Based on Masayuki Takayama’s column, this article examines the wrongful conviction of Takashi Nasu, exposing how judicial decisions were distorted to protect academic authority, and how justice was delayed until a powerful figure’s death made retrial unavoidable.

April 27, 2016

The following is taken from the opening column “Orisetsu no Ki,” serialized in the monthly magazine Seiron, written by Masayuki Takayama, whom I am convinced is the one and only unparalleled journalist in the postwar world.

Anyone with a sound mind should recognize the correctness of my assessment of him.

[Earlier text omitted]

It was the year following Yukio Mishima’s suicide at Ichigaya.

Fukumatsu Takiya, just released from prison, came forward and declared, “I am the murderer of the Hirosaki University professor’s wife.”

This incident had occurred in 1949.

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

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

The only reason for suspicion was that he cooperated with the police in an unusually forthcoming manner.

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

He identified a stain on Nasu’s clothing as “the victim’s blood,” and on the strength of that assessment, Nasu was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

Then, twenty-two years later, the true 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 he chose “the manly path of revealing the crime, just like Yukio Mishima.”

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

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

That same year, he immediately filed a petition for retrial.

However, matters stalled there. For a full three years, the Sendai High Court dragged its feet, and the conclusion handed down by Judge Mizuo Yamada was an astonishing rejection of the retrial request.

What an outrage. Nasu cursed the absurdity.

Undeterred, two years later, in 1976, he filed for retrial once more. This time, it was readily accepted, and he was acquitted.

Legal textbooks explain this strange development by stating that “the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Shiratori Case the previous year made retrials easier to grant.”

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

Had Judge Yamada approved the initial retrial, the University of Tokyo’s authority, a recipient of the Order of Cultural Merit, would have been summoned to court and condemned for sloppy forensic analysis that produced a wrongful conviction.

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

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

Thereafter, the wrongful convictions of three death-row inmates, including Yoshishige Taniguchi of the Zaidagawa Case, all based on Furuhata’s forensic assessments, were successively overturned.

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

To be continued.