Murder of Lindsay Hawker - Media Coverage

Media Coverage

Hawker's parents have striven to keep Hawker's case on the media agenda, appealing for information shortly after the murder. and visiting Japan three months later in order to renew attention. Her family visited again a year after her death, imploring the media to keep the case alive and for Ichihashi to hand himself in. Although Bill Hawker expressed dismay at the lack of knowledge surrounding whereabouts, he stressed that "we have not come here to criticize the Japanese police." They returned again on the second anniversary, and Hawker's father revisited the country later that year, a month after Ichihashi's arrest, to express his gratitude.

Hawker's case has been repeatedly compared to the 2000 murder of Lucie Blackman, another female British citizen, whose dismembered body was found buried in a shallow grave at a beach in Miura, Kanagawa in January 2001. Mizuho Fukushima, quoted in The Asia Pacific Journal and Jenny Holt in the Guardian newspaper has criticised the sensationalist coverage of the case in the British press, characterising it as a combination of missing white woman syndrome and yellow peril racial scaremongering.

In September 2008 a three-part radio play loosely based on the Hawker case, "A Tokyo Murder," by John Dryden and Miriam Smith, was broadcast by BBC Radio 4.

Ichihashi has written a book named Until I Was Arrested which tells his side of the story. Ichihashi had offered Hawker's family all royalties his book might earn, an offer the family rejected.