Sakae Menda spent 34 years on death row before the authorities admitted his innocence
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, Sakae Menda sometimes forgets the ordeal he suffered and knows he is lucky to be alive.
But most days, there is no blotting out the fact 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 December 30th, 1948, a killer broke into the house of a priest and his wife in Kumamoto Prefecture in Kyushu and used a knife and an axe to murder them and wound their two young daughters.
The killer could have been anyone – but penniless, uneducated farmhand Menda was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was arrested over a separate crime of stealing rice.
The police held Menda for three weeks, without allowing him access to a lawyer, until they extracted a confession. Menda signed a statement written by the police and was convicted of double homicide on Christmas Day 1951. He wouldn’t step outside Fukuoka Prison again until 1983.
For Menda, life shrank to a five sq m unheated solitary cell that was lit day and night, and monitored constantly.
Menda tells of hearing one of his fellow inmates being dragged to the gallows for the first time, from his cell. It was an event, he says, that made him “insane”, and caused him to scream so long that he was awarded chobatsu (punishment) – in this case, two months with his hands cuffed, so he had to eat like an animal.
Every morning after breakfast, between 8 and 8:30am – when the execution squads would come – the terror of this potentially being his last day began afresh.
“The guards would stop at your door, your heart would pound and then they would move on and you could breathe again,” he recalls.
Menda would watch dozens more inmates being carted off to the gallows. “The men would yell out as they left: ‘I will be going first and will be waiting for you.’ ”
Menda’s wife Tamae (who he married after his release) calls it a “miracle” that he remained sane. “He is very short-tempered and stubborn,” she says. “I think he survived because he wasn’t educated, and couldn’t make sense of what he was going through.”
The abyss was never far away, but the closest Menda came to 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.”
In 1983, after 80 judges had been involved in Menda’s struggle, a court acknowledged the police had concealed his alibi showing he was not at the scene of the crime. With that, Menda – by then aged 54 – became the first person to ever escape Japan’s death row (three others, all tortured into confessing, have since been released).
In return for stealing the best years of his life, the government gave Menda 7,000 yen a day for every day he was in prison: 87 million yen in total. He donated half of that 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,” he says.
Menda has become one of the world’s leading death-penalty abolitionists. He went to Paris in 2007 to speak at the World Congress against the penalty.
More than a quarter century of freedom has not dimmed Menda’s hatred for the police, the judiciary or what he calls “Japan’s feudal attitude toward justice and democracy”. He says the system has as yet remained unchanged: the police can still hold a criminal suspect for 23 days without any judicial oversight; confessions still carry enormous weight, with over 99 per cent of criminal charges ending 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 I 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 but gradually lost interest. Japanese democracy is only 60 years old. The concept of human rights is not ingrained in our history,” he says.
“I heard that 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 crueller 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.”