Death penalty under renewed scrutiny in Japan

Japan Times

13-04-2025

Capital punishment in Japan is under scrutiny again after the world's longest-serving death row prisoner, Iwao Hakamata, was awarded $1.4 million in compensation last month following his acquittal last year in a retrial.
Stakes for wrongful convictions are high in Japan, where the death penalty has broad public support despite international criticism over how it is carried out.
Here are some things to know:
Widespread support
Japan and the United States are the only two members of the Group of Seven industrialized economies to retain the death penalty.
There is overwhelming public support for the practice, and a 2024 Japanese government survey of 1,800 respondents showed 83% saw the death penalty as "unavoidable."
Of them, 62% said the families of murder victims "would never feel vindicated" if the death penalty was scrapped.
But the same survey — conducted around a month after Hakamata's acquittal — also found those in favor of abolition rose from 9% five years ago to 17%.
Around 70% of those opposed cited the "irrevocable" consequences of executing someone wrongfully convicted.
Dozens on death row
As of December 2023, some 107 prisoners were waiting for their death sentences to be carried out, the Justice Ministry said. It is always done by hanging.
The law stipulates that executions must be carried out within six months of a final verdict after appeals are exhausted.
In reality, however, most inmates are left on tenterhooks in solitary confinement for years — and sometimes decades — with severe consequences for their mental health.
An execution chamber, with its trapdoor marked by a red square, at the Tokyo Detention Center, in an undated photo released by the Justice Ministry in August 2010. |
Justice Ministry / via Reuters
'Cruel' method
Hanging has been Japan's sole execution method for around a century and a half.
Convicts are led to the gallows blindfolded, with their feet and hands cuffed.
A trapdoor opens below them when several prison officers each press a button simultaneously in an adjacent room. None is told which button triggers the deadly mechanism.
Three death-row prisoners sought an injunction against the method in 2022, calling it cruel.
Critics have argued that hanging is prone to botched executions and makes for an agonizing death, although the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the method isn't cruel.
According to the court, capital punishment can only be considered cruel if done by "burning, crucifixion, decapitation or boiling."
Recent executions
More than two years have passed since Japan's last execution — reportedly the longest hiatus since 2007, when the Justice Ministry began disclosing names of those hanged.
The last hanging, in July 2022, was of Tomohiro Kato, who killed seven people in 2008 when he rammed a truck into pedestrians in Tokyo's Akihabara district and then went on a stabbing spree.
The high-profile executions of Aum Shinrikyo guru Shoko Asahara and 12 former members of the doomsday cult took place in 2018.
Aum Shinrikyo orchestrated the 1995 sarin gas attacks on Tokyo's subway system, killing 14 people and injuring thousands more.
The death penalty of Shinji Aoba, 46, whose 2019 arson attack killed 36 people at an anime studio, was finalized in January when he withdrew his appeal.
'No warning'
There is widespread criticism of the system and the government's lack of transparency over the practice.
Inmates are often informed of their impending death at the last minute, typically in the early morning before it happens. Some "may be given no warning at all," rights group Amnesty International once said in a report.
The psychological pain of not knowing when they will be put to death prompted two prisoners to file a lawsuit against the late-notice system in 2021.
No family members are allowed to witness the inmates' last moments.
Still, so little information is disclosed about the system that "the public is deprived of the fundamental basis on which to form their opinions," a group of lawmakers, legal experts and crime victims said in a report in November.
One possibility, the group said, is to retain the system itself but suspend its implementation pending a further review.
"This is exactly what South Korea decided to do, and to date, the country isn't grappling with the rise in heinous crimes," it said.