Jailed American executive resigns from Toyota

The American public relations chief of Toyota Motor resigned on Wednesday, the automaker said, offering her notice from a Japanese jail following her arrest nearly two weeks ago on suspicion of illegally bringing a restricted painkiller into the country.

Toyota "has accepted her resignation after considering the concerns and inconvenience that recent events have caused our stakeholders," the company said in a statement.

The arrest of the executive, Julie Hamp, has been an embarrassment for the automaker, which had only recently promoted her as part of an effort to introduce more diversity into its executive suite. She was the highest-ranking woman at the company and one of the most senior executives who was not Japanese.

Hamp has been in custody since June 18 and has not been formally charged. The police say they found oxycodone, a powerful and potentially addictive painkiller, in a parcel she received from the United States. The tightly controlled prescription drug can be imported only with special permission, which the police say Hamp had not obtained. It is illegal to ship it by mail.

Toyota had initially defended Hamp, 55, who was still in the process of moving to Japan after her promotion, which was announced in March. She had previously headed the company's public relations operations in North America.

At a news conference the day after her arrest, Toyota's president, Akio Toyoda, called her a "trusted and essential" aide and said he believed she had not intentionally broken the law.

The company did not say what had changed on Wednesday, and offered no details about Ms. Hamp's case, citing the continuing police investigation.

Whether Ms. Hamp will be indicted is up to prosecutors, who under Japanese law can keep suspects in jail and under interrogation for several weeks before making that decision.

Information about the case has come mostly from background briefings given by the police to Japanese media outlets. According to news reports based on those briefings, Ms. Hamp has told the police she obtained oxycodone pills to relieve knee pain, and was not aware she was breaking the law by importing them to Japan.

According to the reports, the police say Ms. Hamp had her father send 57 tablets containing oxycodone to a Tokyo hotel where she was staying while she looked for a home in Japan. She did not declare the tablets on the customs label, the reports said, only some plastic children's necklaces that were also in the parcel.

Both Japan the United States place stringent restrictions on oxycodone, a narcotic that is a synthetic cousin of morphine. In the United States, oxycodone is both widely prescribed, in the form of drugs like Percocet, and widely abused. But in Japan it is far rarer: Doctors reserve it for extreme cases like pain from advanced cancer, and per capita consumption here is just one-sixtieth the American level, according to comparative statistics collected by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.

©The New York Times News Service 2015