2023-11-09
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s regular column, which rounds off the issue of Shukan Shincho released today.
This essay, too, demonstrates that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
Essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.
The False-Accusation Newspaper
Not long after the earlier Tokyo Olympics, four members of a family were murdered at a miso company in Shizuoka City.
The retrial of Iwao Hakamada, who was deemed the perpetrator and spent many years in a death-row cell, has begun, but I was astonished by the absurdity of Asahi Shimbun’s coverage.
On the day of the retrial, the morning edition carried the banner headline “God, I Am Not the Culprit” as its lead story on page one.
The evening edition also led its front page with the retrial proceedings, which was fair enough, but then came the following morning’s edition.
This, too, made Hakamada its front-page lead and, in addition, devoted the entire second page to him.
The three consecutive front-page leads consisted of articles bearing the bylines of Yuri Murakami and seven other reporters.
Quite a sizable dedicated team had been assigned.
The retrial will proceed through several hearings until next spring before reaching a verdict, but this layout already says that wrongful conviction and acquittal are established facts.
Is it really acceptable to get so far ahead of oneself?
As former Deputy Prosecutor-General Tetsuo Ito said in comments published in the same newspaper, “The opening of a retrial does not equal acquittal.”
Moreover, the Hakamada case falls outside the “Tanemoto Furuhata expert opinion” pattern of wrongful convictions in Japan.
Furuhata was not a bad person.
He was a leading authority on hematology who proved that, in addition to types A and B, there was an O-type factor.
His was a great mind worthy of a Nobel Prize, but the numerous expert opinions he gave as an authority on forensic medicine at the University of Tokyo all proved wrong, producing a mountain of wrongful convictions.
If the Hakamada case, too, had involved a Furuhata expert opinion, it would be reasonable to regard it as a confirmed wrongful conviction, but at the time of the incident he had stepped back from frontline work and was director of the National Research Institute of Police Science.
He was not involved at all.
Furthermore, the first flaw in Furuhata’s expert opinions came to light in 1971, while Hakamada’s appeal was pending.
In the case of the murder of a Hirosaki University professor’s wife, the real perpetrator came forward after someone else had been imprisoned on the basis of Furuhata’s expert opinion.
It was an inexcusable error in expert assessment.
This prompted scrutiny of Furuhata’s expert opinions, and three men sentenced to death in the Saitagawa, Matsuyama, and Shimada cases were acquitted at retrial one after another.
That was the period in question.
In other words, both prosecutors and judges were handling the Hakamada case while considering the lessons of other cases.
It was a time when they could scarcely afford to be careless.
There is another point.
There is also a historical jinx: whenever Asahi assembles a dedicated team and makes a great fuss over a case, it gets it wrong.
The first case involving a Furuhata expert opinion was the suicide of Japanese National Railways President Sadanori Shimoyama, who jumped in front of a train.
Furuhata lacked knowledge of actual scenes and did not know that bodies severed by trains bleed little.
His expert opinion was that “someone drained Shimoyama’s blood and killed him,” and that the body was run over after death.
Everyone laughed, but Asahi believed Furuhata, assigned reporter Kimio Yada and others to the case full-time, and concluded from its own reporting that the crime involved the U.S. military’s Counter Intelligence Corps.
I hear that the U.S. military was extremely angry, calling it “an international false accusation.”
In the 1970s, a series of crimes occurred in the Tokyo metropolitan area in which ten female office workers were raped and murdered, followed by arson.
When the Chiba Prefectural Police finally arrested Etsuo Ono, Asahi teamed up with Kyodo News, established a dedicated team, and made a great fuss, claiming, “This is a wrongful accusation based on a coerced confession.”
Judges, as the recent LGBT court case also shows, are surprisingly susceptible to worldly influences.
In Ono’s trial, too, appellate judge Shinichi Tateyama assumed that Asahi was a respectable newspaper and, in line with its claims, declared that “the confession cannot be trusted” and acquitted him.
Asahi celebrated Ono’s return to the outside world, bestowing upon him the title “hero of a wrongful conviction.”
But Ono soon raped an eleventh victim, a little girl, and killed a twelfth, a woman, cutting off her head and burning her torso.
Ono was neither wrongly accused nor a hero.
Indeed, when Asahi assigned a dedicated team and mounted a campaign, hardly anything good ever came of it.
The comfort women lie continued for thirty years, until Abe pointed out during the 2012 party leaders’ debate that it was a fabrication by Asahi.
Next comes the “North Korea Is a Paradise on Earth” campaign, which a dedicated team including Hiroshi Iwadare pursued for twenty years, sending more than ninety thousand people back to a hell worse than death.
An appellate ruling was issued the other day in a lawsuit against North Korea brought by Japanese wives who had escaped and returned, indicating that the “false propaganda” in which Asahi had participated could also be subject to the lawsuit.
May the irresponsible Asahi finally be brought to account this time.
For these reasons, those involved in the Iwao Hakamada case may also be in for a terrible surprise if they rejoice that “Asahi is on our side.”
If they believe he was wrongly convicted, they would do well to tell Asahi, “Do not write about it.”