Rashomon, the famous literary montage by Ryunosuke Akutagawa that Akira Kurosawa turned into an even more famous film starring Toshiro Mifune, tells the story of a man’s murder and the rape of his wife from the perspectives of four people. Their accounts differ so greatly one wonders if they are describing the same incident. The Akutagawa story is a classic in world literature, and the Kurosawa film is said to be one the five best non-American films ever made.

The Japanese media like this concept so much they’ve updated the technique to report a sexual harassment case in Kagoshima. Reading the accounts from three different media outlets leaves one wondering if they are describing the same story.

The headline for the Daily Mainichi’s English article blares, “Court Accepts Priest’s Touching of Girl’s Breasts as ‘Religious Activity’”. Here’s their version: Ryoichi Sakamoto, a 36-year-old Shinto priest, was prosecuted for indecent assault because he touched the “breasts and other body parts” of a 15-year-old junior high school girl while she and Sakamoto were in “a religious facility next to his home”. Sakamoto, who was looking at two years in jail, protested that he was performing “a religious activity in order to help her”.

Then they deal with the judge:

“There is room to accept that his act was a religious activity, and reasonable doubt in saying he possessed sexual intent,” Judge Atsushi Tomita said. . . In giving the ruling, Tomita acknowledged that Sakamoto had touched the breasts of the girl, but said of his actions, “(In the sect to which the defendant belongs) there are some cases in which the skin is touched directly, and one cannot say that this did not constitute a religious activity”.

Didn’t you read the English article and marvel at how much information was left out? For starters, why were the girl and the priest together? What kind of “religious facility” was this? What “religious activity” did he perform? What other “body parts” did he touch?

A different picture emerges in the shorter Japanese version that appeared in the Shikoku News based on a Kyodo wire service report. It manages to give us more information while leaving us with more questions.

We discover that the Shinto priest performed the ceremony in a “Shinto-affiliated church”. This is confusing. The Japanese word kyokai is usually applied to Christian churches, and I’ve never seen it used for a Shinto facility. This could be proper usage—I learn new things about Japan every day—but the word choice strikes me as strange.

The Shikoku newspaper explains that the girl and the priest were together because she had health problems and a poor attitude toward her schoolwork, so the priest performed an o-saido to drive out the wickedness by stroking her body. This is even more confusing. Saido is a Buddhist term that can mean “salvation”. The Kojien dictionary adds that it can mean “to preach to a person to liberate him from his confusion and bring him to enlightenment”. But Sakamoto is a Shinto priest, not a Buddhist priest.

Turning to Judge Tomita, the Shikoku News doesn’t quote him as saying, “there is room to accept” that the priest performed a religious activity. Instead, they report that he recognized the behavior as religious activity and doesn’t recognize sexual intent. They also add a twist: they quote the judge stating o-saido is a technique in Eastern medicine.

The third report provides juicier details. Here’s the slant from the Jiji Press: They confirm the judge said “there was room to accept” the priest’s story. It also turns out that the girl didn’t see the priest for religious guidance. Sakamoto was her katei kyoshi, a personal tutor to help her with schoolwork after classes. (It is common for Japanese junior high and high school students to hire tutors.) Further, we find out that he touched the area “near her pubic region”, and that this touching lasted 30 minutes. How did this study session get turned into a purification rite with erotic overtones? Jiji says the girl showed Sakamoto some scars on her abdomen from recent surgery. The priest said he felt sorry for her, so he conducted the religious ceremony.

Even these three stories leave several unanswered questions. What is the o-saido ceremony? The Japanese public doesn’t seem to know much about it. Do Eastern medical practitioners really use o-saido? Why is a Shinto priest performing a Buddhist ceremony? How often does Sakamoto’s sect perform these ceremonies? How did this case get to court? Did the girl complain? Did she tell her parents what happened, and they complained? Did her teachers get wind of it after she bragged about her exorcism to school friends? Did the priest explain what he was going to do beforehand?

There are three different versions, none of which match and none of which give the complete story. The Daily Mainichi’s English-language edition—which loves offbeat sexual stories about Japan—makes the priest look like a Kagoshima version of Jimmy Swaggert and the judge sound like a doddering fool. (Which may be true, but only the Jiji Press comes close to making that case.) Kyodo actually seems to take the priest’s side. And the Jiji Press describes a guy, coincidentally a Shinto priest, who couldn’t control himself when he got his chain jerked by an underage girl and came up with a cock-and-bull story about o-saido to save his neck. After hearing the details, the judge seems to have realized that both the plaintiff and the defendant were no angels and washed his hands of the case by coming up with his own screwy story to keep the girl from psychiatric counseling and the priest from a jail term.

While Rashomon succeeded brilliantly as literature and film, it doesn’t really work when the media channel Akutagawa and Kurosawa instead of doing some straightforward reporting. People in the mainstream media wonder why fewer people take them seriously anymore. It’s no big mystery to me.