Through Masayuki Takayama’s column, this essay exposes how judicial injustice and false convictions were protected by the authority of the University of Tokyo, revealing a deep-rooted distortion within Japan’s postwar legal system.

2016-04-27

Anyone possessing a sound mind will surely understand the correctness of my evaluation of him.

What follows is from the opening column “Ori-fushi no Ki,” serialized in the monthly magazine Seiron, written by Masayuki Takayama, whom I am convinced is the one and only journalist of the postwar world.

Anyone possessing a sound mind will surely understand the correctness of my evaluation of him.

It was the year after Yukio Mishima committed suicide at Ichigaya.

A man named Fukumatsu Takiya, who had just been released from prison, came forward claiming, “I am the one who killed the wife of a Hirosaki University professor.”

This incident had occurred in 1949.

The police arrested Takashi Nasu, who lived near the scene.

He was said to be a descendant of Nasu no Yoichi, famed for hitting the fan target.

The only basis for suspicion was that he was strangely cooperative with the police.

The one who framed Nasu as the culprit was Tanemoto Furuhata of the University of Tokyo’s Department of Forensic Medicine.

He identified stains on Nasu’s clothing as “the victim’s blood,” and on that basis alone Nasu was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

Then, twenty-two years later, the real culprit emerged.

Takiya had broken in to steal, panicked when the wife awoke, stabbed her in the neck, and fled.

Once again, after being released from prison, he was caught shoplifting.

Rather than being sent back to prison, he said that he chose “the path of revealing the crime manfully, like Yukio Mishima.”

Based on his confession and verification, the police confirmed that Takiya was the true culprit.

Nasu rejoiced.
At last, he could clear his name.

That same year, he immediately filed for a retrial.

However, the process stalled there, and for a full three years the Sendai High Court dragged its feet, until Judge Mizuo Yamada delivered the astonishing decision to reject the retrial request.

What an outrage.
Nasu cursed the absurdity.

Undeterred, two years later in 1976, he filed another request for retrial, which this time was accepted without resistance, and he was acquitted.

Legal textbooks explain this strange turn of events by stating that “the Supreme Court ruling in the Shiratori Case the previous year made it easier for retrials to be granted.”

That is a blatant lie.
In the same year, Tanemoto Furuhata died.

Had Judge Yamada approved the first retrial, a man revered as an authority of the University of Tokyo and recipient of the Order of Culture would have been forced to stand trial, condemned for careless forensic analysis that produced a false conviction.

Neither the Supreme Court, nor the prosecutors, nor the University of Tokyo wanted to acknowledge that.

“The retrial was granted because he died” is the correct explanation.

Thereafter, one after another, the wrongful convictions of three death-row inmates—including Yoshishige Taniguchi of the Zaidagawa Case, all condemned on the basis of Furuhata’s forensic analyses—were overturned.

Mizuo Yamada prioritized the authority of the University of Tokyo over the false conviction of an ordinary citizen, twisted the law, and committed injustice.

To be continued.