Dubbed the “Twitter Killer”, Takahiro Shiraishi trawled social media for posts by suicidal young women and lured them to his apartment outside Tokyo. Before being caught in 2017, he had murdered nine people, including three teenage girls, who he also raped and mutilated. His Twitter handle loosely translated as “hangman”.
Shiraishi was executed in June, using the “long drop” hanging method that Japan borrowed from the UK in the 19th century. Prison guards placed him over a trapdoor and three of their colleagues simultaneously pressed release buttons, only one of which sent him to his death. The method is designed to disperse responsibility and assuage guilt.
Japan is the only G7 country, apart from the United States, that retains the right to legally execute its own citizens. Shiraishi’s hanging was quickly condemned by the European Union. Japan responds to such criticism by pointing to the death penalty’s popularity with the public: a survey published earlier this year found support at over 83 per cent.
But the system has been thrown into crisis by the final acquittal last year of Iwao Hakamada, often called the world’s longest-serving death-row inmate. The former boxer was convicted of murdering a family of four in 1968 and spent nearly half a century waiting in a small cell to be hanged on fabricated evidence.
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His release, and revelations about his life behind bars, which pushed him into mental illness, triggered a rare media debate about the gallows and the difficulty of reversing a miscarriage of justice. Hakamada is one of only five prisoners released from Japan’s death row since 1945.
Nearly half of the 105 people on death row in Japan are appealing for a retrial, according to Yuji Ogawara of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations (JFBA). “There are surely more cases where innocent people have been executed,” he says. “The only way to avoid such mistakes is to abolish the death penalty.”
Since Hakamada’s acquittal, a panel of politicians, prosecutors and senior police, under the initiative of the JFBA, have recommended setting up an official parliamentary body to “fundamentally re-examine” capital punishment, but the government has yet to agree. There is little expectation that right-wing prime minister Sanae Takaichi will get behind an inquiry.
In the meantime, death penalty abolitionists are gathering in Tokyo this weekend to demand Japan and the rest of East Asia scrap the state’s ultimate sanction. “The trend toward abolition worldwide is irreversible,” says Raphael Chenuil-Hazan, who leads Together Against the Death Penalty, a French lobby group. “Like slavery and torture, the abolition of the death penalty is inevitable.”
Despite competition from the Middle East, particularly Iran and Saudi Arabia, governments in East Asia execute more people than anywhere else in the world. That’s largely thanks to China, the world’s leading executioner, according to Amnesty International. While data on Chinese executions is kept secret, many estimates put the number at several thousand a year.
Just 20 nations use the death penalty on a regular basis, and only a handful of democracies – notably Japan, India and the US.
US president Donald Trump used an executive order to reinstate the federal death penalty on his first day office in January, but long-term public opinion appears to be moving against its use nationwide.
In practice, Japan reserves the gallows for exceptionally heinous crimes (the last execution before Shiraishi was Tomohiro Kato, who killed seven people in a 2008 rampage through a crowded Tokyo shopping district).
But what abolitionist politician Nobuto Hosaka calls the “peculiar cruelties” of the system in Japan have drawn unwelcome attention since the Hakamada case.
Death row inmates in Japanese jails are kept in solitary confinement and forced to wait for years, and sometimes decades, while the legal system grinds on. A prison rule that inmates cannot be told of their execution until the morning it happens means they live every day believing it will be their last.
Once the justice minister signs an execution order, condemned inmates have minutes to get their affairs in order before dying. There is no time to say goodbye to families. Like the prisoners, the guards are told only on the day of an order when an execution is to be carried out and are frequently rotated to prevent them building up feelings of empathy with their charges.
So secretive are the authorities regarding Japan’s gallows that even elected politicians must surrender recording and photographic equipment when they visit detention houses that carry out executions.
Abolitionists point to fresh surveys showing that a record 16.5 per cent of Japanese want the death penalty scrapped since the Hakamada case. Given this background, Ogawara believes the execution of Shiraishi is “symbolic”. “It is meant to show the public the importance of the death penalty in Japan.”
