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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
“Even now my sad and vexatious feelings have not changed.”
-Father of girl whose killer was hanged in Tokyo on August 3, 2012 (Asahi Shimbun, 8/3/12, evening edition, p.15)“It violates the fundamental notion that like crimes be punished alike to allow life or death to hinge on the emotional needs of survivors.”
-Former U.S. federal prosecutor Scott Turow (Ultimate Punishment, 2003, p.53)The murders committed by AUM Shinrikyo guru Asahara Shoko and his henchmen may be the most malevolent crimes in Japanese history. March 20, 1995 was Japan's 9/11, and but for a little dumb luck—including the failure to puncture all the bags of sarin that were planted in the subway trains—the death toll could have been much higher than 13 and the number of persons injured might have reached five digits instead of the true total of 6300.
1 NHK TV, “ Mikaiketsu Jiken “, May 26-27, 2012.
2 See, for example, David H. Bayley, Forces of Order: Policing Modern Japan (University of California Press, 1976, 1991), and Walter L. Ames, Police and Community in Japan (University of California Press, 1981). For a portrait of Japanese prosecutors that is also somewhat positive, see David T. Johnson, The Japanese Way of Justice: Prosecuting Crime in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2002).
3 Richard Lloyd Parry, “Japan's Inept Guardians,” New York Times, June 24, 2012. Parry has also written an excellent book about Obara Joji, the killer and serial rapist who operated for years under the noses of the Japanese police ( People Who Eat Darkness, Jonathan Cape, 2011).
4 Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004).
5 Several other AUM puzzles remain unsolved and underexplored. For example, why did police fail to find the person(s) who tried to assassinate Japan's top cop (Kunimatsu Takaji) ten days after the assault on the Tokyo subway? Why did prosecutors arrest Asahara's lead defense lawyer (Yasuda Yoshihiro) during the guru's criminal trial on a criminal charge so obscure—obstruction of the compulsory seizure of rental income from a corporation Yasuda was advising—that the Tokyo District Court ultimately concluded it was utterly groundless (appellate courts later overruled)? And why do 1500 people (and one of my friends) still revere Asahara and remain committed to his teachings despite all of the evil done in his name?
6 Aoki Osamu (interviewer), “Ogawa Toshio ga Gekihaku: ‘Asahara Shikei’ to ‘Shikiken Hatsudo’“, Shukan Posuto, July 6, 2012, pp.43-45.
7 After Takahashi's arrest, Takahashi Shizue, who lost her husband in the Tokyo gas attack, lamented “You must have known about our great suffering as victims, yet why did you run around for so long?” Asahi Shimbun, “‘Naze Koko made Tobo’ ‘Shinjitsu Sematte’ Aum Jiken Izoku kara”, June 15, 2012.
8 Inagaki Makoto, “Govt Resumes Executions: Friday's Executions Show New Minister's Determination,” Daily Yomiuri, August 4, 2012.
9 As explained later in this article, the question of deterring terrorism through capital punishment is less complicated and less contentious.
10 Daniel S. Nagin and John V. Pepper, editors, Deterrence and the Death Penalty (The National Academies Press, 2012), and Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005).
11 Sangmin Bae, When the State No Longer Kills: International Human Rights Norms and Abolition of Capital Punishment (State University of New York Press, 2007); Roger Hood and Carolyn Hoyle, “Abolishing the Death Penalty Worldwide: The Impact of a ‘New Dynamic,’“ Crime and Justice (The University of Chicago Press, Vol.38, 2009); and David T. Johnson and Franklin E. Zimring, The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia (Oxford University Press, 2009).
12 Ida Makoto et al, “Saibanin Saiban ni okeru Ryokei Hyogi no Arikata ni tsuite”, Legal Research and Training Institute, Supreme Court of Japan, July 2012. By comparison, in the United States from 1977 to 1999, about 2.2 percent of all known murder offenders were sentenced to death; see John Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, and Martin T. Wells, “Explaining Death Row's Population and Racial Composition”, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Vol.1, No.1 (March 2004), pp.165-207.
13 Jody Lynee Madeira, Killing McVeigh: The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure (New York University Press, 2012).
14 Yamamoto Ryosuke, “Judge Who Spared AUM Doctor Still Has Doubts About Verdict,” Asahi Simbun/Asia & Japan Watch, November 17, 2011.
15 David. T. Johnson, “Hisoka ni Hito o Korosu Kokka”, Jiyu to Seigi, Vol.58, No.9 (September 2007): 111-127, and Vol.58, No.10 (October 2007): 91-108 (translated by Kikuta Koichi); and David T. Johnson, “Japan's Secretive Death Penalty Policy: Contours, Origins, Justifications, and Meanings,” Asia-Pacific Law & Policy Journal, Vol. 7, Issue 2 (Summer 2006), pp.62-124, available here.
16 Fuse Yusuke, Amerika de Shikei o Mita (Gendai Jinbunsha, 2008).
17 Ten seats were allotted for victims and survivors at McVeigh's federal trial in Denver, and there were seats for 320 more to watch a live broadcast in an Oklahoma City auditorium. At McVeigh's execution in Indiana, a lottery was used to allocate 7 seats for victims’ family members, 2 seats for survivors with physical injuries, and 1 seat for other survivors; another 300 watched a closed circuit broadcast in Oklahoma.
18 University of Houston Professor of Law David R. Dow puts Madeira's point more sharply when he says, “After you kill the bad guys, you're just as angry as you were before, but there ain't no one left to hate.” Dow is also the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit legal aid corporation that represents death row inmates. See his The Autobiography of an Execution (Twelve, 2010), p.174.
19 Lonnie Athens, “The Self as Soliloquy,” Sociological Quarterly, Vol.35, No.3 (1994), pp.521-532.
20 Masuda Michiko, Fukuda kun o Koroshite Nani ni Naru: Hikari shi Boshi Satsugai Jiken no Kansei (Inshidentsu, 2009).
21 Mainichi Daily News, “After Death Sentence Confirmed, Bereaved Family of Young Mom and Baby Takes Step Forward,” February 21, 2012.
22 Among developed democracies, the cruelty of murder is unusually common in the United States. For example, the murder rate in New York City has dropped 80 percent since 1990, but as of 2012 it remains approximately 10 times higher than the murder rate in Tokyo. Killing in the United States stands out in two other ways as well, for America is one of the world's leading executing states (its 43 executions in 2011 ranked fifth in the world, behind China, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran), and it is also one of the most active in carrying out the murder that is called (and sometimes celebrated as) war.
23 See, for example, Madeira, pp.192, 237, 282. See also Simran Khurana, “Buddha Quotes.”
24 David Garland, Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (Belknap Press, 2010), p.279.
25 Diana Minot, “Silenced Stories: How Victim Impact Evidence in Capital Trials Prevents the Jury from Hearing the Constitutionally Required Story of the Defendant,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 102, No. 1 (Winter 2012), pp.227-251.
26 For the whole poem see here.
27 David T. Johnson, “Victims and Emotions in Japanese Capital Punishment”, Hogaku Semina, May 2011.
28 David T. Johnson, “Progress and Problems in Japanese Capital Punishment,” in Capital Punishment in Asia: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Roger Hood and Surya Deva (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2013).
29 Hayashi's youngest victim and his main target was a 21-year-old woman whom he had patronized at an “ear-cleaning salon” in Akihabara 154 times in the 14 months before he murdered her. Hayashi felt unrequited love for the woman—or lust, or longing, or something—and he was angry that the management of her shop had forbidden him to visit any more. Hayashi also testified that the woman sometimes spoke critically about some of her customers and clients, and this was one reason the son of his eldest victim rebuked him. For more details on this case, see David T. Johnson, “Capital Punishment without Capital Trials in Japan's Lay Judge System,” The Asia-Pacific Journal (December 27, 2010).
30 Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon Books, 2012), p.xiv. See also Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), and David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (Vintage Books, 2011).
31 David T. Johnson, “Capital Punishment without Capital Trials in Japan's Lay Judge System,” The Asia-Pacific Journal (December 27, 2010).
32 The Kagoshima case is discussed in more detail in Johnson (2010).
33 Mori Tatsuya, “Genbatsu wa Yuko na Keibatsu na no ka: Norway no moto-Hoso ni Kiku”, Sekai, August 2012, pp.176-183.
34 Norway's different approach to terrorism does not marginalize victims and survivors. Before Breivik's trial began, “the court named 174 lawyers, paid by the state, to protect the interests of the victims and their families,” and at trial the court heard 77 autopsy reports. After each report, “the audience watched a photo of the victim, most often a teenager, and listened to a one-minute-long biography voicing his or her unfulfilled ambitions and dreams.” For more detail, see Toril Moi and David L. Paletz, “In Norway, a New Model for Justice,” New York Times, August 23, 2012.
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