How one man got off death row in a country with a 99% conviction rate

On a hushed winter afternoon in Hamamatsu, a seaside city in central Japan, an octogenarian goes for a walk. His gait is peculiar, almost mechanical, and his body jolts with each small step. His stiff arms swing by his sides, not quite in sync with his legs. A padded green coat swallows his frame. Beneath a soft brown fedora is a plump, round face.
Two women flank him as he enters a library. He pauses at a vending machine; something about it seems to speak a language only he can hear. Juice, soda, coffee, corn soup, tea: he presses many buttons in quick succession. Fumbling, he tries to feed in too many notes, until one of the women gently helps him. Two cans of sweetened coffee clatter into the tray.
He begins to drift through the library’s aisles. Eventually, the women guide him to a bench by the window. They hand him a photo book of cats. He turns the pages slowly: a kitten curled up in a bowl, another basking in a sunbeam. Although he doesn’t smile, he looks fixated and hardly says anything. He seems like a spirit left behind in a hollowed-out shell.
In 1966, Hakamada Iwao was arrested on the charge of murdering his boss, his boss’s wife and their two teenage children. He was later convicted of the crime and spent much of the next 58 years on death row, locked alone in a cell no bigger than a parking space. Every morning he woke up not knowing whether that day would be his last. 
In September 2024 a court acquitted Hakamada, who was then 88. Such a reversal after a defendant had served so many years in prison would be unusual anywhere. But in Japan, the conviction rate is over 99% for cases that go to trial; in some years it has been as high as 99.9%. This makes Hakamada’s case astonishing. What's more, the court also declared that the police and prosecutors had fabricated the evidence that led to his conviction. In March 2025 he was awarded 217m yen ($1.45m) in compensation—the largest-ever payout for a criminal case in the country’s history.
“When the judge read out ‘not guilty’, his voice sounded divine,” Hakamada Hideko, Hakamada’s 92-year-old sister, told me. “I’m not someone who cries, but the tears just came.” It is not clear whether Hakamada—who suffers severe symptoms of koukinsho, or “detention syndrome”, as a result of his prolonged solitary confinement—understands the significance of the court’s decision, for himself or Japan’s justice system. 
I first met Hakamada in late 2022. I had seen videos of interviews where he appeared fragile but composed, like someone I could have a conversation with. But when my colleague and I arrived at his home, he stayed in another room the entire time. I said hello to him but he did not respond; I couldn’t tell if he registered that I was there. Only then did I realise those clips had been carefully stitched together, lending him an air of coherence that didn’t really exist.
I spoke instead with Hideko, who cares for him and had long served as his advocate. Sprightly and sharp, she recounted half a century of injustice with unwavering conviction. I remember thinking that without her support, Hakamada might have rotted away in that narrow cell. Over time, she became the nucleus of a network of lawyers, activists and ordinary people that helped bring about his acquittal. 
At this point, Hakamada seems more comfortable with inanimate objects than with people; his bedroom is filled with plush toys. When I visited him again this past February to tag along on his walk, I brought him a shiba inu stuffed animal at the suggestion of one of his carers. After I nervously handed it to him, he quietly said doumo (“thank you”), examined it for a while and put it in his pocket. That was the only meaningful interaction I have managed to have with him.
“He abandoned reality a long time ago to escape to an idealised, fantasy world,” said Ino Machiko, one of the women who accompanies Hakamada on his daily outings. “He couldn’t possibly come back to reality now, and take in what he had gone through. That would be too much.”
***
Hakamada Iwao was born in 1936 in Hamamatsu, a city in Shizuoka, a coastal prefecture known for green-tea fields and clear sightlines to Mount Fuji. The youngest of six siblings, Hakamada was a “calm and gentle boy”, according to Hideko; the two were close growing up.
Hakamada’s family was not wealthy, and he began working after graduating from school, around the age of 15. A few years later, he fell in love with boxing. Though never a household name, he achieved modest success and set a record in 1960 for fighting the most matches in a year: 19. That figure, which remains unsurpassed in Japan, is “absolutely unthinkable today”, said Nitta Shosei from the Japan Pro Boxing Association. “What makes it even more remarkable is that he mostly went the full distance in these fights…he was slugging it out for multiple rounds, taking punches, getting back up.”
But his body quickly began to break down, forcing him to quit professional boxing after just a few years. He moved from Hamamatsu to Shimizu, a small port town a couple of hours east, where he began building a new life. He first found work at a cabaret, then briefly ran a bar. He eventually joined the Kogane Miso factory, which was run by Hashimoto Fujio and his family. 
In the early hours of June 30th 1966, fire consumed the Hashimoto home, next door to the factory. After firefighters brought the blaze under control, they discovered the bodies of Hashimoto, his wife and their two teenage children, who between them had been stabbed more than 40 times. 
Hakamada, who was 30 at the time, lived in a dormitory across the train tracks from the Hashimotos. He was among those who rushed to help extinguish the fire. So it was a surprise when, two months later, he was arrested on suspicion of murder.
The brutal killings unnerved the sleepy town, and police were under pressure to find a culprit quickly. They had no physical evidence linking Hakamada with the crime, but he lacked a clear alibi. He was also an easy target, as a quiet outsider with no relatives in the area. And as an ex-boxer with a strong build, it was thought that he could have overpowered the Hashimotos. 
From the moment of his arrest, Hakamada claimed he was innocent. A few people believed him, including Watanabe Akiko and her husband (who had played in a band at the cabaret Hakamada had worked in). Watanabe, now 90, remembers Hakamada as kind and gentle. When her baby lost a piece of cloth he was attached to in a crowded shopping street, she assumed it was gone for good. But Hakamada insisted on going back to find it. “He’s the kind of person who would do something like that,” she told me. “He has a warm heart.”
A few days after the murders, the police came to Watanabe’s house. She recalls one of them, cigarette in mouth, declaring: “It has to be Hakamada, the boxer. There’s nobody else who could commit such a terrible crime.” The police confiscated photos featuring Hakamada in the family’s photo album. “They spoke as if they knew from the very beginning!” said Watanabe.
Having decided that Hakamada was their man, the police tried to get him to confess. What followed was a relentless interrogation that lasted 23 days. The questioning often went on for 12 hours; on the longest day, it stretched to 16. Officers sometimes refused to give Hakamada water and deprived him of sleep. They forced him to use a portable toilet in the corner of the interrogation room in full view. They shouted at him, deriding him as a bokusaa kuzure—“washed-up boxer”. They even punched him, kicked him and beat him with a stick. At one point, he fainted.
Some audio recordings from the interrogation have since been made public. Initially, Hakamada was defiant, telling the police: “You’re the ones who’ve ruined my life. I’ll never forget this.” But by the 20th day of torture, Hakamada’s will had eroded. He finally confessed on September 6th 1966, in a state of near-delirium.
***
Japan’s judicial system relies heavily on confessions. Legal commentators call them the “king of evidence”, as they underpin around 90% of convictions. In a recent book, Nishi Yoshiyuki, a former judge who is now a defence lawyer, explains that Japan’s obsession with confessions dates back to the Edo period—the era between 1603 and 1868 when the Tokugawa shoguns (military rulers) ran the country. Confessions were seen as essential not just for proving guilt but for maintaining the shogunate’s grip on power and preserving the appearance of order and control. As in many other early modern societies, torture was frequently used to extract admissions of guilt. 
In the late 19th century the last shogun was overthrown and a more modern state emerged. The imperial family, long sidelined, were restored to prominence. Under the Emperor Meiji, Japan rapidly adopted some Western institutions, such as courts, a parliament and a national education system. But torture persisted. Gustave Boissonade, a French jurist who had been invited to Japan in the 1870s to consult on the modernisation of its legal system, was shocked when he visited a court building and encountered a screaming man whose legs were being crushed by heavy stones.
As a result of Boissonade’s advocacy, torture was formally abolished in Japan in 1879. Even so, Sasakura Kana, who runs the Innocence Project Japan, a group that seeks to overturn wrongful convictions, has noted that “the basic structure of relying on confessions really hasn’t changed since the pre-war period”. After its defeat in the second world war, Japan was occupied by America, which sought to create a demilitarised democracy. Once again, the justice system was reformed along Western lines. One of the provisions in Japan’s post-war constitution said: “No person shall be convicted or punished in cases where the only proof against him is his own confession.” 
But in practice Japanese investigators have continued to rely on them. This may partly be for practical reasons; for instance, wire-tapping and undercover operations are strictly regulated in Japan, which can make it difficult for investigators to build cases based solely on physical evidence. But culture also plays a role—in Japanese society, a confession is often seen as the first step towards moral atonement. 
Before an indictment, police can hold suspects for up to 23 days, far longer than most democratic countries allow (in most European countries it is around a day or two). When that period expires, they can immediately re-arrest suspects on separate charges as many times as they wish—a practice critics call “hostage justice”.
Officially, indefinite detention is meant to prevent suspects from destroying evidence or escaping. But legal experts and former detainees say it is primarily used to extract confessions. Pre-indictment interrogations are open to abuse, in part because defence lawyers are banned from attending (again, unlike in most democratic countries). 
The dramatic case of Carlos Ghosn, the chairman of Nissan, a carmaker, thrust the issue into the global spotlight in 2018. Ghosn was arrested for financial misconduct, a charge which he denies; after being detained for 108 days, he pulled off a daring escape to Lebanon, hiding inside a large box (usually used to hold music equipment) to board a plane. 
But most people subjected to “hostage justice” generate no headlines. Among them is Marcus Cavazos, an American resident of Tokyo who used to work as an English teacher. I first met him in October 2024 while I was reporting on another piece; he is now a friend. We recently talked at a bar, where, over several pints, he told me about his harrowing experience.
Several years ago, Cavazos was wrongfully accused of smuggling drugs. He had passed along a package that an acquaintance said held an antique lamp from his mother—but actually contained crystal meth. Cavazos, who had not checked what was inside, denied knowing about the drugs. Still, he was detained by the police for six months. “My cell was a bit bigger than that,” he said, pointing at the bar’s toilet. There was no bed, only a thin mattress on a cold, hard floor, and no air conditioner or heater; a small lightbulb illuminated the cell at all hours. Detainees were only allowed to exercise for 30 minutes a week, in a rooftop yard surrounded by caging. Worried about his physical health, Cavazos started doing pushups inside his cell. A guard threatened to take away his books—one of his only forms of entertainment—if he didn’t stop. 
During the interrogations, investigators pressed Cavazos to admit that he had knowingly smuggled drugs. He remembers them saying things like: “Remember, we have a conviction rate over 99%. Once we indict you, you don’t stand a chance.” 
Cavazos was having suicidal thoughts and felt tempted to confess, just to get out on bail. Ultimately, he refused to admit anything and won a not-guilty verdict after the case went to trial. But Cavazos told me that he continues to suffer from PTSD, and to face stigma from society. “It’s going to haunt me for the rest of my life,” he said. “And this could literally happen to anyone. Even to you.”
***
By the time Hakamada’s trial began in December 1966, he had already been cast as a villain. Newspapers parroted the police’s portrait of him as a violent boxer-turned-murderer. Yomiuri Shimbun, a big daily, ran an article that speculated whether his boxing career might have damaged his brain’s emotional-control centres; a professor described him as “a classic case of split personality”. Another paper cited a psychiatric expert who suggested that Hakamada might suffer from “an extreme abnormal personality”.
None of these academics had met Hakamada. “It wasn’t just the police and prosecutors, but also the media and the general public. Everyone was complicit in creating this ‘monster’ that in fact didn’t exist,” said Suzuki Takako, a parliamentarian who has campaigned for criminal-justice reform.
A year after the murders took place, the police announced that they had discovered five bloodstained pieces of clothing in the depths of a miso tank at the factory: a white short-sleeved shirt, a pair of trousers, green underpants, white suteteko (traditional Japanese pants that are worn between the trousers and underpants) and a dark long-sleeved top. At last, there seemed to be physical evidence to shore up Hakamada’s confession.
But something didn’t add up. In the confession police extracted from him, Hakamada said that he had been wearing pyjamas the night of the murders—not the work clothes that the police purported to have found. Why, wondered Hakamada’s family and lawyers, would a killer stash the bloodstained clothes in a miso tank, instead of simply destroying them in the fire? And why had the police—who surely had searched the crime scene right after the incident—only found these crucial pieces of evidence a year later?
In letters to his family from prison, Hakamada remained defiant: “God, I am not the criminal. I am shouting every day,” he wrote in one. “I pray that these words will ride the winds of Shizuoka and reach the ears of the people.” But in 1968 he was found guilty by a panel of judges and sentenced to death. (Japan does not have juries, though a system of “lay judges” was introduced in 2009.) 
Among the letters Hideko showed me when I visited her small flat in Hamamatsu earlier this year, one stood out. Written shortly after the death sentence was handed down, it featured unnaturally square letters with straight lines. Hideko explained that her brother had used a ruler to write, as his hands had been shaking so violently that he could barely hold a pen. 
The blows continued to fall. Both of Hakamada’s parents died later that year—a fact that his family initially tried to keep secret from him. When he was finally told the news, he was crushed. “My entire body froze with shock. I prayed to God that this was some kind of mistake. But the truth cannot be denied. From that time on, hatred became what sustained my life. Today, I feel as though only cold blood flows beneath my skin,” he wrote in another letter. 
After the supreme court confirmed the death sentence in 1980, Hakamada’s mental health spiralled. He began speaking about “evil radio waves” attacking him and claimed that he was no longer human, but God himself. He eventually stopped recognising people—including Hideko, whom he soon refused to see altogether.
***
In most democracies, people would see a conviction rate of over 99% as evidence that the system was rigged (in Britain it is around 80%). In Japan, however, this figure is widely accepted as reasonable. That’s in part due to the country’s selective approach in bringing cases to trial: prosecutors choose not to press charges in 60-70% of the cases they review. 
Daniel Foote, a legal scholar, has said that the Japanese system displays “benevolent paternalism”—with prosecutors acting as moral guardians who wield extraordinary discretion in deciding who gets charged and who deserves mercy. They are paradoxically lenient towards those who show remorse and accept responsibility, yet punitive towards those who maintain their innocence. As Suzuki, the parliamentarian, told me, “Japan is considered to be one of the safest countries in the world, with that over 99% conviction rate. But if you flip that statistic, it means once you’re targeted, you’re over. In that sense, Japan is terrifying.”
Japan’s focus on rehabilitation and social reintegration—educational programmes and vocational training are offered to many inmates—has its merits. But many legal observers remain critical of prosecutors’ outsize role. “[They] think they are like gods,” Yoshida Kyoko, a defence lawyer, told me. She used to be a judge, but quit after becoming disillusioned with the judiciary, likening it to a kitchen where “prosecutors cook and judges simply eat whatever is served to them without question”. (She has since handled Ghosn’s and Cavazos’s cases.)
Justice reform has rarely been a hot-button issue in Japan, where crime is rare. Many locals believe their safety reflects a well-run criminal justice system, and are rarely given cause to consider what it’s like to be on the wrong side of the law. “The only people who care…are those who have personally experienced its flaws,” Suzuki explained. 
In the media and in police television dramas, the status quo is rarely questioned; investigators are usually depicted as diligent and morally upright. But even pop culture has occasionally delved into miscarriages of justice. These stories make entertainment out of Japan’s eye-popping conviction rate by focusing on the efforts of brainy, charismatic heroes to combat it. In a popular video game, “Ace Attorney”, players take on the role of defence lawyer, trying to win a “not guilty” verdict for their client. And in the television drama series titled “99.9”, a fictional defence lawyer named Miyama continually stands up to his bosses—who would prefer him to take on more lucrative civil litigation—and wins not-guilty verdicts against the odds. “I just want to know the facts,” Miyama says, with an impish grin. “Even when guilt seems 99.9% certain, the truth might be hiding in that remaining 0.1%.”
***
The truth, however, is that fighting wrongful convictions in Japan requires more than the persistence of a lone, audacious attorney. As a case like Hakamada’s shows, it usually takes a community of determined people and a public-pressure campaign to challenge a verdict.
The support of relatives is not always a given. In many wrongful conviction cases, “even family members often abandon them. But in our case, that didn’t happen,” Hideko told me. After marrying and divorcing young, she devoted herself to saving her brother. For nearly 60 years she organised rallies to spread awareness of Hakamada’s case and met lawyers and politicians to press them to re-evaluate the evidence. Even during the long period in which her brother wouldn’t see her—he eventually opened up to her again—Hideko continued to visit the detention centre. “It was my way of telling him: I haven’t let go of you.”
I asked whether she felt angry, having seen her brother’s life stolen by the state. She replied: “Anger? I never feel anger. I’ve got no time to be angry.” Her resilience leaves an impression on anybody who meets her. “She’s basically been living through hell for the past half-century,” Suzuki, the parliamentarian, remarked. “But Hideko never complains, points fingers at people. She just keeps speaking the truth, believing in her brother’s innocence, and focuses on what she has to do.” Nitta Shosei, the representative from the Japan Pro Boxing Association who has supported Hakamada’s cause since the early 2000s, told me that Hideko is “more like a boxer than any of us. No matter how many times she gets knocked down, no matter how many times the courts reject her, she just smiles and gets back up.” 
Hideko has worked closely with Hakamada’s defence team, which comprises a handful of lawyers who work pro bono. Their leader is Ogawa Hideyo, a septuagenarian who has been involved in the case since the 1980s. He’s delightfully quirky, with a penchant for camellias—specifically youshutsubaki, the foreign-bred varieties with large blooms, which are often dismissed by Japan’s traditional flower culture as gaudy. He represents a local association dedicated to the flowers, and has even published a book about them. He believes the camellia bears some resemblance to his marginalised clients.
When Ogawa first started arguing that the evidence against Hakamada had been fabricated, other lawyers on the defence team were sceptical. “Most lawyers operate with the assumption that the evidence police are showing us is real,” he explained. “If you start questioning that, the judges at the court would think you’re crazy.”
What led to the acquittal, Ogawa believes, was the legal team’s collaboration with Hakamada’s supporters. For the first few decades of Hakamada’s imprisonment they were mostly “the usual suspects”—leftists and labour unionists who had been student activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Most defence teams maintain a clear separation between lawyers and the public. But Ogawa and his colleagues realised that, “Whenever we held meetings, analysed evidence, supporters would be part of it and share ideas—you don’t see that kind of collective effort in other defence teams.”
One of their most crucial collaborators was Yamazaki Toshiki, a 71-year-old man with a wiry frame and a swashbuckling energy. When we met in February, he wore a traditional happi coat over his shirt, a pair of round glasses and a mischievous grin. As a university student, he was first politicised by industrial pollution. Later, he became involved in another wrongful conviction case that unfolded near Shimizu. He had then planned to return to his hometown, on the southern island of Kyushu, but soon found himself wrapped up in Hakamada’s case. “Once I got involved in this one too, I ended up putting roots here,” he told me. 
Yamazaki took me to the crime scene. “It’s just like it was in 1966,” he said, pointing to the Hashimoto house in ruins, standing behind a veil of overgrown trees. The factory had been demolished; in its place was a row of houses. But the tracks that had divided the Hashimotos’ home from the factory remain, and every so often the bells of a nearby level crossing would ring, warning of an oncoming train.
We walked along a narrow path leading to the back gate of the Hashimoto house. According to the police, Hakamada had passed through it multiple times on the night of the crime: once to flee after the killing, again to return with gasoline, and once more to escape after setting the fire. 
But there was a problem. When investigators arrived, they found the gate’s top latch still secured. They claimed Hakamada had crawled through the tiny gap underneath the gate—even though he could have easily undone the latch. “It’s a ridiculous story,” said Yamazaki. 
Yamazaki also doubted the police’s story about the clothing found in the miso tank. During the trial Hakamada tried on the trousers three times and was unable to pull them over his hips (prosecutors claimed they had shrunk in the miso and that Hakamada had gained weight). Looking at the black-and-white photos of the clothing, Yamazaki sensed that something wasn’t right. How had the white shirt remained so pale after stewing in fermenting dark soyabean paste for 14 months? And how could the bloodstains remain so vivid, as if they were fresh?  
The answer, many suspected, was that the bloodstained clothes had been planted by the police shortly before their supposed discovery. In 2000 Yamazaki set out to prove it. He killed a chicken, scattered its blood on a cloth and pressed miso into the fabric. Within days, the blood darkened, eventually turning black. Miso is acidic, he explained, and the fermentation process oxidises material such as blood. “I became a bit of a miso expert,” he said with a laugh. 
This experiment was later repeated by defence lawyers and other supporters, sometimes with human blood. Alongside DNA testing, which has been conducted several times since the 2000s, these miso experiments became crucial evidence for the defence as it petitioned the courts for a retrial—the only path to save someone sentenced to death. 
But for decades, the petition was rejected by the courts. “It felt hopeless,” Todate Yoshiyuki, a lawyer who joined the defence team during this period, told me. “Could we really get him out of that cell?” 
Yet public support for Hakamada was growing. Groups like the Japan Pro Boxing Association began using their platform to raise awareness of his plight. One influential––and unexpected––supporter was Kumamoto Norimichi, the judge who wrote Hakamada’s death sentence. In 2007 he publicly expressed remorse––a highly unusual gesture, as judges are expected to stay silent about their decision-making process. Although Kumamoto had believed in Hakamada’s innocence, he had been outvoted by the two other judges during deliberations. “I’ve been living with pain ever since we handed down the verdict,” he said. “I didn’t want to carry this weight for the rest of my life.” Kumamoto later converted to Christianity—a rare move in Japan, where only 1% of the population is Christian. He hoped, he said, to be with Hakamada, who had also converted, in the afterlife (Kumamoto died in 2020). 
Finally, in 2014, Hakamada’s luck turned. His case came before Judge Murayama Hiroaki, who declared that there was reason to believe evidence had been fabricated. He ordered a retrial and released Hakamada from prison, stating that “detaining him any longer would violate justice to an intolerable extent”.
This was shocking news to the public––and for Hakamada, who was then 78. He was hospitalised for two months to assess the effects of long-term confinement on his body. Even after he moved in with Hideko, he remained unsettled. For some time he refused to go outside, instead spending his days pacing around his room in circles—probably a repetition of what he had been doing for decades in his tiny cell. 
After his acquittal, Hakamada and his sister began receiving support from locals who felt compassion for the pair. Among them was Ino Machiko, one of the women who accompanies Hakamada on his walks. She had been deeply moved by his letters from prison (which were published by his supporters in book form); she described his literary sensitivity as remarkable for someone with his educational background. When I observe her with Hakamada, holding his hand and speaking to him tenderly, I sense an almost maternal affection.
***
After Judge Murayama agreed to reopen Hakamada’s case in 2014, prosecutors appealed. As a result, it took nearly ten years for the retrial to begin, in October 2023. When Hakamada was finally acquitted, he became only the fifth person sentenced to death in Japan in the post-war era to have been acquitted after a retrial. All five of the defendants’ convictions had been based on confessions, which they had subsequently disavowed. 
Their experiences have exposed the degree to which Japan’s retrial law, which has not been amended in more than 70 years, is woefully inadequate for correcting judicial errors. Among the most egregious issues is evidence disclosure. In Japan, investigators and prosecutors can decide what material to hand over to—or withhold from—the defence. “Even in ordinary trials, not just retrials, defence lawyers often don’t know what evidence exists,” said Sakaguchi Tadahiko, a lawyer at the Japan Federation of Bar Associations. “There's no requirement for prosecutors to disclose a list of what evidence they have.” This creates what he calls a “black box”—when crucial evidence can remain hidden indefinitely or, worse, be destroyed. 
In Hakamada’s case, prosecutors had withheld crucial evidence: colour photographs, taken in 1967, of the clothing “found” in the tank. These photos confirmed what supporters like Yamazaki had suspected from the black-and-white photos: that the clothes looked far too clean and bright to have been soaked in miso for a year. 
The colour photos were only made available to the defence in 2010, following pressure by the court, which was starting to come around to the idea of a retrial. Had they been released earlier, Hakamada’s retrial might have happened decades sooner. “The fact that it took four decades for this evidence to emerge shows just how deficient our legal system is,” Sakaguchi told me. 
Hakamada’s case has spurred nearly 400 lawmakers from across the political spectrum to join a parliamentary group pushing to revise Japan’s retrial law. Whether they will succeed remains to be seen: for decades, proposed reforms have been shuffled to the justice ministry’s advisory councils, which tend to be friendly to prosecutors and stifle change. Yet with legislators signalling that they are eager for reform, this coalition could represent a turning point.
Hakamada’s case has also inspired others fighting wrongful convictions. In January I returned to Shimizu to watch a 59-year-old man named Maekawa Shoji slowly climb the stage at a local conference centre, clutching a blue hat. “I’ll wear this to my trial,” he told the crowd, “if I can find clothes that match.” The hat had been a gift from Hakamada, who loves collecting them; Maekawa said he felt a “mysterious force” connecting them.
I later met Maekawa at his flat in Fukui, a prefecture along the Sea of Japan between Tokyo and Kyoto. A Bible sat on the table; a picture of the Virgin Mary hung nearby (like Hakamada, he had converted to Catholicism).
In March 1986 a 15-year-old girl was murdered in Fukui. Police arrested Maekawa, then 21, the following year; no physical evidence connected him to the crime. He was convicted of murder and spent seven years in prison. He then spent more than twice that long in court, trying to clear his name. His lawyers unearthed over 250 pieces of previously undisclosed material, which confirmed what they had long suspected: that the police had cut a deal with a witness linked to organised crime, who agreed to testify that Maekawa was the culprit in exchange for being let off drug charges. The police had also coached other witnesses to match that version of events.
When I asked Maekawa why he continued to fight after having served his time in prison, he hesitated. “There were moments I thought about letting it go. What would be the point? I had already paid the price. I could have disappeared,” he said. “But in the end, I want to see justice done.” He believes Japan’s justice system suffers not only from prosecutorial misconduct, but from something deeper: a cultural aversion to admitting error. “I think Japanese people want perfection too much,” he said. “There’s a kind of arrogance—the idea that we don’t make mistakes.”
Maekawa and his lawyers collected enough evidence to force a retrial, which opened in March. This summer he was found not guilty of murder. The presiding judge apologised, acknowledging that “for 39 years, you have endured immense hardship…I take seriously the fact that it has led to something irreparable. I sincerely wish you happiness in the life that lies ahead.” But the response by the police and prosecutors was far more hostile: they have decided not to conduct a review of the case, and they have not formally apologised to Maekawa. That, said Yoshimura Satoru, his defence lawyer, is “deeply disappointing”. “If they cannot reflect on their actions after this, what kind of nation are we?”
***
Even in Hakamada’s case, the Japanese government has been wary of admitting fault. Although Shizuoka’s chief of police visited Hakamada and Hideko after the acquittal, bowing deeply to them in a formal apology, the moment was later undermined by the prosecutor general. In a statement, she acknowledged that the legal process was overly “prolonged” and that it caused an immense strain on Hakamada—but also said that the prosecutor’s office was “strongly dissatisfied” with the verdict, and rejected the court’s claim that evidence had been fabricated. (Hakamada’s defence team have since launched a libel lawsuit against the state.)
The damage to Hakamada, however, can never be undone. Now 89 years old, he has mild diabetes, and he shows the physical fragility of his age (he needs a lift to go up and down the stairs). Fifty-eight years of agony and isolation have left deep, irreparable scars on his mind. He is still trapped in the fantasy world he created to survive his imprisonment—and even though his ordeal has ended, he seems unable to fully return to reality. 
On the day of Hakamada’s acquittal, Hideko spread newspapers with headlines about her brother’s case on a table. A video captured the moment when she conveyed the news to him, her voice trembling with excitement. “You won. Everything turned out exactly as you said,” she says, her eyes searching Hakamada’s face, her hand touching his. “Everything is okay now. You can rest easy. Can you understand?”
Hakamada does not respond. He sits silently, his small sunken eyes looking straight ahead. His creased face appears as heavy and impenetrable as usual. But to my eye, I detect a faint trace of a smile.