Hachiko
後輩
- 17 Jan 2004
- 1,433
- 10
Legal Death penalty in Japan
- Thread starter thomas
- Start date
Hachiko
後輩
- 17 Jan 2004
- 1,433
- 10
On Japan's death row, executions in secret
By Bruce Wallace
March 12, 2006
NAGOYA, Japan -- Like all prisoners on Japan's death row, Masao Akahori knew that his execution would come without warning. The fear made him stiffen at the sound of the guards' approaching footsteps, wondering whether the clack of boots was a countdown to death or would pass by, fading into the silence of another reprieve.
One morning in the early 1970s, the march stopped outside his cell and a key turned the lock.
"We have come to fetch you," the guards told him.
Akahori remembers his legs collapsing under him, that five guards had to drag him from his cell. He remembers the nervous whispering when the guards suddenly realized they had come to hang the wrong man.
It was Yamamoto they wanted. In the next cell.
"They put me back, no apology, and went for Yamamoto," Akahori recalls. He is 75 now, a ghost of the 24-year-old who was living under bridges in 1954 when he says police beat a false confession out of him that he had raped and murdered a schoolgirl. "They closed the small window in my cell so I couldn't see what was going on with Yamamoto.
"But I could hear them," he says, in a voice that still trembles with the telling.
Akahori says he was so traumatized by his near-death experience that, for several years, he could not speak. But he did eventually win a retrial, and in 1989, after 31 years on death row, he was declared not guilty and released from jail.
Yet his story remains notable. Not simply because he survived to tell it, but because it offers a rare peek into the mists of Japan's death row, where prisoners live in conditions designed to induce submission and where executions, all by hanging, are carried out in secret.
The Japanese government says 75 inmates await execution, living under rules set out in a 1908 prison law and tightened by directives in 1963:
They are prohibited from talking to other prisoners. Their contact with the outside world is limited to infrequent, supervised visits from family or their lawyers. They are not allowed hobbies or television, and may own only three books, though more can be borrowed with the warden's permission as long as the content is not deemed to preach "subversion of authority." Exercise is limited to two short sessions a week outside their cells, four solid walls and one small window. Some rely on sleeping pills, bought with money provided by their families, to survive the isolation.
Many prisoners live in this purgatory for more than two decades while appeals against their sentences churn through Japan's notoriously sluggish legal system. But once appeals are exhausted, executions will come without notice, on the whim and with the stamp of the justice minister.
There are no last meals. Hangings are carried out without witnesses, and the inmate's family members aren't informed until the prisoner is dead and they are told to collect the body.
Japan's bar associations and human rights groups have long protested - to a public that shows little inclination to listen - that conditions on death row are an "affront to human decency." But corrections officials argue that the system is designed to ensure prisoners on death row remain calm, do not become suicidal and do not try to escape.
"We want to maintain the mental stability of those waiting for death," says Kenichi Matsumura, a specialist at the Adult Correction Section of the Justice Ministry. "Emotionally, everybody wants them to face their last moments in peace."
Whether that works is an open question. During his years on death row, Akahori often heard those footsteps stop at other cells. Some prisoners went compliantly, he says. Others fought vigorously.
"Of course, some people don't want to die," Akahori says. "They shout. And the guards would try to cover their mouths and tie their hands with towels to take them away."
The gag extends to a clampdown on public information from death row. The executed prisoner's name is never released, becoming known only if the family chooses. There are no Stanley Tookie Williams-style media frenzies in Japan, no debates about the sincerity of a prisoner's remorse or the merits of redemption. You don't see candlelight vigils outside Japanese prisons on the night of scheduled executions because only the authorities know one is coming.
Even Japanese lawmakers have difficulty seeing conditions for themselves. In 2003, nine lawmakers fought for and won the right to visit an execution chamber, though not to witness an execution. It was the first time legislators had been allowed inside since 1973, according to Amnesty International, which says Japan's death row violates the country's signed pledges on human rights protection.
What little the world knows about conditions inside comes from the few prisoners, such as Akahori, who have survived to tell their stories - four prisoners were released from death row in the 1980s when their convictions were overturned - or from the rare writings from prison that get past censors.
"We have to sleep under a bright light," Masashi Daidoji complained in his prison diary, Being Convicted for Execution. "I asked for an eye mask but it was turned down as it covers our face. No wonder not a few people take sleeping pills."
Daidoji is on death row for his role in the bombing of a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries building by left-wing radicals in 1974 that killed eight people and injured 380 others. His diary, passed outside in letters to his family and published by a small Tokyo publishing house owned by his cousin Masakuni Ota, is a compendium of complaints about "smelly rice" eaten next to the toilet, and cells that were freezing cold in winter and suffocatingly hot in summer.
The book was published in 1997. Daidoji is still on death row.
Indeed, the number of executions in Japan is low, and the pace is slow. For one thing, Japan's murder rate is among the lowest in the world. And despite overwhelming popular support for the death penalty in Japan, most justice ministers in recent years have been reluctant to sign death warrants; they often delay.
Only one prisoner was hanged last year and two the year before. The majority of those condemned to die are, in reality, being condemned to years of solitary confinement - awaiting a death that could call at any moment.
"It's hard to wait," says Akahori, who lives in a small apartment in Nagoya on the proceeds from a modest settlement he received for his wrongful conviction. He rarely goes out but lends his voice to campaigns on behalf of two death row prisoners still claiming their innocence. One has been on death row since 1966, the other since 1961.
"I sometimes thought: The sooner, the better. In 1974, I talked to my supporters and said, 'Maybe I should go,'" he says. "I wanted to die, but I'm not strong-willed enough to kill myself. And I had no weapon."
Prison officials defend their treatment of the condemned as necessary security steps. Matsumura says lights are left in the cells 24 hours a day to "allow the guards to watch so they won't run away." Sleep masks are not allowed because they could be used to fashion a cord that prisoners might use to kill themselves.
Daidoji's diary records his being alarmed at the "swollen, expressionless faces" all around him - ill from the mental strain of isolation and lack of exercise - and he vows to exercise to maintain his health. But the guards prevented him from doing push-ups or stretching exercises in his cell.
"Moving your arms around would be OK, but push-ups or something that makes noise is not allowed - it would disturb others," Matsumura says. Prisoners are calmer if they are prevented "from getting unnecessary information or stimulation from the outside world," he says.
So there is no TV. Radio is allowed, but the prisoners have no say over the station. Some prisons allow videos, but that is at the discretion of prison wardens.
Any prisoner unhappy with his treatment can discuss it with a Justice Ministry representative, who must, by law, visit every two years.
Critics say the sedated atmosphere on death row leads to a numbed despair, even among those still trying to prove their innocence. Last fall, Tomoaki Takanezawa, 38, abandoned his appeals against his death sentence despite insisting he is innocent of murdering two men in 2003, contending that the system is so weighted against the prisoner that "the results are obvious."
Takanezawa's lawyer said his client had become emotionally unstable under the strain of living on death row.
Yet there is very little public debate in Japan about the death penalty, let alone death row conditions. Polls show about four in five Japanese support capital punishment, a consensus reinforced by a lingering national trauma from the 1995 sarin nerve gas attacks carried out by the Aum Supreme Truth cult, which killed 12 Tokyo subway commuters and sickened thousands.
Thirteen Aum members are on death row, although only one has exhausted all his appeals. Lawyers for the cult's leader, Shoko Asahara, 50, have refused to appeal his death sentence, claiming their client does not speak other than to groan and is therefore incapable of preparing a defence.
But last week, a court decided that Asahara was feigning dementia and is capable of speech. The Japanese media have cited reports that, in November, Asahara yelled, "Go home, idiots!" at relatives who had come to visit him.
The latest ruling brings Asahara closer to execution, reopening the emotional wounds from that terrorist attack. It also comes as Japan has been shocked by an unusual spate of child killings, leaving many here wondering whether their country is sliding toward Western levels of violence.
All of this undermines the tiny political constituency for abolishing the death penalty or improving prison conditions.
"The bureaucrats don't want people to talk about it; they want to continue going about it in secret," said Ota, the Tokyo book publisher and cousin of Daidoji. "And the general public tends to be indifferent. This society is without much debate, conformist, and cold toward different people.
"Instead of thinking about this issue, they prefer to push it aside, not to see it. We don't have to think about it if we don't see it."
Akahori said the hardest part of his incarceration, next to the fear of dying, was the ban on talking to other prisoners.
The Justice Ministry official Matsumura explains: "They have to be separated. I don't think any prison warden would allow them to gather. The basic idea is we don't want them to communicate to plan to escape together."
baltimoresun.com
-------------------------
Are their law and court systems as messed up as their education system?
By Bruce Wallace
March 12, 2006
NAGOYA, Japan -- Like all prisoners on Japan's death row, Masao Akahori knew that his execution would come without warning. The fear made him stiffen at the sound of the guards' approaching footsteps, wondering whether the clack of boots was a countdown to death or would pass by, fading into the silence of another reprieve.
One morning in the early 1970s, the march stopped outside his cell and a key turned the lock.
"We have come to fetch you," the guards told him.
Akahori remembers his legs collapsing under him, that five guards had to drag him from his cell. He remembers the nervous whispering when the guards suddenly realized they had come to hang the wrong man.
It was Yamamoto they wanted. In the next cell.
"They put me back, no apology, and went for Yamamoto," Akahori recalls. He is 75 now, a ghost of the 24-year-old who was living under bridges in 1954 when he says police beat a false confession out of him that he had raped and murdered a schoolgirl. "They closed the small window in my cell so I couldn't see what was going on with Yamamoto.
"But I could hear them," he says, in a voice that still trembles with the telling.
Akahori says he was so traumatized by his near-death experience that, for several years, he could not speak. But he did eventually win a retrial, and in 1989, after 31 years on death row, he was declared not guilty and released from jail.
Yet his story remains notable. Not simply because he survived to tell it, but because it offers a rare peek into the mists of Japan's death row, where prisoners live in conditions designed to induce submission and where executions, all by hanging, are carried out in secret.
The Japanese government says 75 inmates await execution, living under rules set out in a 1908 prison law and tightened by directives in 1963:
They are prohibited from talking to other prisoners. Their contact with the outside world is limited to infrequent, supervised visits from family or their lawyers. They are not allowed hobbies or television, and may own only three books, though more can be borrowed with the warden's permission as long as the content is not deemed to preach "subversion of authority." Exercise is limited to two short sessions a week outside their cells, four solid walls and one small window. Some rely on sleeping pills, bought with money provided by their families, to survive the isolation.
Many prisoners live in this purgatory for more than two decades while appeals against their sentences churn through Japan's notoriously sluggish legal system. But once appeals are exhausted, executions will come without notice, on the whim and with the stamp of the justice minister.
There are no last meals. Hangings are carried out without witnesses, and the inmate's family members aren't informed until the prisoner is dead and they are told to collect the body.
Japan's bar associations and human rights groups have long protested - to a public that shows little inclination to listen - that conditions on death row are an "affront to human decency." But corrections officials argue that the system is designed to ensure prisoners on death row remain calm, do not become suicidal and do not try to escape.
"We want to maintain the mental stability of those waiting for death," says Kenichi Matsumura, a specialist at the Adult Correction Section of the Justice Ministry. "Emotionally, everybody wants them to face their last moments in peace."
Whether that works is an open question. During his years on death row, Akahori often heard those footsteps stop at other cells. Some prisoners went compliantly, he says. Others fought vigorously.
"Of course, some people don't want to die," Akahori says. "They shout. And the guards would try to cover their mouths and tie their hands with towels to take them away."
The gag extends to a clampdown on public information from death row. The executed prisoner's name is never released, becoming known only if the family chooses. There are no Stanley Tookie Williams-style media frenzies in Japan, no debates about the sincerity of a prisoner's remorse or the merits of redemption. You don't see candlelight vigils outside Japanese prisons on the night of scheduled executions because only the authorities know one is coming.
Even Japanese lawmakers have difficulty seeing conditions for themselves. In 2003, nine lawmakers fought for and won the right to visit an execution chamber, though not to witness an execution. It was the first time legislators had been allowed inside since 1973, according to Amnesty International, which says Japan's death row violates the country's signed pledges on human rights protection.
What little the world knows about conditions inside comes from the few prisoners, such as Akahori, who have survived to tell their stories - four prisoners were released from death row in the 1980s when their convictions were overturned - or from the rare writings from prison that get past censors.
"We have to sleep under a bright light," Masashi Daidoji complained in his prison diary, Being Convicted for Execution. "I asked for an eye mask but it was turned down as it covers our face. No wonder not a few people take sleeping pills."
Daidoji is on death row for his role in the bombing of a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries building by left-wing radicals in 1974 that killed eight people and injured 380 others. His diary, passed outside in letters to his family and published by a small Tokyo publishing house owned by his cousin Masakuni Ota, is a compendium of complaints about "smelly rice" eaten next to the toilet, and cells that were freezing cold in winter and suffocatingly hot in summer.
The book was published in 1997. Daidoji is still on death row.
Indeed, the number of executions in Japan is low, and the pace is slow. For one thing, Japan's murder rate is among the lowest in the world. And despite overwhelming popular support for the death penalty in Japan, most justice ministers in recent years have been reluctant to sign death warrants; they often delay.
Only one prisoner was hanged last year and two the year before. The majority of those condemned to die are, in reality, being condemned to years of solitary confinement - awaiting a death that could call at any moment.
"It's hard to wait," says Akahori, who lives in a small apartment in Nagoya on the proceeds from a modest settlement he received for his wrongful conviction. He rarely goes out but lends his voice to campaigns on behalf of two death row prisoners still claiming their innocence. One has been on death row since 1966, the other since 1961.
"I sometimes thought: The sooner, the better. In 1974, I talked to my supporters and said, 'Maybe I should go,'" he says. "I wanted to die, but I'm not strong-willed enough to kill myself. And I had no weapon."
Prison officials defend their treatment of the condemned as necessary security steps. Matsumura says lights are left in the cells 24 hours a day to "allow the guards to watch so they won't run away." Sleep masks are not allowed because they could be used to fashion a cord that prisoners might use to kill themselves.
Daidoji's diary records his being alarmed at the "swollen, expressionless faces" all around him - ill from the mental strain of isolation and lack of exercise - and he vows to exercise to maintain his health. But the guards prevented him from doing push-ups or stretching exercises in his cell.
"Moving your arms around would be OK, but push-ups or something that makes noise is not allowed - it would disturb others," Matsumura says. Prisoners are calmer if they are prevented "from getting unnecessary information or stimulation from the outside world," he says.
So there is no TV. Radio is allowed, but the prisoners have no say over the station. Some prisons allow videos, but that is at the discretion of prison wardens.
Any prisoner unhappy with his treatment can discuss it with a Justice Ministry representative, who must, by law, visit every two years.
Critics say the sedated atmosphere on death row leads to a numbed despair, even among those still trying to prove their innocence. Last fall, Tomoaki Takanezawa, 38, abandoned his appeals against his death sentence despite insisting he is innocent of murdering two men in 2003, contending that the system is so weighted against the prisoner that "the results are obvious."
Takanezawa's lawyer said his client had become emotionally unstable under the strain of living on death row.
Yet there is very little public debate in Japan about the death penalty, let alone death row conditions. Polls show about four in five Japanese support capital punishment, a consensus reinforced by a lingering national trauma from the 1995 sarin nerve gas attacks carried out by the Aum Supreme Truth cult, which killed 12 Tokyo subway commuters and sickened thousands.
Thirteen Aum members are on death row, although only one has exhausted all his appeals. Lawyers for the cult's leader, Shoko Asahara, 50, have refused to appeal his death sentence, claiming their client does not speak other than to groan and is therefore incapable of preparing a defence.
But last week, a court decided that Asahara was feigning dementia and is capable of speech. The Japanese media have cited reports that, in November, Asahara yelled, "Go home, idiots!" at relatives who had come to visit him.
The latest ruling brings Asahara closer to execution, reopening the emotional wounds from that terrorist attack. It also comes as Japan has been shocked by an unusual spate of child killings, leaving many here wondering whether their country is sliding toward Western levels of violence.
All of this undermines the tiny political constituency for abolishing the death penalty or improving prison conditions.
"The bureaucrats don't want people to talk about it; they want to continue going about it in secret," said Ota, the Tokyo book publisher and cousin of Daidoji. "And the general public tends to be indifferent. This society is without much debate, conformist, and cold toward different people.
"Instead of thinking about this issue, they prefer to push it aside, not to see it. We don't have to think about it if we don't see it."
Akahori said the hardest part of his incarceration, next to the fear of dying, was the ban on talking to other prisoners.
The Justice Ministry official Matsumura explains: "They have to be separated. I don't think any prison warden would allow them to gather. The basic idea is we don't want them to communicate to plan to escape together."
baltimoresun.com
-------------------------
Are their law and court systems as messed up as their education system?
Thanks for the article. I might have read something like this before.
While I think it's good for prisoners to change while in these facilities, to change in this way? No thanks. The point isn't to create more demented individuals. Even if they do become submissive, they won't seem to be even fully functional anymore. Not to mention that this treatment is a little something people call "inhumane."
Another depressing look at how "justice" is carried out in Japan.
While I think it's good for prisoners to change while in these facilities, to change in this way? No thanks. The point isn't to create more demented individuals. Even if they do become submissive, they won't seem to be even fully functional anymore. Not to mention that this treatment is a little something people call "inhumane."
Another depressing look at how "justice" is carried out in Japan.
- 21 May 2003
- 14,310
- 4,404
Bump !
An interesting topic you don't hear too much about.
Uncle Frank
☝
An interesting topic you don't hear too much about.
Uncle Frank
☝
Emoni
先輩
- 20 Sep 2003
- 1,779
- 67
I'll be that social genius.
There is having an opinion, then there is being totally insensative to others who have had family, friends, and people they know murders, raped, and worse. The thought of you going up to a family who has just lost their child to a murderer who might have raped or tortured the kid beyond what you can image is both sick and cruel.
While I'm no fan of the death penalty, I'm old enough to know not to pick one hard side on a topic like this without having gone through a situation like this. I also know enough to be sensative and cautious about being self-rightous about the topic.
Opinions are perfectly ok, but your behavior in expressing them leaves a lot to be desired in the matter of maturity.
As for everything else, good topic and lots of interesting information here. This isn't something you hear about much in Japan, and it is something that does need to be talked about.
- 8 Mar 2005
- 2,139
- 89
Frank has been on a thread-necromancy spree. 
- 21 May 2003
- 14,310
- 4,404
Sorry!!
Desperate for Non-J-Rock posts to read. I've been going back to "the good ol days" of JREF for posts that made people think a bit or learn something they didn't know about Japan.
Uncle Frank
Desperate for Non-J-Rock posts to read. I've been going back to "the good ol days" of JREF for posts that made people think a bit or learn something they didn't know about Japan.
Uncle Frank
OPTIMUS
後輩
- 2 Sep 2006
- 9
- 0
Though this is an old thread, I find this thread very informative. To tell you frankly, I have no idea if this is still being practice here in Japan, i.e., the last minute death call in a manner that is very secretive. I think this is very excruciating, especially for the prisoner itself.
I am very much against death penalty simply because we human doesn't have the right to take away life. This is just very barbaric...eye for an eye....
I am very much against death penalty simply because we human doesn't have the right to take away life. This is just very barbaric...eye for an eye....
taeter_tot
Kouhai
- 15 Dec 2006
- 62
- 0
just curious,is death sentence in japan executed by electric chair or lethal injection like we have in the usa :?
Elizabeth
先輩
- 22 Apr 2003
- 9,839
- 135
I think it's by hanging...
- 15 Mar 2002
- 16,758
- 2,298
That article also claims they go for a clean break. Japanese nonfiction books I've read on the subject (by former guards, prisoners assigned clean-up in the death chamber, and an activist) uniformly assert that this is not the case, death coming by strangulation preceded by quite a period of convulsions. As I indicated, average time of death: 14 minutes.
craftsman
************
- 24 Sep 2006
- 280
- 19
An article on a Korean news site entitled "Japan, South Korea Maintain Death Penalty: U.S. only other democratic nation with capital punishment" had some details about the Christmas executions in Japan.
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?at_code=383737
Christmas Day was chosen to execute the 4 elderly Japanese men because:
And...
It also tells us that in 2006, Japan sentenced 46 people to death, bringing the present death-row population to 96. And that 2006 was the 14th year in a row that at least one Japanese execution had been carried out.
Other threads provide plenty of details about the conditions of death row in Japan.
Another article today explains how the execution debacle of Saddam Hussain has led to a new resolve from Italy.
Italy pushes for worldwide death penalty ban
http://www.channel4.com/news/content/news-storypage.jsp?id=32145414
Would this Italian initiative work? My personal opinion is that the death penalty reflects a morality so removed from humanity that it ceases to be human. But you don't need to think the same to be sick to your stomach by all the hangings over the holiday period.
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?at_code=383737
Christmas Day was chosen to execute the 4 elderly Japanese men because:
And...
It also tells us that in 2006, Japan sentenced 46 people to death, bringing the present death-row population to 96. And that 2006 was the 14th year in a row that at least one Japanese execution had been carried out.
Other threads provide plenty of details about the conditions of death row in Japan.
Another article today explains how the execution debacle of Saddam Hussain has led to a new resolve from Italy.
Italy pushes for worldwide death penalty ban
http://www.channel4.com/news/content/news-storypage.jsp?id=32145414
Would this Italian initiative work? My personal opinion is that the death penalty reflects a morality so removed from humanity that it ceases to be human. But you don't need to think the same to be sick to your stomach by all the hangings over the holiday period.
I think that the death penalty is a little too much of an "Eye for an Eye". They should make people who should be on death row live in a little cell with no amenities except what they pay for. The prisoners can get money by working for state/government approved jobs or by donations from family and friends. If they don't work and no one donates then they will starve to death. I don't think the public should have to pay the bill for people on death row but I also don't think anyone should be able to choose who dies.
