From all the evidence gathered--there IS no Hitomi Ichinohei.
        Shocked? Disappointed? So was I.

I'm neither.

She'd always made the occasional dumb mistake.  Some people still remember
the 10000 yen Big Macs in Japan.  And there's that screwup about the Japanese
attitude towards abortion.  (I later asked Maiko Covington about this, to be
sure.)  And the time she claimed to have fallen for an April Fool joke
enough to make several international phone calls when there couldn't possibly
have been enough time to do so, and compounded it by saying there's no
April Fools in Japan (then why is there a KOR manga episode based around it,
as well as an April Fools Ranma song?)

And then there was the time she claimed her company was doing $25 million in
research in order to produce a new comic book.  (Search Dejanews for June
1995.) Since the top-selling comic book sells at _best_ under 200000, she must
have been spending over $125 per issue.

And then there are at least four stories with transvestite themes I've seen
from her.  If it's enough that you can notice it even when the subject is
Ranma, it's a _lot_.

Ichinohei, by the way, is a name from a
manga, and can be interpreted as 'one's wall' or 'one's barrier' I suppose.
I could be wrong, but it sure sounds like a handle. 

Hitomi Ichinohei, with the same first _and_ last name, is a character from
Ninja High School (not actually a manga).