The Culture of Capital Punishment in Japan David T
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MIGRATION,PALGRAVE ADVANCES IN CRIMINOLOGY DIASPORASAND CRIMINAL AND JUSTICE CITIZENSHIP IN ASIA The Culture of Capital Punishment in Japan David T. Johnson Palgrave Advances in Criminology and Criminal Justice in Asia Series Editors Bill Hebenton Criminology & Criminal Justice University of Manchester Manchester, UK Susyan Jou School of Criminology National Taipei University Taipei, Taiwan Lennon Y.C. Chang School of Social Sciences Monash University Melbourne, Australia This bold and innovative series provides a much needed intellectual space for global scholars to showcase criminological scholarship in and on Asia. Refecting upon the broad variety of methodological traditions in Asia, the series aims to create a greater multi-directional, cross-national under- standing between Eastern and Western scholars and enhance the feld of comparative criminology. The series welcomes contributions across all aspects of criminology and criminal justice as well as interdisciplinary studies in sociology, law, crime science and psychology, which cover the wider Asia region including China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Macao, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14719 David T. Johnson The Culture of Capital Punishment in Japan David T. Johnson University of Hawaii at Mānoa Honolulu, HI, USA Palgrave Advances in Criminology and Criminal Justice in Asia ISBN 978-3-030-32085-0 ISBN 978-3-030-32086-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32086-7 This title was frst published in Japanese by Iwanami Shinsho, 2019 as “アメリカ人のみた日本 の死刑”. [Amerikajin no Mita Nihon no Shikei] © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020. This book is an open access publication. 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The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations. Cover credit: Alamy ACTG0F This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland PREFACE In July 2018, 13 former members of Aum Shinrikyo were executed in Japan, including Asahara Shoko, the guru of the new religion whose crimes killed at least 29 people and injured 6500 more. Aum’s offenses were as heinous as any the country has seen. There was the premedi- tated slaughter of attorney Sakamoto Tsutsumi, his wife Satoko, and their infant son Tatsuhiko in Yokohama in 1989. There was the sarin gas attack in Matsumoto in 1994, which targeted judges overseeing a lawsuit involving Aum, and which killed eight people and injured more than 500. And there was Japan’s crime of the century: a terrorist attack in which fve coordinated releases of sarin gas in the Tokyo subway on March 20, 1995 killed 12 and injured more than 5500—and which (but for a bit of luck) could have killed many thousands. No one was surprised when those Aum killers were condemned to death. In February 2004, I interviewed 30 of the people gathered on the sidewalks around the Tokyo District Court where Asahara was about to be sentenced to death. Everyone received the same question: “If Asahara is convicted, what sentence do you think is appropriate?” The ensuing conversations lasted six hours, with all but one respondent concluding that this serial killer deserved to die. The exception was an offce lady who said she preferred a life sentence because “death would be too easy for him.” Fourteen years after Asahara was condemned to death, few Japanese objected when he and 12 of his henchman were hanged. Soon after those executions, Murakami Haruki (a well-known Japanese novelist) v vi PREFACE published an essay in a national newspaper which built on his moving accounts of the subway gas attacks that had been published two decades earlier.1 In this essay, Murakami noted that “as a general argument, I adopt a stance of opposition toward the death penalty” but then said “I cannot publicly state, as far as this case is concerned, ‘I am opposed to the death penalty’,” because he had acquired “a painful awareness of the feelings of some bereaved families.”2 By arguing that he opposes capital punishment but not in this case, Murakami is articulating a sensibility—the death penalty is “unavoidable” (yamu o enai)—that is ubiquitous in Japan’s culture of capital punish- ment. Prosecutors use this expression to explain their charge decisions, to justify their demands for a death sentence, and to persuade Ministers of Justice to sign death warrants. Victims and survivors use it to lobby for the ultimate punishment. Reporters and editors use it to forecast capi- tal outcomes and to interpret death sentences. Judges and lay judges use it—often—to explain and justify the death sentences they impose. And Japan’s government uses it to ask citizens whether they support capital punishment (a typical survey question asks “Do you agree that the death penalty is unavoidable in some cases?”). The “unavoidable” expression simultaneously suggests that the death penalty “cannot be helped” and that the speaker is ambivalent about this purportedly “inescapable” out- come. The reservations wrapped in the expression suggest that Japanese capital punishment continues to operate because agents of the state (prosecutors, judges, politicians) and citizen-onlookers represent them- selves, to themselves and others, as cogs in a machine over which they have little control. Sociologically speaking, the view that capital punishment is “unavoidable” is a fction—but it is a fction that performs important functions. Claims that capital punishment “cannot be helped” provide comfort and deniability, both to those who participate in state killing, and to those who support and acquiesce to it. In this way, the linguistic formula refects “bad faith” of the kind lamented by philosophers and 1Murakami’s books Andaguraundo (Kodansha, 1997) and Yakusoku Sareta Basho de (Bungei Shunjusha, 1998) were published in English as Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (Vintage, 2000). 2Murakami Haruki, “AUM Shinrikyo Cases Still Not Closed”, The Mainichi, July 29, 2018, at https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20180729/p2a/00m/0na/004000c. PREFACE vii sociologists, for it “pretends something is necessary that in fact is volun- tary.”3 The frequent use of this fction also illustrates how Japan’s death penalty is kept “smothered under padded words,” which modern socie- ties frequently do in order to discourage debate about the subject.4 Systems of capital punishment ask normal people to perform extraor- dinary, prohibited acts—acts of bureaucratic, premeditated killing.5 To facilitate such acts, and to foster support for this form of state killing, Japan’s culture of capital punishment provides a handy linguistic mech- anism of moral disengagement. By framing capital punishment as “inev- itable and unavoidable” (yamu o enai), this fction disavows personal responsibility while lubricating the machinery of death and legitimating executions. In this era of abolition, when it has become increasingly diff- cult to defend capital punishment, these are noteworthy functions. Many Japanese observers believe the Aum executions are exemplary, because the death penalty was “properly” imposed and “properly” car- ried out for murderous acts of breathtaking wickedness, and because the agony and anger of victims and survivors demanded that the ulti- mate penalty be paid. In these respects, the Aum executions give us a glimpse of the death penalty at its most legitimate. But on closer inspec- tion, these executions—the best-case scenario for Japanese capital pun- ishment—are deeply problematic. To wit: • The Aum executions foreclosed many avenues for learning the truth about how promising young scientists became hardened killers. • The executions leave lasting questions about why Hayashi Ikuo— the Aum executive who hoped to kill hundreds by releasing sarin gas on the Chiyoda subway line—escaped the ultimate punishment (he received a sentence of life imprisonment).