Japan | Why do lawyers work so hard to defend murderers from the death penalty?

TOKYO—Why fight to keep a murderer alive? asks Aera magazine (Sept 21-28).

Defense lawyer Yasushi Mizutani’s profession qualifies him to explain.

On July 5, 2009, at 4:15 in the afternoon, a man walked into an Osaka pachinko parlor, doused the floor with gasoline and set it on fire. Five burned to death. Ten others survived their burns. The next day police in Hiroshima arrested Sunao Takami, then 41. He confessed immediately.

“Why did you do it?” they asked him.

He shrugged. “I wanted to kill. It didn’t matter who.”

The death penalty is widely seen as barbarous. Worldwide, it’s on its way out. Japan and the U.S. are the only G7 “major Western democracies” that retain it. Human rights advocates are appalled. Rightly so, no doubt. But who can read the above sketch without an emotional surge whose verbal rendering would be, “Let him hang!”

Is that barbarous?

That’s one question. Another is: do the details and fine points that flesh out the sketch, giving Takami human contours and an individual identity, soften the instinctive hate, make us feel guilty for it, arouse sympathy? Mizutani, who defended Takami in court, feels they do. The judges and jurors who determined Takami’s fate didn’t. Takami was hanged on August 21. Seventeen years had passed since the fatal afternoon in the Osaka pachinko parlor.

Takami’s off-hand remark to police is too easily taken at face value, Mizutani writes in Aera. It’s a lot more complicated than that. The “human contours” Mizutani’s article gives him make that, at least, clear.

Stimulant drugs Takami had used in his 20s came back to haunt him in his 30s. He was a long-distance trucker – long, long hours at the wheel, kilometer after lonely kilometer along an endless highway. He saw visions, heard voices. They took shape as a woman named “Mifi.” The people around him, she said, were manipulating him, conspiring against him. No wonder his life was going nowhere. Was there no fight, no resistance in him? There was, he assured her. Show me, she urged. How? Kill. Who? Anyone.

Symptoms such as these are usually classed as mental illness. Can the insane be held responsible for the insane things they do in the grip of insanity? Takami cannot be, Mizutani argued in court. But his article in Aera mentions no psychiatric tests or treatment, and the courts, from Lower all the way up to Supreme, rejected the insanity plea, finding in the shrewd and detailed planning of the arson proof of rationality, sanity, and, consequently, responsibility. Takami, not “Mifi,” must be held accountable. 

Which was fine with Takami. He showed no wish to be spared. At one point he delivered a rant to the effect that the court—judges and jurors—were “liars,” pawns in Mifi’s power. Otherwise he was quiet—even, Mizutani says, “shy.” He made no appeal for sympathy. He declined to apologize to members of his victims’ families.

That just about rounds out the portrait we’re given. It’s incomplete, inevitably, and remains so even with the additional detail that at the time of the crime he’d been long unemployed and was grievously in debt; but if sympathy is the basis for opposition to the death penalty, there’s not much here, nothing in the man himself to suggest a spark of human feeling our own feelings can respond to—except maybe this: when Mizutani, seeking to puncture Takami’s indifference in the face of death, mentioned that hanging, which he and many others condemn as cruel and unusual punishment banned by the Constitution, can break the neck bone, Takami grimaced and rubbed his neck as though in pain, murmuring, “That’s awful!” When Mizutani suggested he file a final appeal for clemency, Takami showed no interest (let alone gratitude), saying only, “I want a game magazine”—though video games were forbidden to him.

He’s a man, in short, very hard to sympathize with—hard to feel anything for except revulsion, to the point almost that anyone who feels none might be called unnatural, for trivializing the grief of the bereaved if for no other reason—for murder destroys not only the victim’s life but those of his or her intimates. Mizutani understands this perfectly well. “If someone in my family were murdered,” he writes, “I might very well want the murderer executed.” He is understanding, too, towards bereaved family members venting their fury toward the murderer on the murderer’s defender. “I’ll burn your family!” read an anonymous message on Mizutani’s X account—the ugliest though by no means the only explosion of the verbal violence of despair.

That said, is desire for revenge justified, is the court, or should it be, an instrument of revenge? Is revenge justice? Is justice revenge? Or is it something more, something higher? If higher, what? Recognition of everyone’s humanity and human dignity, extended even to those who commit the ultimate violation of human dignity: murder? Barbarism licensed revenge. Civilization, in curbing it, is generally considered a step upward. Is that the last word on the subject?

There is no last word. Questions are many, answers few. One more question: where is the fine line between evil and illness? A lot of awful crimes are committed by people whose minds do not function normally. Does that absolve them of the label “evil,” if not of punishment?

Source: japantoday.com, Michael Hoffman, September 28, 2026. Michael Hoffman is the author of “The Arimasen Dialogues.”

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde

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