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Waiting for the final knockout
On Thursday, October 10, perhaps the most famous criminal case in Japan in the last 100 years came to an end. Japanese prosecutors say they will not appeal the court's decision to acquit Iwao Hakamada, who spent more than half a century on death row for a crime he did not commit. Kommersant has studied the story of Hakamada's life and the fight for freedom.
“I will prove to you that your father never killed anyone. The police know this better than anyone, and the judge sympathizes with me. I will break these chains and return to you.” This is the letter that Iwao Hakamada sent to his son in 1983, when he spent 15 years in solitary confinement on death row. But the son, like his older sister and Kakamada’s parents, never doubted his innocence. But it took him more than 56 years to convince the judges of this fact. And for 45 of those years, he remained in the same cell, knowing that the next day could be his last.
At approximately 2 a.m. on June 30, 1966, the Shimizu City Fire Department received a call that a house near the Kogane Miso Manufacturing and Sales Company had caught fire. Four firefighters put out the fire within 30 minutes. When the police arrived at the scene, they found the bodies of four people: factory manager Fujio Hashimoto (41), his wife Chieko (39), his daughter Fujiko (17), and their 14-year-old son Masaichiro. They were all dead. There were about 40 stab wounds on their bodies. The fire was intended to cover up the evidence.
The police soon revealed that the main motive for the murder was theft. 80,000 yen was missing from the house. The fact that 3.7 million yen in cash, bank books, stock certificates and expensive jewelry were left untouched did not bother her.
A wood carving knife with a 13cm blade, believed to be the murder weapon, was also found in the house. Police have launched a manhunt for a robber, murderer and arsonist all rolled into one.
With so many suspects, 30-year-old Iwao Hakamada soon emerged as the main and only culprit in the eyes of the police. He knew the owner of the house well and visited him, although they belonged to different social classes. Hashimoto was rich, popular with women, and lived in a large house opposite his miso factory.
Hakamada had a sporting background. In his youth, he trained as a boxer, was never knocked out, and even reached sixth place in the national rankings in his weight class. However, he became disillusioned with the sport and left the ring, working in a bar, then selling water, and eventually joining the Hashimoto factory.
On the night of the murder, Kakamada was at the scene of the tragedy. He lived in the factory dormitory and rushed to help the firefighters. This led to him being charged with serious crimes.
Kakamada could not provide a credible alibi for the murder of his family. There were wounds on the middle finger of his left hand and on his right shoulder. And finally, he was a former boxer.
On the morning of August 18, 1966, Kakamada's name appeared in a newspaper and he was identified as a suspect, which was unusual in the media at the time. Newspaper reporters did not usually mention a person's name, especially as a suspect, until that person was arrested. And Hakamada was not arrested until the evening of the same day.
When police searched Khakamada's dormitory room, they confiscated his home clothes and found small blood stains on them. Analysis showed that the blood types in the samples matched those of the murdered father and son. This became the prosecution's main argument in the trial, which began in 1968.
Khakamada himself initially denied all the accusations against him. But the investigators were persistent. They interrogated the suspects for 14 hours a day, 19 days in a row, without breaks or visits to the toilet. In total, the interrogation lasted 264 hours, including 37 minutes of communication with a lawyer. Kakamada confessed.
However, at the trial he retracted his testimony. And in a letter to his sister he explained: "I could do nothing but curl up on the floor and hold my bowels... One of the investigators put my thumb on the inkwell, looked at the written confession and then ordered: Please write your name here!"
But the court did not believe him and trusted the investigation. In the end, it had information about stains on the defendant's clothes in his room that matched the blood types of the two victims. According to the prosecutor's office, the bloody clothes were found in one of the factory tanks that Kakamada abandoned when he fled the crime scene. Even though the clothes were found 14 months after the crime, the court was not particularly concerned. His blood type was the same as Khakamada's. And nothing more was needed. DNA tests did not yet exist. On September 11, 1968, Kakamada was found guilty and sentenced to death.
"The decision was not what I expected. It was based on a serious misunderstanding of the facts. I therefore appealed the decision immediately," he wrote to his family shortly after the ruling. Kakamada attributed the incident to a misunderstanding and apologised for causing distress to her loved ones.
Khakamada wrote letters to her family regularly. It was the only way for a death row prisoner to contact his family. He wrote many letters, especially to his mother. However, she died two months after the trial. Five months later, my father was gone. Khakamada had only his younger sister, Hideko, and a son who was two years old when his father was arrested.
Iwao himself was moved from his hometown to Tokyo after the trial. At the time, he was still confident that the Tokyo High Court, where his appeal would be heard, would understand that the case against him was fabricated.
In their appeal, the defense presented six main arguments for Kakamada's innocence. Kakamada's confession was a confession. Those damn clothes weren't his. If he had attacked four people single-handedly and inflicted more than 40 wounds, his neighbors should have heard at least some noise. The small knife that was the murder weapon couldn't have inflicted those wounds. The back door of Hashimoto's house, which Hakamada was known to have entered, was locked. After all, he had no motive for murder.
At the trial, Iwao Hakamada was asked to wear bloody clothes that were clearly too small for him. However, the investigation found that the situation had worsened, and Kakamada claimed that this was because he had gained weight in prison while receiving government support. Other defense claims were also rejected. In 1976, the Tokyo High Court rejected the appeal.
The highest court was the Supreme Court of Japan. On November 11, 1980, the parties heard their arguments and did not change their decision. Kakamada was transferred from a regular cell at the Tokyo Pretrial Detention Center to a solitary confinement cell to await execution.
Japan's justice system is slow and clumsy. But death is sudden and lightning fast. All it takes to execute a sentence is the signature of the Minister of Justice. Death row inmates are notified that their time has come until hours or more before their execution. Once notified, all you are allowed to do is choose a meal for your last meal.
After the Supreme Court ruling, Kakamada was no longer allowed to communicate with the public in any way. Even the guards told him his prison number. Now all he had was a camera, walks, books, a shower every four days, and, of course, letters from his family. In fact, the letters he exchanged with his sister and son constituted his only communication with the outside world.
But the former boxer did not live to see death. His sister helped him in this process, and she also hoped that the new lawyer would find a way to prove his innocence before the pastor executed him.
Kakamada's new legal team, brought in in 1981, lasted 13 years. But in the end, the defendant's case was almost identical to that of 1968. There was a wood carving knife that didn't match the wound, a locked back door to the house, and bloody clothes that were too small for Hakamada. It's no surprise, then, that the Shizuoka District Court refused to retry Hakamada in 1994.
The next attempt was made in 2000. Then lawyers finally resorted to DNA testing. But there were no results. The lab could not extract a DNA sample from the bloodstain, because at that point he was already almost 34 years old. Technology was not yet on Hakamada’s side. And attempts to review the case on earlier grounds failed in the Tokyo High Court in 2004 and the Supreme Court in 2008.
On March 10, 2011, Iwao Hakamada celebrated his 75th birthday in solitary confinement. That same day, Hakamada was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-serving person on earth on death row. His health had already deteriorated noticeably, both physically and mentally. At some point, as his letters show, he began to see himself as a “demigod” who no longer feared imprisonment.
But Kakamada no longer celebrated his 75th birthday as a desperate suicide bomber. His innocence was confirmed by a DNA test using new technology in 2008 and retests in 2011 and 2012.
But prosecutors still tried to throw him in jail, challenging the legality of the DNA test. But now the Shizuoka District Court has finally sided with the defendants.
Khakamada herself did not believe what had happened. When a guard told him about it (he did not appear in court again), his answer was: “Stop fooling around.” But on March 27, 2014, Khakamada was released from prison 46 years after his arrest.
He was not found not guilty, but he was granted a retrial. And given Kakamada's age and health, the court ruled that he could await a new trial at home. After all, it was unlikely that a 78-year-old man would be able to escape after decades in prison.
Khakamada had to wait another ten years before the case was retried. But on September 26, 2024, he finally heard what he had been seeking for decades. The court found him not guilty.
"I want to say this sincerely," Kakamada said at a press conference to announce the final acquittal. "We have finally achieved a complete and final victory, and I am happy to meet you all." It was his 91-year-old sister, who dedicated her life to saving her brother, who helped him find the words, "Thank you." "Thank you very much!" Iwao Hakamada replied.
This week, on October 8, prosecutors announced that they had no plans to appeal the judges’ decision. Hakamada Iwao’s case is officially closed. He apologized on behalf of the prosecution and will receive 200 million yen ($1.4 million) in compensation. In half a century, no investigation has attempted to determine who actually killed Fujio Hashimoto and his family.