriage. At her lowest ebb, she was offered no help from family or police, and so she resolved to assist others in similarly dire straits. For a fee, she helps people find new homes and jobs, organises the removal of their belongings and assists them in creating a new identity.
The Evaporated taps nicely into that staple of true crime — people who disappear in mysterious circumstances — though Adelstein and Plambeck are less interested in solving missing persons cases than in understanding why and how people disappear. It also avoids the solemnity that characterises so many true crime podcasts, with Adelstein wryly reflecting on his accountant making off with his money just 10 days before his tax return was due. The series nonetheless reveals much about the human capacity for shame, something felt not only by those who vanish but by those they leave behind. In the past, to alleviate the shame, such disappearances would often be blamed on the spirits — the term used was kamikakushi, which means hidden by the gods.
Pseudocide, by journalists Poppy Damon and Alice Fiennes, is also concerned with disappearances, specifically people who fake their own deaths. The second and most recent series investigates the case of Patrick McDermott, a Korean-American cameraman and ex-partner of the late singer Olivia Newton-John, who vanished in 2005 while on a fishing trip. The coastguard declared him lost at sea, though some claim he is still alive and living under an alias in Mexico.
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