TOKYO (AP) — A Japanese police chief on Monday apologized in person to Iwao Hakamada for his decades-long suffering that started from an overbearing investigation and wrongful conviction that had kept him on death row until last month, when he was acquitted in a retrial.
The 88-year-old Hakamada, a former boxer, was acquitted by the Shizuoka District Court, which said police and prosecutors had collaborated to fabricate and plant evidence against him, and forced him to confess with violent, hourslong closed interrogations.
The acquittal was finalized earlier this month when the prosecution waived its right to appeal — though it complained about the ruling — finally ending Hakamada’s nearly 60-year legal battle to prove his innocence.
Shizuoka Prefectural Police chief Takayoshi Tsuda on Monday visited Hakamada at his home and offered an apology in person. As he entered the room where Hakamada, his sister Hideko Hakamada and their supporter waited, Hakamada silently rose from his sofa to greet him.
“We are sorry to have caused you unspeakable mental distress and burden for as long as 58 years from the time of the arrest until the acquittal was finalized,” Tsuda said, as he stood straight in front of Hakamada and bowed deeply. “We are terribly sorry.” Tsuda promised a “meticulous and appropriate investigation.”
Hakamada, who has difficulty carrying out conversation due to his mental condition from the decades of death row confinement, responded: “What it means to have the authority ... Once you have the power, you’re not supposed to grumble.”
Hakamada’s 91-year-old sister, who had stood by her brother through the long process to clear his name and now lives with him, thanked the police chief for visiting them.
“There is no use complaining to him after all these years. He was not involved in the case and he only came here as his duty,” she told reporters afterward. “But I still accepted his visit just because I wanted (my brother) to have a clear break from his past as a death row inmate.”
He was arrested in August, 1966, in the killing of an executive at a miso bean paste company and three of his family members in Hamamatsu, central Japan. He was initially sentenced to death in a 1968 district court ruling but was not executed because of the lengthy appeal and retrial process in Japan.
It took nearly three decades for the Supreme Court to deny his first appeal for a retrial. His second appeal for a retrial, filed by his sister in 2008, was granted in 2014. The court ordered his release from his death row solitary cell but without removing his conviction, pending the retrial process.
Hakamada was the world’s longest-serving death row prisoner and only the fifth death row inmate to be acquitted in a retrial in postwar Japan, where criminal trials take years and retrials are extremely rare.
His case and acquittal have triggered calls for more transparency in the investigation, legal change to lower hurdles for a retrial and debate over death penalty in Japan.
Iwao Hakamada, center, former Japanese death-row inmate acquitted after nearly 50 years on death row, and his sister Hideko, right, receive an apology from Shizuoka Prefectural Police chief Takayoshi Tsuda, not in photo, for his suffering at Hakamada's home in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka prefecture, central Japan, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (Kyodo News via AP)
Shizuoka Prefectural Police chief Takayoshi Tsuda, left, offers an apology to former Japanese death-row inmate Iwao Hakamada, center, and his sister Hideko, right, for his decades-long suffering, at Hakamada's home in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka prefecture, central Japan, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (Kyodo News via AP)
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea’s government said Saturday it will not attend a memorial service near Japan’s Sado Island Gold Mines due to unspecified disagreements with Tokyo over the event, which stirred longstanding tensions over the abuse of Korean forced laborers at the site before the end of World War II.
The decision marked a rare display of friction between the countries since the 2022 inauguration of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol. Yoon has prioritized improving relations with Japan following years of disputes over their bitter history and solidifying three-way security cooperation with Washington to counter North Korean nuclear threats, but has faced accusations at home that he was neglecting the suffering of Korean survivors.
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement it was impossible to settle the disagreements between both governments before the planned event near the mines on Sunday. It didn't specify what the disagreements were.
Japanese officials had no immediate comment.
Some South Koreans had criticized Yoon’s government for throwing its support behind an event without securing a clear Japanese commitment to highlight the plight of Korean laborers.
South Korean sentiment over the event worsened after the Japanese government said this week it would send Akiko Ikuina, a parliamentary vice minister at the country’s Foreign Ministry, to the event. Ikuina had reportedly visited Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine following her election as a lawmaker in 2022. The shrine honors the country’s about 2.5 million war dead, including convicted war criminals. Japan’s neighbors view the shrine as a symbol of the country’s past militarism.
There were also complaints over South Korea agreeing to pay for the travel expenses of Korean victims’ family members who were invited to attend the ceremony.
Ties between Seoul and Tokyo have long been complicated by grievances related to Japan’s brutal rule of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945, when hundreds of thousands of Koreans were mobilized as forced laborers for Japanese companies, or sex slaves at Tokyo’s military-run brothels during World War II. Many forced laborers are already dead and survivors are in their 90s.
Historians say hundreds of Koreans were forced to labor at the Sado mines under abusive and brutal conditions during World War II. Japan’s government has said Sunday’s ceremony will pay tribute to “all workers” who died at the mines, without specifying who they are. Critics saw this as part of a persistent policy of whitewashing Japan’s history of sexual and labor exploitation before and during the war.
The 16th-century mines on the island of Sado, off the western coast of Niigata prefecture, operated for nearly 400 years before closing in 1989 and were once the world’s largest gold producer. The mines were designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site earlier this year after Tokyo and Seoul settled a yearslong dispute. South Korea withdrew its opposition to the listing after Japan agreed to acknowledge Korean suffering more clearly in the site’s exhibition and to include Koreans in a memorial ceremony.
In 2023, Yoon took a major step toward improving ties with Japan that had deteriorated for years over historical grievances and trade disputes, by announcing a plan to compensate Korean forced laborers from the colonial period without requiring contributions from Japanese companies.
Yoon’s plan, which relies on money raised in South Korea, drew an immediate backlash at home from former forced laborers and their supporters, who had demanded direct compensation from the Japanese companies and a fresh apology from the Japanese government.
__ AP writer Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed.
Remains of Japan’s Sado gold mine are seen on Sado Island, northern Japan, on Aug. 19, 2021. (Keiji Uesho/Kyodo News via AP)
