Last year, as the clock ticked toward the 15th anniversary of her daughter's killing, Sumiko Namai offered a US$20,000 reward to find the killer. She appeared on TV with a clairvoyant, the police posted the suspect's photo on popular Web sites, and newspapers carried articles on the countdown.
But the date, Dec. 19, came and went with no new development here in Japan's largest northern city. The next morning, newspapers reported that the 15-year statute of limitations had expired on the killing of Namai's 24-year-old daughter, Michie. The man who had buried her body in the snow after stabbing her repeatedly in 1990 was now beyond the law's reach. If he were still alive, he could confess and resume a normal life.
Other nations have a statute of limitations on homicide, particularly in Europe, the source of modern Japan's laws. But few match Japan in its ritualized focus on the countdown, as well as the infinite twists and turns of a system that sets a precise time limit on crime, punishment and guilt.
Under Japanese law, prosecutors had 15 years -- extended to 25 years last year, but only for killings committed after the law passed -- to charge murder suspects. The instant the clock ticked past midnight to usher in the 16th year, suspects could no longer be arraigned. If a suspect was outside Japan, the period was extended by the length of time abroad. In 2004, the limit expired on 37 cases.
Not surprisingly, newspapers, movies and mystery novels have found the limit to be an endless source of material. In recent weeks, a major TV network even began broadcasting a new series, The Statute of Limitations Police, about an officer who solves murder cases after time has run out.
Who needs fiction, though, in the case of Kazuko Fukuda, a bar hostess who killed a co-worker in 1982, then went on the lam for nearly 15 years by using aliases and undergoing plastic surgery? She was arrested with a mere 11 hours to go, convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Or consider Ken Ishikawa, 54, in Otaru, whose older sister, Chikako, who had left to teach music at an elementary school in Tokyo, vanished in 1978. Surrounded by framed photos of his sister, Ishikawa said the family believed she had been kidnapped, perhaps even taken to North Korea.
It was 26 years later, in 2004, that the family learned the truth. A school security guard had choked Chikako Ishikawa to death and buried her nude body in a hole under his living room.
He continued to work at the school and live in the same house for years, until city road expansion plans forced him to move in 2004.
Fearing that construction workers would find the body, the guard, Shinya Wada, now almost 70, confessed and went free.
"They say that after 15 years the victims' feelings calm down and evidence disappears, but there's no way that the family of the victim will ever forget," Ken Ishikawa said. "It's madness. He's a murderer, but we can't do anything. Isn't Japan a country governed by law?"
Japan adopted the statute of limitations on murder in the late 19th century.
"If it was said that advanced countries had it," said Morikazu Taguchi, a professor at Waseda University's law school in Tokyo, "It became an absolute must."
In the decades after World War II, Germany and France eliminated the statute of limitations on crimes against humanity.
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