Sayama Incident

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The Sayama Incident (狭山事件, Sayama Incident^?) is a murder case named after Sayama City, Saitama Prefecure, Japan, where it took place. The incident, in which a man was imprisoned for 31 years, highlighted official discrimination against Japan's Burakumin or untouchables.

1 Summary
2 Doubt over guilty verdict
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Summary

On May 1, 1963, 16-year-old Yoshie Nakata (中田善枝, Yoshie Nakata^? born May 1, 1947) went missing on her way home from school.^[1] Later that night, a ransom note was delivered to her house. The note asked to bring JPY200,000 (approximately US$556 at the time) to a place close to her house at 12:00am on May 2. Her sister brought the money to the designated place, with many policemen surrounding her. Although a man came to her and had several conversations, he escaped saying there are policemen around her. The police failed to arrest a possible suspect.

In the morning on May 4, the dead body of the victim was found underground on an alley in a farm. She was murdered after rape. The media criticized the police for making the same mistake of failing to catch the possible suspect within one month after another kidnapping case of Yoshinobu Murakoshi.

In order to cover up their mistake, the police went into a Buraku community on May 23 and arrested 24-year-old Kazuo Ishikawa (石川一雄, Kazuo Ishikawa^? born on January 14, 1939) on an unrelated charge. Although at first he denied the charge, from June 20 he began confessing that he had kidnapped and killed her. While in custody for over a month, the police forced Ishikawa to confess to the kidnapping in exchange for a number of unfulfilled promises.

Mr Ishikawa was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, later changed to life imprisonment. He was paroled and released from prison in 1994. Along with his supporters, he is still seeking a fair retrial and the chance to clear his name. "I want the label of murderer, which is bearing so heavily on me, removed", Mr Ishikawa said in 2002.^[2]

[edit] Doubt over guilty verdict

Since he was a resident of a discriminated burakumin social minority, human rights groups and lawyers claimed that the courts made the assumption that he was the criminal.^[3] He, and his supporters, insist that the police forced him to make a false confession by isolating and threatening him for almost a month. As is often with the people from Burakumin villages, he could not read or write and did not have the slightest knowledge of what a lawyer was. The police exploited that and made him suspicious by giving him false information about his lawyer. Finally the police succeeded in enforcing him to confess by a false promise that he will be freed within ten years if he confessed to the murder.