This chapter introduces Masayuki Takayama’s “Orifushi no Ki” column in Seiron, focusing on the Hirosaki University professor’s wife murder case and the wrongful conviction of Nasu Takashi. Takayama details how a flimsy forensic opinion by Tokyo University expert Furuhata Tanemoto led to Nasu’s 15-year sentence, even though the real culprit, Takiguya Fukumatsu, confessed 22 years later. Judge Yamada Mizuo initially rejected Nasu’s retrial request, seemingly to protect Tokyo University’s prestige and the reputation of a Culture Order recipient, only allowing a retrial after Furuhata’s death. The essay exposes how judicial authorities prioritized institutional authority over an anonymous citizen’s innocence and links this pattern to other notorious wrongful convictions built on “Furuhata forensics.”

This chapter was originally published on April 27, 2016.
Below is from the leading column “Orifushi no Ki” serialized in the monthly magazine Seiron by Masayuki Takayama, whom I am convinced is the one and only journalist in the world in the postwar era.
Anyone with a sound mind will recognize that my evaluation of him is correct.
The year after Yukio Mishima committed suicide at Ichigaya.
Takiguya Fukumatsu, who had just been released from prison, came forward and said, “I am the one who killed the wife of the Hirosaki University professor.”
This case occurred in 1949 (Showa 24).
The police arrested Nasu Takashi, who lived near the crime scene.
He was a descendant of Nasu no Yoichi, the man who shot the fan target.
The basis for suspicion was that he was strangely cooperative with the police.
That was all.
The man who made Nasu into the culprit was Furuhata Tanemoto of the University of Tokyo’s Department of Forensic Medicine.
He identified a stain on Nasu’s clothes as “the victim’s blood,” and that forensic opinion became the decisive factor for sentencing Nasu to 15 years in prison.
Then, 22 years later, the real culprit appeared.
Takiguya had broken into the house to steal and, surprised when the wife awoke, stabbed her in the neck and fled.
After his release from prison this time as well, he was arrested for shoplifting.
He said he chose “the manly path of confessing the crime, just like Yukio Mishima,” rather than being sent back to prison.
Based on his statements and on-site verification, the police confirmed that Takiguya was the real culprit.
Nasu rejoiced.
He could finally clear his name.
That same year, he immediately filed a motion for retrial.
But the situation stopped there, and for a full three years the Sendai High Court stalled, and the conclusion handed down by Judge Yamada Mizuo was the unthinkable dismissal of the retrial request.
What on earth was that.
Nasu cursed the absurdity.
Without giving up, in 1976 (Showa 51), two years later, he filed another retrial request, and this time it was straightforwardly granted.
He was found not guilty.
Legal texts explain this bizarre sequence of events by saying that “the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Shiratori case the previous year opened the door to retrials.”
That is a blatant lie.
That same year, Furuhata Tanemoto died.
If Judge Yamada had granted the first retrial, a man who was a towering authority of the University of Tokyo and a recipient of the Order of Culture would have been forced to stand in court and be denounced for having given a sloppy forensic opinion that produced a wrongful conviction.
That was something the Supreme Court, the prosecutors, and the University of Tokyo alike did not want to admit.
The truth is, “the retrial was granted because he had died.”
After that, the innocence of three death-row inmates, including Taniguchi Yoshishige in the Zaidagawa case, who had been condemned on the basis of Furuhata’s forensic opinions, was cleared one after another.
Yamada Mizuo put the authority of the University of Tokyo above the wrongful conviction of an anonymous citizen, twisted the law, and committed an injustice.
To be continued.