Police seek to arrest missing actress Sakai over stimulants+

TOKYO, Aug. 7 Kyodo -
Police obtained an arrest warrant Friday for missing actress Noriko Sakai on
suspicion of possessing stimulant drugs, four days after her husband was
arrested for alleged amphetamine possession, investigators said.

The police plan to arrest the 38-year-old television personality, who gained
popularity not only in Japan but in other parts of Asia such as mainland China,
Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1990s, as soon as they find her.
The Supreme Court on Friday stopped using a video to promote the lay judge
system featuring Sakai. Toyota Motor Corp. stopped releasing a commercial video
in which Sakai appears on its website on Thursday.
The Metropolitan Police Department obtained the warrant after finding a small
quantity of drugs in her apartment in Tokyo's Minato Ward where she lives
separately from her 41-year-old husband Yuichi Takaso.
The police judged the drug found in her apartment to be hers because Takaso did
not usually visit her there. During questioning by the police, Takaso said his
wife had stimulants, the investigators said.
Takaso, a self-proclaimed professional surfer, was arrested Monday after a
police officer found a plastic bag containing stimulant drugs in his underwear
in Tokyo's Shibuya district. Sakai was summoned to the arrest site, but she
refused the police request to go to a police station on a voluntary basis and
take a urine test.
She and her 10-year-old son then went missing after his arrest, but her son was
found safe Thursday in Tokyo at an acquaintance's home. Radio signals had been
picked up from her cellphone in Yamanashi Prefecture but disappeared Tuesday
evening.
The Tokyo police said Friday that Sakai asked the acquaintance to let her hear
her son's voice in a call she made from a public phone at an unidentified
location Wednesday. Rumors have been spreading that Sakai is at a religious
group facility in the prefecture, where reporters had begun to gather by early
Friday afternoon.
Sakai made her debut in 1986 in a TV drama and released her first record the
next year before her popularity expanded overseas in the early 1990s. Following
her marriage in 1998 and the birth of her first son in 1999, she appeared in
commercials and recreated her image as that of a good mother in a happy family.
A few hours after reports surfaced that the police had obtained an arrest
warrant for Sakai, the president of her record company called on her to come
out of hiding in a televised news conference.
''Please show up as quickly as possible,'' Masahisa Aizawa, president of
Tokyo-based Sun Music Production Inc., said in front of dozens of reporters.
''We have not received any information (about the police's move) and have no
choice but to await what the investigation brings about.''
In 1993, Sakai appeared in an event promoting campaigns against drug abuse.
==Kyodo