MURDER OF JAPAN'S DON JUAN
Widow busted in ’18 death of mogul who boasted of wooing 4K gals
THINGS started to go sour just weeks after Japan’s self-described Don Juan married his third wife.
Kosuke Nozaki, 77, bristled at warnings that Saki Sudo, then 22, was interested only in his money when he married her in February 2018.
“I am sorry for the 99 percent of people who wish for this marriage to fall apart, but I am confident that I will be happy,” wrote the real-estate mogul and playboy who gained celebrity status in Japan after the publication of “Don Juan of Kishu,” a best-selling 2016 memoir that detailed how he had seduced 4,000 women.
But Sudo seemed to have had other plans for the marriage. The tall, ravenhaired beauty was frequently away on shopping trips in Italy, Singapore and Dubai, snapping up designer wardrobes with her new husband’s cash. She preferred the posh waterfront condo that Nozaki rented for her in Tokyo to his home in the sleepy city of Tanabe in Wakayama Prefecture, almost 300 miles away, according to reports.
Nozaki seemed to have good reason to put up with the absences and his new wife’s penchant for Chanel clothes.
“She has white skin with a firmness that repels water,” he wrote in a second book, published in 2018. “Our time in the bedroom is also fun. I’m convinced that is the secret to staying young. We have a quota of sex three times a day, and I don’t need Viagra. I know having so much sex may cause my death, but if I can die having sex and go to heaven then I am good.”
But it wasn’t the sex that killed him. It was poison.
Three months into their marriage, on May 24, 2018, Nozaki was found dead in his bedroom. He died of “acute stimulant intoxication,” with a high level of undisclosed narcotics in his bloodstream, an autopsy found.
His widow moved quickly to appoint herself president of the million-dollar company he founded, according to reports. She also had plans to leave Japan shortly after the funeral. But her escape was foiled when the coronavirus pandemic made travel impossible.
Police, along with Nozaki’s family, had long suspected Sudo may have been responsible for his death, especially when they found phone records that showed Internet searches for “stimulant drugs” and poisons on Sudo’s phone, according to sources cited by the Japanese press.
Late last month, police arrested Sudo in Tokyo and extradited her to Wakayama, where they charged her with murder.
NOZAKI was a self-made businessman who rose from humble roots in Tanabe, a city of 70,000 in western Japan. He bailed on his education after middle school, selling metal scraps, condoms and alcohol before making a fortune in real estate, a money-lending venture and a string of liquor stores, according to his memoir.
But his life was marked by a seemingly insatiable desire for sex.
“The reason I make money is to date attractive women,” he wrote in “Don Juan of Kishu: The Man Who Gave 3 Billion Yen to 4,000 Beautiful Women.”
“When I find a woman of my type, tall and voluptuous, I would tell her . . . I want to go out with you and have sex with you . . . I’ll give you 400,000 yen [$3,600 in US dollars] if you agree.
“Some people may frown at my sense [of relationships], but this is exactly why I have been working in various occupations and earning money. Everybody has a different dream. I don’t feel guilty about anything.”
The book, which sold more than 50,000 copies in Japan, also included tips on how to stay fit and how to pick up flight attendants and college students. Nozaki said he was inspired to tell his story after one of the young women he dated stole $550,000 in cash and other valuables from him in 2016.
He said he wrote the memoir partly to restore his faith in humanity. Although the unidentified woman was arrested, he did not press charges, famously declaring that the cash she took “is like toilet paper to me.”
“The theft gave me a good life experience,” said Nozaki, who, despite his womanizing, largely kept to himself, according to a neighbor.
Whenever he met an attractive woman, Nozaki would give her his card along with the equivalent of $100 as an incentive to call him.
He said he met Sudo in the fall of 2017 at a Tokyo airport, when he pretended to stumble to get her attention. But some reports suggest that they met through a third party — and that Sudo allegedly was a high-end call girl. Prostitution is illegal in Japan.
When they started dating, Nozaki promised Sudo an apartment in Tokyo
and an allowance of $10,000 a month, reports said.
It was a new world for Sudo, who had attended beauty school before reportedly working as an actress in porn videos.
But something had apparently soured before Nozaki’s death, and Sudo was at risk of losing her fabulous life. According to Japanese broadcaster NHK, Nozaki was thinking of divorcing her.
Before her arrest, her family did not know where she was living or that she had married Nozaki. Sudo had told them that she paid for the lavish trips she flaunted on social media thanks to savvy real-estate investments.
“I don’t even know where to go to see my daughter,” Sudo’s mother told reporters after the woman’s arrest. “I only went to her home in Tokyo once and only heard about things from TV and the Internet.”
NOZAKI died 18 days after the demise of his beloved miniature dachshund, Eve, who passed away mysteriously in his arms on May 6, 2018. He was devoted to the dog and had told his wife and anyone else who cared to listen that he planned to leave his inheritance to Eve after his death.
“Eve suddenly became ill and was taken in the middle of the night to a veterinarian,” a report said.
Friends said Nozaki, who had no children, was devastated after the canine’s death and asked a monk at a local temple to conduct a memorial service. He tearfully buried Eve in the backyard and, in the days before his own death, was planning a June celebration in honor of Eve — busily inviting friends, business associates and even securing musicians for the event.
After Nozaki’s death, authorities suspected foul play in Eve’s passing and went so far as to exhume the dog. In the end, they were unable to conduct a necropsy because the remains had deteriorated too much.
It’s not clear if police uncovered new evidence in Nozaki’s case before the surprise arrest of Sudo, now 25, on April 28.
Police said she had been a suspect for years because she was in the Tanabe house when her husband died there. Sudo initially told authorities that she heard a noise from the couple’s bedroom and went to investigate and found Nozaki slumped on a couch in his bedroom.
Police, who also questioned the man’s longtime housekeeper, who was also in the home, now claim Sudo gave Nozaki a poison-laced cocktail shortly before he died.
Weeks after the funeral, Sudo moved quickly to secure her late husband’s fortune. She unilaterally appointed herself president of his firm on July 30, 2018, after calling a meeting of his relatives and shareholders, who refused to attend.
“Sudo, who deemed that the relatives had entrusted her to handle administrative procedures, created minutes saying that she held an extraordinary general shareholder’s meeting on July 30 at Nozaki’s house,” said a report in the Mainichi daily newspaper. “Sudo, who was the only one present, served as the chair and appointed herself as the company’s representative director.”
Later, she transferred more than $300,000 to her bank account from the company’s coffers, according to auditors who have accused her of stealing from the firm and filed criminal charges against her last year.
In addition to leaving his $11 million fortune to Eve, Nozaki had planned to bequeath some of his assets to Tanabe, the city of his birth.
“He was saying positive things recently, like he wants to contribute to the local community. [His death] is truly regrettable,” a childhood friend of Nozaki’s told the Kyodo News.
Local authorities had been in the process of negotiating with Sudo over the cash at the time of her arrest.
Sudo initially denied any involvement in her husband’s death in 2018, and now, according to police sources cited by Mainichi, she has decided to remain silent.
But she had already made her feelings clear at Nozaki’s funeral, where she spent most of the proceedings on her cellphone.
As mourners lined up to pay respects to the young widow, one guest told her, “It must be hard considering the death of your husband.”
Shrugged Sudo: “Not really.”