JAPAN: Bruce Wallace reports on the purgatory that is Japan's death row where prisoners endure inhumane conditions that were set out in a 1908 law
Like all prisoners on Japan's death row, Masao Akahori knew that his execution would come without warning. The fear made him stiffen at the sound of the guards' approaching footsteps, wondering if the clack of boots was a countdown to death or would pass by, fading into the silence of another reprieve.
One morning in the early 1970s, the march stopped outside Akahori's cell and a key turned the lock.
"We have come to fetch you," the guards told him.
Akahori remembers his legs collapsing under him, that five guards had to drag him from his cell. He remembers the nervous whispering when the guards suddenly realised they had come to hang the wrong man.
It was Yamamoto they wanted. In the next cell.
"They put me back, no apology, and went for Yamamoto," Akahori recalls. He is 75 now, with watery eyes, a ghost of the 24-year-old who was living under bridges in 1954 when he says police beat a false confession out of him that he had raped and murdered a schoolgirl. "They closed the small window in my cell so I couldn't see what was going on with Yamamoto."
Akahori says he was so traumatised by his near-death experience that, for several years, he could not speak. But he did win a retrial, and in 1989, after 31 years on death row, he was declared not guilty and released from jail.
Yet his story is precious. Not simply because he survived to tell it, but because it offers a rare peek into the mists of Japan's death row, where prisoners live in conditions designed to induce submission and where executions, all by hanging, are carried out in secret.
The Japanese government says 75 inmates await execution, living under rules set out in a 1908 prison law:
They may not talk to other prisoners. Contact with the outside world is limited to infrequent, supervised visits from family or lawyers. They may not have hobbies or television, may own only three books, although more can be borrowed with the warden's permission as long as the content is not deemed to preach "subversion of authority". Exercise is limited to two short sessions a week outside their cells. Some rely on sleeping pills to survive the isolation.
Many prisoners live in this purgatory for more than two decades while appeals churn through Japan's notoriously sluggish legal system. But once exhausted, executions will come without notice, on the whim and with the stamp of the justice minister.
Hangings are carried out without witnesses, and the inmate's family isn't informed until the prisoner is dead and they are told to collect the body.
Japan's bar associations and human rights groups have long protested to a public that shows little interest that conditions on death row are an "affront to human decency". But officials argue that the system is designed to ensure prisoners on death row remain calm, do not become suicidal and do not try to escape.
"We want to maintain the mental stability of those waiting for death," says Kenichi Matsumura, a specialist at the adult correction section of the justice ministry. "Emotionally, everybody wants them to face their last moments in peace."
Whether that works is questionable. During his years on death row, Akahori often heard those footsteps stop at other cells. Some prisoners went compliantly, he says. Others fought vigorously.
"Of course, some people don't want to die," Akahori says. "They shout. And the guards would try to cover their mouths and tie their hands with towels to take them away."
The gag extends to a clampdown on public information from death row. The executed prisoner's name is never released, becoming known only if the family chooses. There are no media frenzies in Japan, no debates about the sincerity of a prisoner's remorse or the merits of redemption.
Even Japanese lawmakers have difficulty witnessing conditions for themselves. In 2003, nine lawmakers fought for and won the right to visit an execution chamber, although not witness an execution. It was the first time legislators had been allowed inside since 1973, according to Amnesty International, which says Japan's death row violates the country's signed pledges on human rights protection.
What little the world knows about conditions inside comes from the few prisoners, such as Akahori, who have survived to tell their stories - four prisoners were released from death row in the 1980s when their convictions were overturned - or from the rare writings from prison that get past censors.
"We have to sleep under a bright light," Masashi Daidoji complained in his prison diary, Being Convicted for Execution. "I asked for an eye mask but it was turned down as it covers our face. No wonder not a few people take sleeping pills."
Daidoji is on death row for his role in the bombing of a Mitsubishi heavy industries building by left-wing radicals in 1974 that killed eight people and wounded 380. His diary, passed outside in letters to his family and published by a small Tokyo publishing house owned by his cousin Masakuni Ota, is a compendium of complaints about "smelly rice" eaten next to the toilet, and cells that were freezing in winter and suffocatingly hot in summer.
The book was published in 1997. He is still on death row. The number of executions is low, and the pace slow. For one thing, Japan's murder rate is among the lowest in the world. And despite overwhelming popular support for the death penalty, in recent years ministers have been reluctant to sign death warrants.
Only one prisoner was hanged last year, and two the year before. The majority of those condemned to die are being condemned, in practice, to years of solitary confinement - poised on the brink for a death that could call at any moment.
"It's hard to wait," says Akahori, who lives in a small apartment in Nagoya on the proceeds from a modest settlement he received for his wrongful conviction. He rarely goes out, but lends his voice to campaigns on behalf of two death row prisoners still claiming their innocence. One has been on death row since 1966, the other since 1961.
Prison officials defend their treatment as necessary security. Matsumura says lights are left on in the cells 24 hours a day to "allow the guards to watch so they won't run away". Radio is allowed, but the prisoners have no say over the station. Some prisons allow videos.
Any prisoner unhappy with his treatment may take it up with a justice ministry representative who must, by law, visit every two years.
Critics say the sedated atmosphere on death row leads to a numbed despair, even among prisoners still trying to prove their innocence. Last autumn, Tomoaki Takanezawa (38) abandoned his appeals against his death sentence despite insisting he is innocent of murdering two men in 2003.Takanezawa's lawyer said his client had become emotionally unstable under the strain of living on death row.
Polls show about four in five Japanese support capital punishment, a consensus reinforced by a lingering national trauma from the 1995 sarin nerve gas attacks carried out by the Aum Supreme Truth cult, which killed 12 Tokyo subway commuters and sickened thousands.
In the autumn, Justice Minister Seiken Sugiura announced just hours after taking office that he would not sign any more execution warrants because of his opposition to capital punishment. By the next day, a rebellious justice ministry bureaucracy had forced him to "correct" himself. He promised to carry out his duties with "careful consideration".