One year after former Japanese pannist Asami Nagakiya was murdered in Port-of-Spain, Japanese DJ Selector Hemo is calling on the police here to ensure her killer is brought to justice.
Nagakiya’s body was found under a tree at the Queen’s Park Savannah on Ash Wednesday last year. No one has been charged with her murder.
As citizens and visitors alike participated in this year’s Carnival celebrations on Monday and yesterday, Hemo, whose real name is Tomoko Inoue, made yet another call for justice over her close friend’s murder.
“She was my friend and a member of my Yosakoi team and had always joined my events relating T&T,” Inoue, here for yet another Carnival season, said in an interview with the T&T Guardian.
Inoue has been visiting T&T for the past 17 years to play music at various Carnival events.
She said she still could not understand why anyone would have killed Nagakiya, who accompanied her (Inoue) to Port-of-Spain to participate in the Carnival yearly. She said Nagakiya enjoyed playing the steelpan but played mas “for the first time last year and after Carnival Tuesday it happened.”
Inoue said she would like “to ask the police in T&T to catch the perpetrator and bring (him) to justice as soon as possible.”
The Japanese DJ said she “fell in love with T&T from my first visit and I have been trying to promote T&T’s music abroad.” However, she expressed concern about the number of murders in the country, adding that the crime problem was making it difficult for her to encourage people to visit T&T by themselves.
“There are too many indiscriminate killings of civilians and I don’t want to see people in T&T die any more,” she said.
Inoue said while people can walk alone at nights in Japan, it is not the same in T&T because of the crime situation.
Asked to comment on soca music, Inoue said she loves it and promotes it wherever she goes.
“Soca is very positive and happy and I think is the only genre which enables people to wine and with someone you don’t know,” she added.
She said she promotes soca in the nightclubs, on the radio and elsewhere, including the Yosakoi festival, which is held in 200 different countries of the world, including Ghana and Belize. She said she will be in Grenada next to play soca music.
She also spoke of the need for closer cultural ties to be developed between Japan and T&T in the coming years, and the need for assistance to be given to the artistes to ensure that existing challenges to promoting cultural exchanges could be significantly reduced.
Inoue said: “Coming and visit T&T is a big hurdle for those who don’t know well about this country. I would like to invite Trinidadian artistes and exchange the culture. So I’m looking for sponsors.”