In Japan, they hang them high, but also very quietly

ERIC TALMADGE, The Associated Press
The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
12-19-2004

In Japan, they hang them high, but also very quietly -- Executions are extremely private affair
By ERIC TALMADGE, The Associated Press
Date: 12-19-2004, Sunday
Section: NEWS
Edtion: All Editions.=.Sunday

OSAKA, Japan - Mamoru Takuma's wife had heard executions happened only when Parliament was in recess, and rumor had it the justice minister was planning to resign in the next week or two, another bad sign.

But the voice on the intercom caught her off guard.

It was midmorning. She had been doing some research on the Internet for a lawsuit her husband was working on. It was a complicated matter and she was planning to visit him in prison that afternoon to brief him on what she had learned in the week since they last met.

The prison official was businesslike, even curt.

"Your husband died well," he said.

"As soon as he opened his mouth, I fell to the ground and covered my ears," she said. "I never expected our time together to be so short."

By any measure, Mamoru Takuma was a vicious murderer.

On June 8, 2001, he burst into an elementary school on the outskirts of this western Japan city and began slashing the terrified children around him. Eight died. Takuma had no particular connection to any of his victims. He simply wanted to die, and to take others with him. He saw killing children as the best means to that end - knowing that a crime so heinous would ensure he was hanged.

Japan and the United States are the only advanced industrialized countries that retain the death penalty.

But they are vastly different.

In Japan, with much less violent crime to begin with, death is a rare sentence. There are currently 62 condemned prisoners here, and only two have been executed this year. In the United States, 3,374 prisoners were on death row as of the end of last year and 65 were executed.

What also separates the two is the thick wall of secrecy hiding the Japanese system from public scrutiny.

Death row inmates are carefully isolated from the general prison population. Takuma's widow said her husband was placed alone in a padded, windowless cell shortly after his conviction and remained there until his execution roughly one year later.

To avoid political debate, executions are not carried out when Parliament is in session and are timed to coincide with the departure of the justice minister who issued the execution order. Daizo Nozawa, for example, was replaced in a Cabinet reshuffle 10 days after Takuma was hanged.

When it is time, a guard appears at the inmate's cell, usually early in the morning. A Buddhist priest - or, as Takuma requested, a Christian minister - is called in.

The fact of execution is kept secret from even the prisoner until about an hour beforehand, and there are no last-minute appeals, no final goodbyes. Until 1998, there was no official confirmation an execution had taken place. Officials still refuse to confirm to the media the names of those hanged. The information has to come from the families or lawyers.

By the time executions are carried out, the prisoners usually have little or no connection to the outside world. Often on death row for more than a decade, their crimes are likely to have been forgotten by the public. Most have been divorced by their wives and disowned by their families.

To the rare relative who comes to claim a body, officials have little to say. "All they said was that he was given a last cigarette and some juice to drink," Takuma's widow said. "And that he didn't cause a fuss."

Keywords: JAPAN, CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

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