Inside what looks like a normal, grey office block, lie the secretive execution rooms where Japan’s most notorious criminals are taken to be hanged.
The country’s use of the death penalty has come into the sportlight again after it carried out its first execution since 2022, of a serial killer who promised to help vulnerable girls and women kill themselves, but then raped and dismembered them, keeping their body parts in cold storage.
‘Twitter killer’ Takahiro Shiraishi, so-called because of the method he used to first contact his victims, is reported to have spent his last moments at Tokyo Detention House in Katsushika City.
From the outside, the building looks unassuming. But deep within its walls lies a chamber with a glass wall where criminals are taken to be hanged – with only an hour or two of notice.
In 2010, media were given a rare opportunity to see one of the country’s few remaining execution rooms, where the country’s worst criminals are put to death.
Inside the nondescript building, which is surrounded by a low wire fence, criminals on death row are taken to a morbidly empty room.
They then stand facing a viewing platform separated by a window, and are made to stand in the middle of a red square. The square marks out a trap door which will give way beneath their feet, sending them plunging down to be hanged.
Medics then confirm their death and wipe the body down in a last sterile act.
Prisoners are often told of their fate only hours before their execution, meaning families and lawyers are often left in the dark until after the execution has taken place.
Before being led to their fate, convicts pass a small gold statue of Kannon, a Buddhist goddess associated with mercy.
Witnesses of the hangings have told of their horror as they watch officers pull the mechanical levers to drop prisoners, blindfolded and hooded to muffle their screams, through the floor into a chamber below.
Despite several years without executions, human rights campaigners feared executions were making a comeback after 21-year-old Yuki Endo, who murdered the parents of a girl after she rejected him, was sentenced to death in January 2024.
Yuki was just 19 when he stabbed the girl’s parents, attacked and injured her sister with a machete and burned the house down, making him the first person in Japan to be given death penalty for a crime committed between the ages of 18 and 19, the MailOnline reported.
The most recent executed prisoner before last week was Tomohiro Kato in 2022, who killed seven people in 2008 by driving a truck into a crowd at the Akihabara shopping district.
Why are Japan’s executions so secretive?
Japan’s death penalty law requires that the executions must follow ‘utmost secrecy’, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.
This extends to the convicts themselves, who typically find out about their execution on the morning it takes place, a local newspaper wrote, citing lawyer Yoshikuni Noguchi who once witnessed an execution.
After the announcement, the convict is moved to a special room and monitored by security officers.
Families are supposed to be told about the execution, but according to the UN and campaigners this isn’t always the case.
Lawyer Noguchi recounted an execution, describing in detail how with one pull of the lever, the body of the inmate was dropped through the hatch.
He had to grab the rope to stop it from shaking.
The experience impacted him deeply, with those around him saying he looked pale.
He later resigned from his role as a prison officer.
One of the most infamous convicts executed at Tokyo Detention House is cult leader Shoko Asahara, 63, real name Chizuo Matsumoto.
After founding the Aum Shinrikyo cult in 1984, he attracted loyal supporters into his bizarre ideology and world of rituals, such as drinking bathwater and wearing electrical caps for synchronised brain waves.
But behind the scenes, the cult was stockpiling weapons, and on March 20, 1995, Asahara and his worshippers released sarin nerve gas into the busy Tokyo subway.
The attack killed 13 people.
Asahara was eventually convicted of having killed 27 people in 13 murders and other assaults and kidnappings during six years of trying to build his twisted, alternative empire.
Following his failed appeals for his release, the mass murderer was hanged on July 6, 2018 with six other cult members.
Amnesty International feared that the appointment of Fumio Kishida as Japan’s Prime Minister in 2021 showed the country’s ‘lack of respect for right to life’.
Critics of capital punishment like Amnesty argue that death penalty is unacceptable, saying it denies human rights and it is irreversible and mistakes can happen.
Amnesty also claimed it does little to deter crime and it is used in countries with problematic human rights record like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
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