On Tuesday, Japan’s Justice Department reported that three convicted murderers had been hanged to death. Department head Yoshihisa Furukawa announced that he had ordered the execution of the death sentences “after careful examination”. Later, the deputy cabinet secretary, Seiji Kihara, read out a statement: “The majority of the Japanese public believe that the death penalty is indispensable for extremely vicious crimes.” Terrible crimes continue to exist and he finds it “inappropriate” to abolish the death penalty. The human rights organization Amnesty International replied: “The execution of the three men ignores international human rights standards.”
Death sentences are a bad fit for free rule of law, and the global trend is clear. According to Amnesty International, two-thirds of all countries have either abolished or suspended the death penalty. Even in the USA something is happening: Joe Biden was the first US president to speak out against executions this year. But in Japan, next to the USA, the second G7 state with a license to kill? No rethinking anywhere. This Tuesday clearly showed that.
The executions of the three men were the first since December 2019 and the first under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Seiji Kihara said that the abolition of the death penalty should be carefully considered. But how this review should go from the perspective of the new cabinet, he also said. Pro death penalty, of course. He can refer to the majority opinion. Government surveys regularly show that a large number of people in Japan are in favor of the death penalty. Most recently in November 2019. Only nine percent of those surveyed wanted to abolish it. 80.8 percent thought it was necessary in particularly severe cases.
The high-tech island nation looks almost archaic when it comes to the death penalty. An eye for an eye is a useful legal principle here. According to the 2019 survey, one of the most frequently cited points by proponents is that those who take life have to pay with their lives. And the method of execution has been hanging since 1882. In 1955, Japan’s Supreme Court confirmed: “Compared to other forms of the death penalty (…) such as decapitation, firing squad, electrocution and gas execution, the hanging cannot be considered cruel from a humanitarian point of view.”
Disturbing crimes such as the Aum sect’s 1995 poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway may have reinforced the feeling of many Japanese that death can be a just punishment; Sect leader Shoko Asahara and twelve of his followers were executed in 2018. Deterrence is another argument – but one that weakens with every new act of violence. The stabber, who injured 17 people in the Tokyo subway in October, even told the police that he wanted to kill people precisely because he wanted to be sentenced to death. And international critics do not accept the pressure of the majority as a reason. The British lawyer Saul Lehrfreund, co-founder of the lobby group Death Penalty Projectsaid in the newspaper Asahi Shimbun: “No country has abolished the death penalty because of the results of opinion polls. It always needed political leadership.”
Japan’s rule of law does not look good in the light of its death sentences. Iwao Hakamada sat lonely on death row for 46 years before his dubious conviction for multiple robbery and murder was reopened in 2014. Two prisoners are currently complaining against the practice of not informing the convicts that it is their turn until the day of the execution. But Japan is not giving in. 107 people are still on the nation’s death row after Tuesday’s executions.