Tuesday, May 22, 2007

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Thursday, May 03, 2007

Japanese personal savings fund development loan program (from GYAKU)

Japanese personal savings fund development loan program

Founded in 1995, with operations in Japan and Britain, People Tree is an ecological fashion company that works with 70 fair trade producer partners in 20 developing countries to help marginalized communities use fair trade to escape from poverty. Affiliated with the Japan-based NGO Global Village founded in 1989 by environmental activist Safia Minney, People Tree sells its Fair Trade products to over 600 Fair Trade shops throughout Japan, Britain and Italy.

Within Japan, People Tree publishes a biannual 106-page catalogue promoting its latest fashion lines, clothing, accessories, and other fair trade products. The first few pages of this catalogue are devoted to reports on issues related to fair trade: topics such as human rights, social justice, the environment, and international development.

The following is a translation by gyaku of a report which appeared in Japanese in the Spring/Summer edition of the People Tree catalogue (publication date: March 1, 2007). The article describes the research of Tanaka Yu, environmental activist and chief director of the NPO bank "Mirai Bank", exposing a web of connections by which money from Japanese private citizens' savings accounts is used by Japan's Official Development Assistance (ODA) Program to finance yen-denominated loans to third-world countries such as Indonesia. The majority of Japanese people, as well as most foreigners living in Japan, know nothing about this "assistance", which is allocated to ODA loans on their behalf under the name of Fiscal Investment and Loan Program (FILP, in Japanese "Zaisei Touyuushi"/財政投融資).

In the article, Tanaka Yu explains that, rather than "assisting" third-world countries, this financial assistance in fact tramples over human rights, finances wars, and destroys the environment. Within Japan, alternative financial institutions have emerged in response to the involvement of mainstream banks in these kinds of "development" programs. Examples of such NPO banks are Mirai Bank in Tokyo (focusing on financing environmental projects), Hokkaido NPO Bank (focusing on development within Hokkaido) and Community Youth Bank Momo in the Tokai Region (focusing on sustainable community development).

For more information, see People Tree's English-language website, and the original Japanese version. There is also a short summary in English at interlocals which has also been translated into Chinese.

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The connections between developmental assistance and Japanese savings accounts

Financial assistance that we believe to be for the benefit of developing nations in fact plunges these countries deep into debt, while destroying the natural environment within Japan. The source of this financial assistance, moreover, is your very own money. How are we to respond to these facts? In today's article, we speak with Tanaka Yu, chief director of the NPO bank "Mirai Bank," about the circumstances surrounding developmental assistance and what we can do, using our own money, to change this situation.

Japan's Official Development Assistance (ODA), increasing suffering in the world's Developing Nations

Financed through Japan's Official Development Assistance (ODA) Program, construction of the gargantuan Asahan Dam on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, was completed in 1984. The Asahan Dam, however, was not constructed with the aim of supplying energy to the citizens of Indonesia, but rather, under the pretext of developmental assistance, was built to enable the import of aluminium from Indonesia to Japan. The price of extracting aluminium ore domestically in Japan, a country scarce in natural resources, had steadily increased due to rising energy production costs. The project originated in efforts to escape these costs by shifting production to cheaper developing nations.

Nominally donated as developmental aid, construction expenses were in fact financed by means of yen-denominated government credits ― in other words, a loan to Indonesia. At the time, this amounted to a loan of 45 billion yen. Of the energy produced by the dam, roughly 99% was directed to aluminium production, with the remaining 1% flowing to urban areas. Even after completion of the dam, villages in the area for a long time remained without access to electrical power. To make space for the dam and the construction of factories, fields belonging to the local inhabitants were razed, forests chopped down, and lives forever changed.

The benefits of the electricity produced by the dam went entirely to the production of aluminium, with all products exported to repay loans. The majority of this aluminium was bought by Japanese corporations at low prices, used to produce things like drink cans, window frames and car wheels. Thanks to this dam constructed in Indonesia, Japanese consumers were able to obtain new products made of aluminium at very cheap prices. This was the scheme.

The market price of aluminium later decreased sharply, and even now Indonesia continues to suffer without end in sight, trapped in deep debt. In January, 2006, Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla argued that Indonesia should not receive any more of Japan's developmental assistance, which overemphasizes loan-based donations from which Indonesia cannot not derive any benefit.

The ODA is the root cause of Japan's garbage problem!?

On the other hand, speaking of problems facing Japan, garbage comes up as a major one. The Japanese people have worked hard to separate and recycle their garbage. Tanaka Yu explains that the original spark which drew him to community activism was his involvement in recycling programs. In order to raise funds for groups such as the Junior Sports-Club Association and the Children's Club (Kodomo-Kai), he participated in clean-up operations which involved collecting empty aluminium cans.

However, whereas in 1989, 1 kilogram of aluminium cans could be sold for 100 yen, by 1995 this figure dropped to only 30 yen. Moreover, in terms of market value, the new aluminium cans arriving from places like Indonesia were consistently cheaper than the low-quality cans made of recycled alumium, which required a significant investment of labour for collection. Due to this cheaper cost, profit-seeking corporations had no reason to buy recycled aluminium. It is for this reason that the recycling movement never progressed in Japan. It would seem that this reasoning applies not only to the production of aluminium, but also to the production of other products such as paper.

As a result of this dam's construction, Indonesia suffers under debt while Japan struggles with a garbage problem. Who has really been helped? Who has benefitted from low-cost aluminium for construction work? In fact, the only ones who have benefitted have been the world's corporations, particularly Japan-based ones, who have gotten their hands on the profits they wanted.

According to Tanaka Yu, caused by the actions of Japan's ODA, developing countries all over the world have been trapped in debt hell. Of total donations granted by Japan's ODA, 55% take the form of yen-denominated loans; in other words, this financial assistance demands repayment. What makes this figure so conspicuous is that nowhere else in the world is there anything like it. At present, the sum total of ODA loans to the 48 countries ranked as the poorest in the world exceeds the sum total of donations to these same countries.

Obstructing solutions to the garbage problem while pluging the world's developed nations into debt hell, can we really call this assistance? Of course, there are many cases of ODA operations that have been beneficial. And yet, why then does the ODA continue these assistance programs ― assistance that causes developing nations to suffer while reaping great profits for corporations?

Why does the Japanese government press for repayment?

One question that arises is: why does the Japanese government not give financial assistance in the form of donations, the way that other countries do? The answer is that the Japanese government is investing your money in these assistance programs. The name of this fund is "Fiscal Investment and Loan Program" (FILP). These funds come from resources such as postal savings accounts, employee pensions, government pension plans, and postal life insurance, that is, the very savings that we all invest in without much attention. This money of ours is then used to fuel mounting problems created by the ODA, bringing suffering to the people of developing countries.

On top of this, aside from bilateral cooperation agreements, the FILP funds are also used to finance the World Bank and IMF (International Monetary Fund), organizations which impose further debt programs on these developing countries. When developing countries find themselves financially strapped, these institutions then implement Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP), forcing governments to re-allocate funds from education, welfare, and health toward debt repayment. They are forced furthermore to produce crops exclusively for export, and are payed only in foreign currency. Local people starve and die while only a few feet away crops rich in produce are harvested for export to developed countries. The topic of Fair Trade occasionally comes up in this context, touching on for example the production of cacao beans from Africa and bananas from the Philippines, to name a few.

Things we can all do right now: NPO Bank and Fair Trade
Today's problems and the picture of the future

Through our savings and without being conscious of it, we are all of us involved with, and investing in, various social problems. Roughly 130,000 people working in the finance departments of banking institutions, via investment in the stock exchange, make decisions that determine where the savings of 130 million of Japanese people will end up going. The thinking of just 0.1% of the total population steers the future course of Japan and of the whole world, while the money invested goes to creating a series of problems that destroy our own future.

Where then should we deposit our money so that we can arrive at the brighter future that we hope for? First of all, directly invest your money in projects or companies that engage in social activities and that you can personally trust. If you don't have any investment know-how, then deposit your money in financial institutions which themselves invest in such kinds of projects.

An example of such a financial institution is "Mirai Bank" organized by Tanaka Yu, with whom we have been speaking today, as well as other NPO Banks of its kind. NPO Banks are banks that are run by and operate in the interest of the general public. In 1994, a group of only 7 supporters put forward 4 million yen and started invested this money in groups and enterprises engaging in community-based actvities. While at first people spoke of the project as a kind of pipe dream, total investment in this bank currently amounts to over 600 million yen. Total investment by this bank, moreover, has reached a scale of 160 million yen, without a single case of bad debt. Recently, NPO Banks of this kind have steadily increased in number, spreading across the whole country.

Next, when thinking about where your money goes, it is important to stop and consider what it is you are buying. Through the action of buying something, we are choosing both the people who make the item and the company that sells it. In these cases, please choose fair trade products, goods that are produced via a process that takes into consideration human rights and environmental issues.

In the current age, money connects the whole world. Words and ideas that transform the world, however, are unfortunately nearly non-existant. If you are worried about war, or about environmental destruction, think carefully when you spend your money. If we demand high profits, then businesses that make money now will get their hands on our money and investment it in ways that will destroy the Earth of tomorrow. Futher, if we demand cheap prices, corporations will trample over the environment and over human rights to suppress costs and produce lower-priced commercial goods.

It has only been a little over ten years since NPO banks and fair trade businesses began operating in Japan. These are still very new systems, and there are many issues that remain to be solved. For example, due to the fact that little consideration has been put into the nonprofit-based financing mechanism of NPO banks, these banks are forced to register themselves in the same way as do consumer banking instutions, according to the "Finance Industry Law". However, when these consumer banking instutions cause social problems, it is the NPO banks who deal with the repercussions.

If nothing changes, new NPO banks will not be able to open, and heavy administrative costs will prevent operations from continuing. This despite the fact that NPO banks do not collect funds illegally, far from it: their interest rates on loans are extremely low, and the groups involved do not even make a profit. For this reason, NPO banks across the country have started thinking about ways to bond together and support each other. The goal is to make it possible for citizens, outside of the context of finance industry laws, to autonomously manage non-profit banks.

Were this goal to be realized, it would become possible for any person in any area to open their own non-profit bank. By having control over their own money, people would be able to choose their own future. In this way, it would become possible to support the management and low-interest financing of businesses which advance fair principles of trade, rather than investing in corporations that maximize profits while trampling over the poor.

It is a different kind of feeling to buy a fair trade product. When buying a product in the usual way, subjects of conversations typically focus on the low price of a product or what its brand name is; in the case of fair trade shopping, however, price and brand name are irrelevant. In their place, thoughts about the person who made the product come to mind. This very different feeling is what we need to bring to all corners of our everyday lives. Once this goal is realized, it will become possible for everyone to experience this novel sensation of richness and wealth. Through this type of operation, starting from our everyday lives, we each become joined to the poor people who live amidst poverty. The hope is that in this process we can create a new kind of relationship, one that is not based on governmental assistance programs. If we can learn to spend our money carefully, we can build a world that does not need money.

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Some things to think about

Our money, trampling over human rights

Thanks to the success of White Band anti-poverty campaigns, many people have taken an interest in the problem of global poverty. However, the number of people who actually understand the root causes of such poverty remains very small. What drives these people into poverty, trampling over their right to live a happy life, is the forceful demand to repay the loan ― much like those of the loan shark ― given to them in the name of assistance. Using financial resources from postal savings accounts, more money has been leant in this way to the poorest countries of the world by Japan than by any other country. If Japan had freed these countries of their debt, they would never have become as poor as they are today. It is still not too late. If Japan stops demanding repayment of these loans, countless lives could be saved.

Our money, financing wars

Money from postal savings accounts and bank accounts of Japanese citizens indirectly covers the military expenses of American war operations. Due to its budget deficit, the U.S. is struggling to squeeze out enough money to cover these military expenses. Government bonds are sold to raise funds. Supporting this fund-raising, at a scale larger than any other country in the world, is the Japanese government, which bears the costs for close to 40% of all bonds issued by the U.S. The source of funds for investment in these bonds, referred to under the title of "Short-term Government Securities," comes from money taken out of the bank accounts and postal savings accounts of ordinary citizens. Our bank deposits are used to finance the delivery of bombs to be dropped on Iraq.

Our money, destroying the environment

In 2006, despite fierce opposition, government policy in Hokkaido led to the sell-off, at a price of next to nothing, of sacred land (Nibutani) belonging to the local native Ainu population to the national government, to be used for a hydro-dam project. The dam's industrial water service, however, did not sell as much as a single drop of water to companies or citizens, but instead hoarded large amounts of money from loans. Following its completion, it didn't take long before the dam was filled with sediment, leading eventually to more money being spent in order to flood more land, the most fertile in the area. The funds to carry out this operation came from our postal savings accounts. What is left of the large debts incurred by our country will also be financed with money from our savings and through the taxes that we pay. The truth is, in fact, that the funds for all such environmentally destructive public projects come from the same source.

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Profile of Tanaka Yu

Beginning with regional recycle programs and community activism against nuclear power generation, Tanaka Yu became increasingly involved in various NGO activities related to environmental, economic, and anti-war themes. Currently chief director of the Mirai Bank business association, Tanaka is also a board member of the Japan International Volunteer Center and of Sokuon-Net, as well as an advisor to ap bank. Tanaka Yu is also a part-time lecturer at Fukui Prefectural University, Rikkyo University and the Wako University Graduate School. He has written many books, most recently "30 Ways to Eliminate World Poverty" (sekai kara mazushisa wo nakusu 30 no houhou/世界から貧しさをなくす30の方法), published by Godo-shuppan.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Gyaku: Earth Day at Yoyogi Park in Tokyo (April 21, 2007), more

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Dead Men Walking: Japan’s Death Penalty

 

Dead Men Walking: Japan's Death Penalty

 

by David McNeill and C. M.  Mason

 

 

Japan's death penalty is cruel, secretive and out of step with much of the developed world say its opponents. As a record 97 men and 5 women await the hangman's noose, one man alive and free who knows its true horrors speaks.

 

After breakfast on Christmas Day, 2006, three Japanese pensioners and a middle-aged former taxi-driver were given an hour to live. The men were told to clean their cells, say their prayers and write a will. Fujinami Yoshio, 75, scribbled a note to his supporters before he was taken to the gallows of the Tokyo Detention Center in a wheelchair. "I cannot walk by myself, I am ill and yet you still kill such a person," he wrote. "I should be the last person executed."

 

Also struggling to walk and partially blind, Akiyama Yoshimitsu, 77, had to be helped by prison guards to the execution chamber. Both men were appealing their convictions for murder. Fujinami attacked his ex-wife's family with a knife in Tochigi Prefecture in 1981, killing two of her brothers and robbing the family. His defense argued that he was addicted to amphetamines and had snapped after his in-laws prevented him from meeting his estranged wife.

 

Akiyama was convicted of murdering a factory boss in Chiba in 1975 and robbing him of 10 million yen. For the rest of his life, he maintained that his brother Taro bore most responsibility for the crime. Fukuoka Michio, 64, also claimed he was innocent of killing three people, including his wife's sister, in Kochi Prefecture over three years from 1978, protesting that the police forced his confession and ignored his alibi.

 

The fourth man, 44-year-old Hidaka Hiroaki, was a serial killer who had lured four women, including a 16-year-old high-school student, into the taxi he drove in Hiroshima before raping, robbing and murdering them, all in 1996. He rejected his lawyer's appeals for a stay of execution, saying he wanted to die.

 

All four were hanged with military precision at three different venues within minutes of each other; blindfolded, handcuffed and bound at the ankles before a 3-cm-thick rope was slipped around their necks and a trapdoor opened beneath their feet. They had a collective age of 260 and had waited in some cases a quarter of a century for the hangman's rope. By the time families, lawyers and supporters were told, their bodies were already growing cold in prison morgues. Relatives—if they had any—had 24 hours to pick up the corpses.

 

According to Amnesty International, 102 people are waiting to be hanged in one of Japan's seven execution chambers, the largest number in over half a century. The hangmen are undeterred by age, senility or handicap: The condemned include 86-year-old Ishida Tomizo, convicted of a 1973/4 rape and double-murder, and 81-year-old Okunishi Masaru, who has protested his innocence of poisoning five women for over four decades. Opponents of the death penalty believe that several death-row inmates are clinically insane, driven there by the burden of solitary confinement and sometimes waiting decades for the prison guards to stop outside their cell door.

 

"There is a clear tendency after the year 2000 for a rise in the number of death sentences, a phenomenon related to the crime situation," says Teranaka Makoto of Amnesty International Japan. "The Police Agency repeatedly emphasize that serious crime is worsening but the statistics don't show this. What is true is that the police have made more new crimes, such as stalking, and that media coverage has enormously expanded, so we have a kind of moral panic, with people talking about crime much more."

 

Despite the recent expansion in the prison population, Japan incarcerates its citizens at a far lower rate than most developed countries: 58 per 100,000 people compared to 142 in Britain and 726 in the United States; and executes fewer people than either the US or China, the world's leading death-penalty state. The Japanese Justice Ministry can also point to low rates of recidivism and—for some the ultimate test—safer streets than most of those countries.

 

But Japan is bucking a worldwide abolitionist trend: 128 countries have scrapped their execution chambers, including the Philippines and Cambodia and a growing number, including South Korea and Taiwan are debating abolition. By contrast, support for the death penalty is increasing here. A 2005 government poll found for the first time over 80 percent of Japanese people "in favor" of executions (in "unavoidable circumstances") a rise of over 23 percent since 1975. Just six percent want the system abolished.

 

Why is Japan swimming against the tide? Activists cite a lack of debate. "There is no discussion about this in the media," says Hosaka Nobuto, Secretary-General of the Parliamentary League for the Abolition of the Death Penalty. "Even in the Diet, the death penalty is something of a taboo because most lawmakers know the abolitionist cause is unpopular. It has become a vicious circle: Politicians don't discuss it and the public doesn't hear the abolitionist case, so the politicians continue to avoid it."

 

Hosaka says the Christian lobby in most other countries, including Europe, Philippines and South Korea, has been a major factor in moving those countries toward abolition, despite often strong public support for executions. "Religious groups in Japan cooperate in the death penalty," he said.

 

Japan's system has proved immune to condemnations from the Council of Europe, Amnesty International, the United Nations Human Rights Commission and the country's own abolitionist lawmakers, such as Social Democrats Oshima Reiko and SDP President Fukushima Mizuho. It has also survived a brief moratorium on executions from 1990 to 1992 (seven people were executed the following year) and the tenure of justice ministers who apparently opposed state killings, such as the devoutly religious Sato Megumu, who held the post during the moratorium, or Sugiura Seiken, who refused to sign execution orders throughout 2006. Eventually, the bureaucracy re-imposes its will, as it did last Christmas. "We absolutely wanted to avoid ending the year with zero executions," an anonymous Justice Ministry official told the Asahi newspaper after Fujinami and his fellow prisoners were hanged. The official said the system would "break down" if the number of death-row inmates exceeded 100. New minister Nagase Jinen has re-asserted government policy.

 

The particular cruelties of death row in Japan have been widely criticized: inmates are deprived of contact with the outside world, a policy designed to "avoid disturbing their peace of mind" say ministry officials; kept in solitary confinement and forced to wait an average of more than seven years, and sometimes decades, in toilet-sized cells while the legal system grinds on. Decisions about who is to be executed and when often seem arbitrary, but when the order eventually comes, implementation is swift. The condemned have literally minutes to get their affairs in order before facing the noose. There is no time to say goodbye to families. Because the orders can come at any time, the inmates, in effect, live each day believing it may be their last.

 

It is the high probability of mistakes, however, that really keeps opponents awake at night. Half a century after the torture and framing of Menda Sakae (see panel) the criminal courts still rely heavily on confessions for proof of guilt. "Nothing has changed since I was arrested," says Menda. Failure to admit a crime is frowned on, notwithstanding the right to silence or even innocence of the charge. The police, therefore, have every incentive to extract a confession and, with up to 23 days to interrogate a suspect, the blunt tools to do so. "It is almost certain that there are more innocent people waiting to be executed in Japan," claims Ishikawa Akira, one of the country's leading abolitionists, and a parliamentary secretary to Fukushima.

 

About half of the people on death row claim they are not guilty of all or part of the charges for which they have been condemned. They include former pro-boxer Hakamada Iwao, a death-row inmate who has protested his innocence of murdering a Shimizu family for four decades. One of the three judges who sentenced Hakamada in 1968 said last month he believes he deserves a retrial. "I thought [the evidence produced at the trial] did not make sense," said Kumamoto Norimichi, who nevertheless went along at the time with the 360-page judgment. Hakamada's application for a retrial has been rejected by the Tokyo High Court and the Supreme Court.

 

Critics of police methods have been heartened by the acquittal last month in Kagoshima District Court of 12 people accused of vote-buying in 2003 prefectural elections. The presiding judge ruled that the 12 "appear to have made confessions in despair while going through marathon investigations" by police who "likely goaded them to confess." The Kagoshima police chief who presided over the investigation, Inaba Katsuji, has since been promoted to a senior position in the Kanto National Police Agency.

 

There seems little real momentum, however, to reform the criminal justice system. Indeed, with growing social cracks opening up in the landscape of "beautiful Japan and lurid crime stories never far from the front pages, some believe the police, courts and judges will fall back on the tried-and-tested methods that sent Menda to prison for 34 years. "The government is using the image of rising crime to introduce their own methods to control the social order," says Teranaka who sees the death penalty as a "symbolic" issue. "I fear that the number of executions will continue to rise."

 

The man who lived to tell the tale

 

When his body isn't groaning under the weight of its 81 years and the sun is shining in the skies over his native Kyushu, Menda Sakae sometimes forgets the ordeal he suffered and knows he is lucky to be alive. But most days there is no blotting out that the Japanese state stole 34 years of his life, or that he thought every one of those 12,410 days would be his last. "Waiting to die is a kind of torture," he says, "worse than death itself."

 

Early on Dec. 30, 1948, a killer broke into the house of a priest and his wife in Kumamoto Prefecture and used a knife and an axe to murder them and wound their two young daughters. In the dirt-poor early postwar years, life was cheap and a black market thrived in most parts of Japan. The killer could have been anyone, but penniless, uneducated farmhand Menda was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was arrested on a separate crime of stealing brown rice.

 

The police detained him for three weeks without access to a lawyer until they extracted a confession. During interrogation, the 23-year-old was starved of food, water and sleep and beaten with bamboo sticks while hung upside down from a ceiling. Menda signed a statement written by the cops and was convicted of double homicide on Christmas Day 1951. He wouldn't step outside Fukuoka Prison until 1983.

 

Life shrank to a 5-square-meter unheated solitary cell, lit day and night and monitored constantly. His parents cut him off. "They came once before sentencing. Even after I filed for a retrial and sent them letters they didn't want to accept my innocence." He says they came again after he appealed to them via a friend. "After that, they came to see me when they disowned me. That was the last of it."

 

From his cell, he heard one of his fellow inmates dragged to the gallows for the first time, an event that he says made him "insane" and caused him to scream so long he was awarded chobatsu: a two-month stint with his hands cuffed so he had to eat like an animal. Every morning after breakfast, between 8 and 8:30 am—when the execution order comes—the terror began afresh. "The guards would stop at your door, your heart would pound and then they would move on and you could breathe again."

 

Menda would watch dozens more inmates carted off to the gallows. "The men would yell out as they left: "I will be going first and will be waiting for you," he once told Australian TV, saying there were "no words" to describe the feelings of those left behind. Menda's wife Tamae calls it a "miracle" that he stayed sane. "He is very short-tempered and stubborn," she says. "I think he survived because he wasn't educated and couldn't make sense out of what he was going through."

 

The abyss was never far away, but the closest Menda came to walking over the edge was when his Buddhist chaplain told him to accept his fate. "I asked him why and he said because Buddhist teaching says, 'As a man sows, so shall he reap.' He told me that it was decided in my previous life that I was to be executed and that unless I accept what was handed to me my parents, siblings, friends and acquaintances would not be saved." Instead, Menda converted to Christianity and began reading the bible and translating books into Braille, a hobby that sustained him through the years of solitary confinement.

 

In 1983, after 80 judges and half a lifetime of struggle a court finally acknowledged the police had concealed his alibi and he became the first person to ever escape Japan's death row (three others, all tortured into confessing have since been released). He was 54. In return for stealing the best years of his life, the government gave him 7,000 yen a day for every day he was in prison: 90 million yen in total, half of which he gave to a group campaigning to abolish the death penalty. "I had to pay lawyers and pay back my debt. I only have a third left."

 

Now married, Menda is one of the world's leading death-penalty abolitionists. He traveled to France this year to Paris to speak at the World Congress against the death penalty. He says he knows the mentality of the condemned man better than most. "I have met so many death-row inmates, and I know that they didn't have any reasoning behind their crimes. They told me that they felt rage and don't remember anything afterward. People kill others because they are not normal. When people kill, they are not themselves. They forget who they are."

 

Over two decades of freedom has not dimmed his hatred for the police, the judiciary or what he calls Japan's feudal attitude toward justice and democracy. He points out that the system that tore his life apart is still unchanged: the police can still hold a criminal suspect for 23 days, confessions still carry enormous weight, over 99 percent of criminal charges end in victory for the prosecution, and the condemned are still kept in solitary confinement with virtually no chance of a reprieve. "The powerful have the upper hand here," he says.

 

"I went to see the police when I was released and asked them how they felt about what they did to me. They told me they were just doing their job." He remains pessimistic that the system will change. "When I was released, people took up the cause (of abolition) but gradually lost interest. Japanese democracy is only 60 years old. The concept of human rights is not engrained in our history."

 

"A judge once said it was natural to sacrifice one or two citizens for the sake of Japan's judicial stability. But I believe there is nothing crueler than a government taking away a life. It is all too human to make a mistake...or just happen to cause problems. In this sense, I am for abolishing the death penalty.

 

The execution chamber

 

The gallows, like much of the rest of Japan's prison system, are shrouded in thick veils of government secrecy. Executions are timed to coincide with Diet recesses to avoid protests from opposition lawmakers, prison guards are forbidden from discussing their work and few ordinary civilians have ever set foot inside an execution chamber. The Justice Ministry never publicly releases the names of the people it kills.

 

Media enquiries are swatted away. The ministry declined to answer most of the questions put to it for this article, including who pushes the execution button, the number of inmates on death row or even how many people are present during a hanging.

 

Three years ago, a small party of ministers fought and won the right to see the gallows, the first time in three decades the Ministry granted access to a political delegation. In 2001 a human rights group from the Council of Europe was refused permission to meet a death-row prisoner, despite a direct request from the prisoner himself. The delegation was told that meeting the inmates "might disturb their peace of mind" and were shown an empty cell.

 

Still, a handful of former insiders have illuminated Japan's ultimate legal sanction and the people who carry it out.

 

According to writer and former executioner Sakamoto Toshio, prison guards are rotated every three years to prevent them building up feelings of empathy with their charges. Like the prisoners, the guards are told on the day of an order when an execution is to be carried out. Discussing the details of their work or whether they have actually put a rope around somebody's neck is "taboo", says Sakamoto, who claims the stress of working on death row sends some to psychiatric hospitals. "Nobody talks about the rights of the men who do this work," he says. "No matter how psychologically strong they are, guards get mentally and physically exhausted serving inmates on death row because it is truly cruel.

 

Former prison-guard-turned lawyer Noguchi Yoshikuni says on the morning of an execution two burly guards strong enough to control a resisting man take the condemned prisoner by each arm and lead him to a concrete room. A Buddhist or Christian altar, the prison warder and a curtain concealing the other half of the room are among the last sights he will see. The curtain is pulled back to reveal a glass encased room and the prisoner is asked if he has any final words.

 

"It is not unusual for the men to say thanks to the guards or apologize for causing them trouble," according to Noguchi. Sakamoto says he has seen men being dragged kicking and screaming to the gallows, calling out for their mothers. Death-penalty opponents believe that inmates have been beaten if they resist, citing the case of Nagayama Norio, who was executed in 1997 and cremated before his lawyer could inspect his body.

 

Inside the room, three guards wait with hands on three buttons. The prisoner is handcuffed, hooded and bound at the feet and a rope is pulled around his neck. The guards push the buttons but do not know which one has been rigged to open the trapdoor beneath the prisoner's feet. Below a doctor, waiting with a prison official, checks the heart of the hanging man. They wait for five minutes to make sure of death and then take the body down, put it in a coffin and ship it to a prison morgue. In most cases, says Sakamoto, the bodies are never picked up. "Most of the time the remains are buried in the prison graveyard or the bodies donated to hospitals for medical research," he told a Japanese magazine recently.

 

Both men have come to different conclusions from their work. Noguchi opposes executions and leads a group of campaigners trying to win more access to prisons. "Killing people won't cut crime," he says. "There is absolutely no data to prove this, and there is always the possibility that innocent people will die." But in his book Shikei wa ikani shikkou sareruka (How the death penalty is conducted), Sakamoto says the death penalty should be kept, as the ultimate deterrent...but never used.

 

The condemned's last steps toward oblivion

 

In his 2003 book titled "Shikei wa ikani shikkou sareruka (How the death penalty is carried out)," former death-row prison guard Toshio Sakamoto includes a section graphically illustrating what no cameras are allowed to record—the last moments in a condemned prisoner's life. Click here for a selection of illustrated pages from Sakamoto's book that gives a chilling taste of capital punishment in action in Japan.

 

 

Sources

 

Sakamoto Toshio, "Shikei wa ikani shikkou sareruka—Moto keimukan ga akasu" (How an execution is conducted: recounted by a former prison guard), Publisher: Nihon Bungei sha.

 

Menda Sakae Gokuchu Nooto—watashi no miokkuta shikeishu-tachi. Publisher: Impakutoo Shuppankai. ( Menda Sakae's prison diary: The friends I lost).

 

 

David McNeill writes regularly for the Chronicle of Higher Education, the London Independent and other publications. He is a Tokyo-based coordinator of Japan Focus. C. M. Mason is a freelance writer based in Tokyo. This article was written for The Japan Times, where it appeared on April 8, 2007. This slightly revised version appeared at Japan Focus on April 8, 2007.

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