Presumed guilt? Unpacking Japan's 99.9% conviction rate.

It’s been nearly 60 years since Ishikawa Kazuo was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a high school girl in his hometown of Sayama, Japan. He’s maintained his innocence throughout the decades, and soon, he may get a rare chance to prove it.

By the end of this year, Japan’s court is expected to decide whether or not to grant the octogenarian a retrial.

“We have entered the final stretch,” he told a crowd of supporters at a Sayama rally earlier this year, bowing deeply and vowing to clear his name. 

Advocates say his case lays bare deep issues in Japan’s criminal justice system, which boasts a 99.9% conviction rate and relies heavily on confessions. Lack of research makes it difficult to know how many innocent people are found guilty in Japan courts, but one lawyer estimates the country produces as many as 1,500 wrongful convictions annually – more than the United States, according to popular figures. The Tokyo-based Association of Victims of Wrongful Convictions is in contact with at least 25 prisoners who claim to be victims of wrongful conviction, and there are dozens more who’ve been released or acquitted.

Many are seeking justice by calling for legal reform and greater accountability from the state. But experts say the bigger challenge will be changing the culture surrounding crime in Japan – one that prioritizes fast arrests and convictions, demonizes offenders, and places immense trust in police and prosecutors.

“You assume one is guilty even before a trial takes place,” says Harada Masaharu, whose younger brother was murdered in the 1980s. He now leads Ocean, an association advocating for dialogue between crime victims and offenders. This case-closed mentality is “likely to create wrongful convictions,” he says, which rob crime victims of justice, too. 

“Families of victims really want to know why our loved ones had to be killed,” he adds, “but we are left uninformed.”

False confessions

The Samaya case is not the first to shine a spotlight on Japan’s criminal justice shortfalls.

In 2019, the system came under international scrutiny when ousted Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn dramatically escaped the country after a total of 130 days in detention, saying he was fleeing “injustice and political persecution.” 

And in March, Japan’s court ordered a retrial of Hakamada Iwao, considered the world’s longest-serving death row inmate, after nearly half a century of incarceration. 

Next up is Mr. Ishikawa, his supporters say.

His saga began in May 1963, when local teenager Nakata Yoshie went missing from their small city north of Tokyo. Dozens of police officers failed to capture a suspect who showed up to collect her ransom during a sting operation. The incident, which came just a month after police fumbled a similar kidnap-for-ransom case in Tokyo, prompted public outcry.

Under enormous pressure to arrest a culprit, the Saitama Prefectural Police focused their search on the city’s burakumin community, descendants of feudal-era outcasts who still face discrimination. They arrested Mr. Ishikawa, an illiterate construction worker, and after weeks of interrogation without lawyers, Mr. Ishikawa says police manipulated him into a confession by threatening to arrest his brother and promising a short sentence. But after pleading guilty to murder, the 25-year-old was sentenced to hang. 

The high court later commuted the sentence to life in prison, and in 1994, he was released on parole. 

“Mr. Ishikawa was falsely arrested before I was born,” says Aoki Keiko, who spent 20 years behind bars for the alleged murder of her 11-year-old daughter and now leads the Association of Victims of Wrongful Convictions. “He has not been acquitted yet. The system has been so wrong for so long.”

Even today, there are cases of police targeting vulnerable communities, such as non-Japanese and working poor, in an effort to make a swift arrest following a crime. And cases routinely hinge on confessions, says Ms. Aoki, despite research showing that false confessions are not only common, but also relatively easy to induce. 

She recalls how two male police officers showered her with abusive language during a prolonged interrogation back in 1995. The questioning lasted for 33 days, and by the end, Ms. Aoki was worn out. Police said her partner had already confessed. She did the same. 

It was 2016 when she and her former partner were acquitted during a retrial, and she is currently seeking damages from the government.

Miyake Katsuhisa, a journalist and author who has covered wrongful convictions for many years, describes these sorts of interrogations as “psychological torture” meant to “create a result quickly.” Still, he says most Japanese support the police and fail to see the dark side of the 99.9% conviction rate.

Presumption of guilt and partial evidence

One factor that contributes to these attitudes is that major media, which have long been criticized for their collusive relationship with authority figures, rarely investigate cases independently, only reporting the information they get from police and prosecutors. Another is the intense social stigma around criminal activity.

Many experts also point out that the high conviction rate is in large part a result of Japan’s low indictment rate – in other words, prosecutors only move forward with cases they are sure they can win. Japan’s Ministry of Justice alludes to this while explaining that 99.9% figure.

“In order to avoid imposing an undue burden on innocent people for being involved in a trial, prosecutors, in practice, bring indictments only if there is a high probability of obtaining a conviction based on adequate evidence,” the website states.

Yet critics say that judges and defense don’t get to see that evidence. Unlike the United States, Japan does not have a pretrial discovery process that allows defendants access to prosecutorial evidence.

“Police and prosecutors spend taxpayers’ money to collect evidence,” says Kyoto-based lawyer Kamoshida Yumi. “However, prosecutors present only incriminating evidence to a court, while hiding other pieces of evidence that could point away from the accused.”

Because of this implicit trust in prosecutors’ judgment, Ms. Kamoshida says, some judges hand down guilty verdicts without careful consideration of the defense, who are effectively “presumed guilty.” It’s also very difficult to get a retrial – Mr. Ishikawa has been denied twice – and even in the rare case that a person is exonerated, Ms. Aoki says prosecutors and police are not held accountable. 

“They never apologize for their failures, never reflect on them and never look into them,” she says. “They are desperate to save face and save the system.” 

The victims association and the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, along with other experts and advocates, are pressing to reform Japan’s retrial law, which has not been revised in its 74 years of existence. They want to prohibit prosecutors from filing an appeal, which they argue delays trials and adds undue pressure on the accused and their defense, and to ensure all evidence is disclosed before the initial trial.

In the case of Mr. Ishikawa, the disclosure of more than 250 pieces of evidence – revealed slowly over the past 14 years – could be a game-changer. 

Indeed, public pressure has led to a trickle of evidence, including undisclosed interrogation tapes and a new handwriting sample, which supporters say prove Mr. Ishikawa could not have authored the ransom note as police asserted in the 1963 trial.

“The new evidence will certainly demonstrate my innocence,” he says.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct Ishikawa Kazuo’s age at the time of his conviction, and the police department leading the investigation.