Published on August 20, 2019. This article introduces Masayuki Takayama’s Korea and the Media Shamelessly Tell Lies, discussing the Hirosaki University professor’s wife murder case, Furuhata Tanemoto’s forensic opinions, the Saitagawa, Matsuyama, and Shimada cases, the Shimoyama incident, the Asahi Shimbun’s reporting stance, the Ono Etsuo case, and the Hakamada case, while criticizing the deception of media narratives surrounding miscarriages of justice.

August 20, 2019.
Before the lies in his forensic opinions were exposed, Furuhata had received the Order of Culture.
There were many people for whom it would have been inconvenient if someone personally decorated by His Majesty turned out to be a fraudulent forensic examiner.
That is because those people quietly separated the miscarriages of justice from Furuhata.
Among them was the Asahi Shimbun.
The following is from the latest book by Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, published by Tokuma Shoten on June 30, 2019, under the title Korea and the Media Shamelessly Tell Lies.
When the Asahi speaks, even a miscarriage of justice looks like a lie.
The history of miscarriages of justice in Japan began to be written in 1971, Showa 46, when Takiya Fukumatsu turned himself in.
Takiya was the true culprit in the murder of the wife of a Hirosaki University professor that had occurred twenty-two years earlier, but the judicial authorities had made another person the culprit and had him serve a sentence.
It was an inexcusable miscarriage of justice.
The cause was the fraudulent forensic opinion of Furuhata Tanemoto, an incompetent professor at the University of Tokyo’s forensic medicine laboratory.
With Takiya’s appearance, Furuhata’s opinion was re-examined, and as a result, it was found that Furuhata’s opinions in the Saitagawa, Matsuyama, and Shimada cases were also fraudulent, and three death-row inmates, including Taniguchi Shigeyoshi, who had been confined in death-row cells, returned alive.
However, Furuhata’s authority and fame were not shaken.
The reason was that before the lies in his forensic opinions were exposed, Furuhata had received the Order of Culture.
There were many people for whom it would have been inconvenient if someone personally decorated by His Majesty turned out to be a fraudulent forensic examiner.
That is because those people quietly separated the miscarriages of justice from Furuhata.
Among them was the Asahi Shimbun.
The case in which the Asahi was involved was the Shimoyama incident, concerning the president of Japan National Railways.
Furuhata did not know the field knowledge that “being cut apart by a train causes almost no bleeding.”
So he gave the forensic opinion that the absence of blood meant that “someone drained the blood” and “after that, had the corpse run over by a train,” calling it postmortem dismemberment by train.
In other words, he said it was a murder case.
Everyone laughed, but because the Asahi was foolish, it took it seriously.
Yada Kimio of the city desk found bloodstains in a hut near the scene and produced a huge scoop, saying it was “a crime committed by the U.S. military.”
He had piled a fraudulent story on top of a fraudulent forensic opinion.
Therefore, if Furuhata’s opinion were now said to be wrong, the Asahi would lose face.
So, in this case, let us say that Furuhata was right and that the miscarriages of justice were committed by the police or the prosecutors.
Meanwhile, in the world at large, once Furuhata, who had been the cause of miscarriages of justice, disappeared from the world of forensic opinions, miscarriages of justice disappeared.
However, miscarriages of justice make good newspaper material.
So after Furuhata disappeared, the Asahi decided to fabricate them by itself.
The first example was Ono Etsuo, the serial murderer of office ladies in the Tokyo metropolitan area.
The Asahi caused an uproar, saying that this unmistakable homicidal maniac was the victim of a miscarriage of justice, and got him acquitted and released.
After returning to society, Ono killed another woman.
Because of the Asahi’s petty pride, an innocent person was killed.
Even so, the Asahi does not learn.
Every time there is a case, it cries miscarriage of justice.
This time, it insists that the Hakamada case, in which four members of a family were brutally murdered, was a miscarriage of justice, and when the High Court rejected a retrial in 2018, it grumbled in an editorial.
If another newspaper said it, that might be one thing, but the more the Asahi says it, the more everything begins to look suspiciously like a lie.
Hakamada Iwao himself also seems to find it extremely bothersome.