TOKYO LETTER:Why did the justice minister, an opponent of the death penalty, sanction two hangings?
MINISTER FOR justice Keiko Chiba stunned many here when she signed off on two executions – then went to see the grim results for herself.
An anti-death penalty activist for 20 years, Chiba was expected to begin a moratorium on the nation’s controversial death penalty.
Instead, she sat ashen-faced through the hangings of Kazuo Shinozawa (59) and Hidenori Ogata (33), after being "persuaded to do her duty" by justice ministry bureaucrats, according to the Yomiurinewspaper.
Discussion has been raging since about her motives. Did the conservative bureaucrats who run the ministry strong-arm her into breaking her principles, or did she decide to go for herself in the interests of sparking a long-postponed debate? At least one of her predecessors – the devoutly religious Seiken Sugiura – refused to sign a single death warrant during his tenure in 2005/6. Why then didn’t Chiba simply do the same? Those questions will deepen today as the Japanese press prepares for a rare look inside the country’s execution chambers. A small group of journalists and cameramen are for the first time to be allowed to inspect the notorious Tokyo Detention Center, where the hangings are carried out.
So secretive are authorities about Japan’s gallows that even elected politicians must surrender recording and photographic equipment when they visit. Former lawmaker Nobuto Hosaka, perhaps the country’s most famous abolitionist, is one of the few to have seen it and then publicise the macabre details.
According to Hosaka, death row inmates are walked from their cells to what looks like a “lounge in an expensive hotel”, complete with curtains and a Buddhist altar.
Below the room is a Spartan concrete basement with nothing except a drain to catch the excretions of a thrashing or dead human body. “Life and death here is separated by a trap door,” Hosaka said last week.
Inmates are deprived of contact with the outside world, kept in solitary confinement and forced to wait an average of more than seven years, sometimes decades, in toilet-sized cells while the legal system grinds on.
When the order eventually comes, the condemned have literally minutes to get their affairs in order before facing the noose. Because the order can come at any time, they live each day believing it may be their last.
Amnesty International recently called the system a “regime of silence, isolation and sheer non-existence”, singling out the same-day execution notice as “utterly cruel”. The hangmen are undeterred by age, senility or handicap: the condemned include 84-year-old Masaru Okunishi, who for more than four decades has protested his innocence of poisoning five women.
Of the more than 30 people who have been hanged since January 2006, five were in their 70s. It is not unheard of for some inmates to be ferried to the gallows in wheelchairs.
Although Japan incarcerates far fewer citizens per capita than the US or many European countries, its astonishing 99 per cent-plus conviction rate means that the condemned almost certainly include innocent people.
Some have quite literally been driven mad while waiting to die. At least five of Japan’s 107 condemned prisoners are mentally ill, says Amnesty, with many more elderly inmates on the brink of senility.
Secrecy and lack of independent scrutiny means that the exact number is unknown. Recent victims include Chinese national Cheng Detong, who was “quasi-insane”, according to his defence.
A few years back I interviewed Sakae Menda, who was framed by the police for a double murder. Unlike most other miscarriages of justice victims, Menda was released – after 34 years on death row.
That’s 12,410 days believing every one would be his last. “Waiting to die is a kind of torture,” he told me, “worse than death itself.” The justice ministry is quick to point out that public support for the death penalty here is 85 per cent. One reason it is so high is that ordinary people have simply never had a chance to debate it.
Another may be that they are increasingly bewildered and angry by a series of violent crimes, often by loners who have dropped off the social grid.
Chiba may have had these issues in mind when she sat through those twin executions last month, then called up the media. The ministry has since tried to control the visit as tightly as possible, and ignored the foreign press. Only time will tell if her strategy – if that’s what it is – has kick-started a genuine abolitionist movement in Japan, or deepened support for state killings of violent criminals.
