Yoshikuni Noguchi, a former prison officer, has still after fifty years never talked to his family about the day that he witnessed a hanging.
Today Noguchi, 75, is a defence lawyer and an opponent of capital punishment. His recollection is one of few witness accounts of Japan’s secret executions.
He describes the prisoner, a man in his 40s, and how calm he was, even during his last meeting with his wife. Noguchi remembers walking him to the execution chamber at the Tokyo Detention House in 1971 and the robber and murderer shaking hands with the senior wardens.
He remembers the rope swinging violently and the man’s heart still visibly beating when the doctor opened his shirt to check for signs of life. Above all he remembers the tension among the men who carried out the execution and that none of them spoke of it again. “We were ordered to keep silence but I didn’t want to talk about it,” Noguchi said. “It was too sad, too wretched. What we did was to carry out the law but I still felt as if I was killing a fellow human being.”
Japan is the only advanced industrialised democracy apart from the United States to have executions. It is also controversial for the manner in which they are carried out. According to campaigners the process is secretive, cruel and designed to avoid scrutiny.
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In an unprecedented action, two of Japan’s 107 death row inmates are bringing a case against the government over one of the most notorious features of executions: prisoners are generally told of their execution only one or two hours before it is carried out.
A report by Amnesty International gave evidence that the stress of not knowing which day would be their last was driving some inmates insane, but that they were being executed anyway, in violation of international law.
The plaintiffs are demanding that a court in Osaka rule the practice unacceptable and are seeking 11 million yen (£68,000) each in damages for psychological pain. At the first hearing in January their lawyer, Takeshi Kaneko, referred to Japan’s most recent hangings of three prisoners in December. “I cannot help but imagine the men who were told that they would be executed that morning. They were led to the execution chamber as if they were cows or pigs being taken to the slaughterhouse.”
The Ministry of Justice says that “advance notice can disturb the emotional stability” of the inmates but activists suspect other motives. Opinion polls suggest that four out of five people support capital punishment; abolitionists say that the slanted wording of the questions produces a misleading result and that because of the secrecy few think about the moral questions.
Once appeals have been exhausted, inmates can meet only their lawyers and immediate family, who are only informed of their death when they are invited to collect their remains.
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The man Noguchi hanged had a day’s notice. Then, inmates were allowed to keep birds in cages and have visitors. “The law has the right to deprive them of their lives,” Noguchi said. “It should not take away their humanity.”
