What lingers after Case Closed: The Scarlet Bullet? For me, its greatest unease comes less from the spectacular action or the satisfaction of unmasking a culprit than from the uncertainty of a truth that is never fully revealed.
On the surface, Maiko Shirahato and Osamu Inoue act out of revenge against the FBI. Maiko is angry that the bureau treated her father, Makoto Ishihara, as a culprit in the case fifteen years earlier, leading to his death in prison. Osamu resents the investigation that, in his view, concealed the full story and ruined his father’s life.
Yet that explanation seems insufficient for the particular crime they choose to commit. If revenge alone were their purpose, surely simpler and more direct methods were available.
Instead, they abduct three sponsor-company CEOs in a reenactment of the WSG kidnappings fifteen years earlier, eventually reaching Alan Mackenzie. Why choose such an elaborate, roundabout route?
I want to look beyond “revenge” and consider what the two of them really wanted to destroy. Alongside that question, I will explore the older case and ask: Was Makoto Ishihara really the culprit he was taken to be?
My reading is that their motives extend beyond revenge: the loss and despair associated with their fathers are directed outward in two very different ways.
The investigative system, including plea bargaining, becomes a symbol of the outside world they hate. For me, the unsettling core of The Scarlet Bullet is the uncertainty that remains around Ishihara’s involvement.
- Why stage a massive “reenactment” of the 15-year-old crime instead of executing a simple murder?
- Why did the FBI identify Ishihara as one of the culprits in the older case?
- Can we actually trust the plea bargain testimony that condemned him?
- Was Makoto Ishihara an active participant in the original crime, or a completely innocent bystander?
- What was the real reason Maiko Shirahato boarded the same Maglev train as Alan in the film’s climax?
Let’s examine these uneasy details one by one, considering Maiko and Osamu’s motives and the significance of what remains unknown about Ishihara.
*This is a translated version. The original (Japanese) is available here.
- Revenge alone may not explain their motives
Punishing the FBI is the apparent motive, but murder alone would not require an elaborate reenactment. I read Maiko as wanting to break the FBI’s account of her father, and Osamu as wanting to complete a major crime of his own design. - The same crime, but different destinations
Maiko’s concern is with her father himself. She clings to an incomplete alibi and wants Alan to acknowledge the uncertainty surrounding his guilt. Osamu’s concern, in my reading, is with the privilege associated with his father: the life he feels he should have inherited. - Ishihara’s precise role remains uncertain
There are reasons to suspect his involvement, but also reasons to question whether he was the shooter. Even complete non-involvement remains a possibility. I see this uncertainty as part of the film’s examination of how testimony can settle an account of events without settling every doubt. - The present conspiracy may mirror the older crime
If Osamu controlled the plan without telling Maiko everything, their unequal knowledge may echo a position Ishihara occupied fifteen years earlier: involved, yet unaware of the whole scheme.
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Beyond Revenge: What Drove Maiko and Osamu?
Their Apparent Shared Motive: Revenge Against the FBI
The film initially presents both as bearing a strong grudge against the FBI and Alan. Maiko believes her father was wrongly accused and driven to his death in prison; Osamu believes the case was tidied away through a plea bargain that ruined his father’s life.
If revenge were their only purpose, more direct methods of murder would have been available. The elaborate reenactment suggests that revenge alone does not adequately explain their choices.
Maiko: An Incomplete Alibi and Her Father’s Story
Maiko’s feelings center on her father, whose life she believes was destroyed. Her difficulty is that the alibi she knows cannot establish his complete innocence.
If there were accomplices, the alibi could fall apart. She probably recognizes that weakness somewhere, yet wants to cling to the only support she has. Perhaps killing Alan was therefore less important than hearing him acknowledge that her father’s guilt was not beyond doubt.
Her boarding the same train as Alan suggests a determination to extract that acknowledgment. Her father’s refusal to name others through a plea bargain may also have helped her continue to believe in his character.
Osamu: Holding On to the Privileged Life He Lost
What Osamu cannot accept is the way the older case was, in his view, forced into a conclusion through a plea bargain. To him, the system looks like a dirty mechanism for giving events a convenient shape, rather than uncovering the real culprits.
His desire goes further. I see his anger as rooted in the loss of the privileged life he expected as the son of a major company’s executive, after his father came under public attack.
He rejects an ordinary, peaceful life under witness protection and instead designs a disaster: blowing up the train and sending it into the terminal. Behind that choice, I see resentment at his fall from privilege and an inflated desire to manipulate the world that took everything from him.
Two Different Ways of Looking at Their Fathers
They share the wound of lives disrupted by the older case, but their attention is directed toward their fathers in fundamentally different ways.
Maiko’s concern is with her father as a person. She fears her alibi is insufficient, yet clings to it and tries to recover his dignity.
Osamu, by contrast, seems concerned with what his father possessed: the privilege he expected to inherit. His pain is less about failing to protect his father than about losing his own future. That anger turns against the outside world that changed his life.
This, I think, explains his fixation on a reenactment in which he can manipulate the world as the crime’s absolute ruler. By becoming its architect, he tries to recreate the power and privilege he lost.
Maiko wants to recover her father’s story. Osamu wants to make up for his lost privilege by controlling the world. They begin with the same wound but look toward different ends.
Was Makoto Ishihara Really the Culprit?
[Premise] The Three Timelines
Before going further, let’s separate the timelines and events.
- Fifteen Years Earlier: The WSG Kidnappings A large-scale series of abductions appears to involve several people. Ishihara is said to have chased victims near the scene, but whether he organized the whole crime remains unclear.
- Eleven Years Earlier: An Arrest and a Plea Bargain One of the culprits is arrested and gives testimony through a plea bargain. That may have fixed Ishihara’s role as the shooter in the investigation’s account.
- The Present: The Film’s Crime Maiko, who wants to believe in her father’s innocence, joins forces with Osamu, whom I read as seeking control to compensate for his lost privilege. Their reenactment serves different ends.
Why Ishihara May Have Been Involved
Now we can turn to the older case. What part might Ishihara really have played?
His presence near the scene and fingerprints on the weapon make it difficult to conclude that he was wholly uninvolved. As a sushi chef in Boston, he may have had natural access to the sponsors, making him a potentially useful person through whom the organizers could approach their targets.
Rather than a central mastermind, he may have been a peripheral collaborator drawn in by the organizers and then unable to get out.
Why His Involvement Does Not Establish That He Was the Shooter
I find it difficult to identify him conclusively as the shooter. Involvement in an abduction and personally shooting someone are separate questions. His desperately chasing a victim suggests to me a subordinate role rather than overall control.
Osamu’s recollection offers a clue. The person arrested eleven years earlier appears to hold a gun, raising the possibility that the person who made the plea bargain was himself central to the shooting. If the negotiations shifted that responsibility onto Ishihara, the pieces would fit.
The Risks of Plea Bargaining in the Older Case
How Reliable Was the Testimony?
The FBI’s identification of Ishihara as a culprit depends heavily on testimony obtained through the later plea bargain. Such agreements can help uncover a crime, but they also risk fixing a convenient account as the truth.
A witness seeking to reduce his own liability has an incentive to place the heaviest responsibility on Ishihara. Once the investigators have identified a culprit, reopening that account would complicate the case. In this reading, the more neatly the system organizes the case, the less clear Ishihara’s actual role becomes.
What Might Ishihara’s Silence Mean?
Given the scale of the serial kidnappings, it seems unlikely that the FBI regarded Ishihara as acting alone. One would expect an attempt to obtain information about other participants in exchange for leniency, although the film does not establish every negotiation.
If such an approach was made, why did he remain silent and name no one?
One possibility is that he was entirely uninvolved. That would be the most reassuring conclusion, but it is not the only one.
He may have been a minor collaborator or an operative unable to escape, without enough knowledge of the organizers to offer useful information. His silence would then be consistent with his not being the mastermind.
Alternatively, he may have strongly rejected the idea of a plea bargain. Although he made his living in America, his values were formed in Japan. If he could understand the arrangement intellectually but not accept saving himself by selling out someone else, his silence would make sense. I think making him Japanese adds an effective tension to the story; it does not establish what all Japanese people would do.
He may also have feared harm to his family from the other perpetrators. Even with witness protection available, accepting a new life involving his family might have been difficult for him.
Those possibilities remain open. For Maiko, however, the first explanation—that he refused because he was innocent—may have become a powerful reason to believe in him.
How the Present Crime May Reflect the Past
An Unequal Partnership Repeated
Abducting three CEOs requires coordinated roles. The current crime suggests that the earlier case may also have been too complex to place entirely on Ishihara’s shoulders.
Osamu finding Maiko online and bringing her into his plan echoes the possibility that Ishihara was drawn into the earlier crime as someone useful to its organizers.
The bomb and the events on the train make me suspect Maiko did not know the full plan. That suggests a parallel: fifteen years earlier, there may also have been someone who was involved without knowing the whole scheme or its murderous intent.
Perhaps the present crime is more than a surface reenactment. It may be a device for suggesting what the hidden structure of the earlier crime could have been.
Why the Apparent Two-Person Crime Matters
The present crime appears to have been carried out by just two people. Following the film, we readily assume that Osamu and Maiko account for everything.
Yet that leaves an uneasy question. Successfully abducting Alan and confining him on the train could leave room for other accomplices or helpers whom we never see. If two people accomplished all of it alone, I find that remarkable in itself.
That unease also suggests why plea bargaining can matter. Without testimony, how much to reveal and how much to conceal remains largely up to the perpetrators. Their silence, or a selective account, leaves the whole crime difficult to see.
Conversely, when cooperation through a plea bargain works, it can make the larger picture clearer. Even if there were only two offenders, either one’s testimony could clarify their roles and motives; other accomplices would make that value greater.
I read the film as suggesting not only the risks of plea bargains, but also how the full structure of a large crime may remain obscure without cooperation. The apparent two-person scheme draws attention to what testimony might reveal behind it.
Conclusion: The Unease of an Uncertain Truth
The Scarlet Bullet does not entirely reject plea bargaining. I see it as exposing the danger of settling on one account of the truth. That is a reading of the film, rather than a claim that real convictions cannot be challenged.
Had Ishihara’s innocence or guilt been completely clear, Maiko and Osamu’s anger might not have become so tangled. What broke them, in this reading, was not just tragedy but the uncertainty that never resolved into a single answer.
Perhaps the deeper subject is less the identity of a culprit than the danger of assuming the system has settled a question simply because it has produced an answer.
My interpretation comes down to four points:
- Maiko’s concern is with her father himself: she clings to an incomplete alibi and tries to recover his story. Osamu’s concern is with his father’s position and the privilege he lost, seeking compensation through a crime he can control.
- Maiko’s belief in her father may be strengthened by his refusal to name others through a plea bargain. For Osamu, that same investigative mechanism represents the process that concealed the truth and changed his life.
- If Osamu withheld the bombing plan from Maiko, their unequal knowledge suggests that Ishihara may likewise have been used without understanding the whole crime.
- The uncertainty surrounding Ishihara illustrates, in this reading, the risk of testimony fixing one account as the truth.
We cannot quite settle who Ishihara was, yet the system has already given the past a shape. The children who could not accept that settled account bring the old incident back. For me, this is one of the most unsettling and effective aspects of Case Closed: The Scarlet Bullet.
How do you see Ishihara? And what do you think Maiko and Osamu really wanted to destroy?
Further Context: Testimony and Plea Agreements in American Courts
The film’s questions have counterparts in real American cases. Plea agreements are widely used, but testimony given in return for benefits, and promises not disclosed to the defense, have long raised questions about the fairness of convictions.
Due Process
In simple terms, due process requires fair procedures when the state seeks to convict or punish someone. Concealing material evidence favorable to the defense or knowingly leaving false testimony uncorrected can violate that requirement.
Two Cases Concerning Witness Benefits
In Napue v. Illinois (1959), a prosecution witness denied receiving a promise of consideration, and the prosecutor failed to correct that false testimony. The Supreme Court found a due process violation and reversed the conviction.
In Giglio v. United States (1972), a promise not to prosecute a key witness in return for testimony was not disclosed. The Supreme Court held that the circumstances required a new trial. The handling of testimony obtained in return for benefits is a real legal issue, rather than merely a fictional device.
A Related Issue in 2025
In Glossip v. Oklahoma (2025), the prosecution failed to correct false testimony by the key witness in a murder case. The Supreme Court reversed and remanded for a new trial under Napue. Its decision concerned false testimony and prosecutorial obligations; it was not a ruling that every plea agreement is improper.
These cases show that the risks surrounding cooperating witnesses and their testimony remain live issues. They also show that a conviction need not make an account of events permanently unchallengeable.
Disclosure Duties
The Department of Justice’s Justice Manual addresses disclosure of evidence favorable to a defendant, including information affecting a witness’s credibility. Benefits provided to witnesses are among the information prosecutors are directed to examine.
Cooperation can help reveal a crime, while inadequate disclosure or false testimony can distort the account accepted at trial. Its value and its risks can coexist, as the film’s uncertainty leads me to consider.
Sources
- United States Department of Justice / Justice Manual / 9-5.000 – Issues Related To Discovery, Trials, And Other Proceedings
- Napue v. Illinois, 360 U.S. 264 (1959)
- Giglio v. United States, 405 U.S. 150 (1972)
- Supreme Court of the United States / Glossip v. Oklahoma, No. 22-7466 (Feb. 25, 2025)
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