Japan’s top law enforcement officials apologized to the family of a businessman who was wrongfully arrested and died after a months-long detention.
Shizuo Aishima, a former adviser to machinery firm Ohkawara Kakohki, was one of three company executives illegally held in pretrial detention for months on charges that were later dropped.
Human rights campaigners have long demanded an end to Japan’s “hostage justice” practice, where investigators use lengthy pretrial detentions to coerce confessions.
Senior officials from the Tokyo police, the top public prosecutor’s department and the Tokyo prosecutor’s office visited Aishima’s family and grave on Monday. The officials knelt and prayed in front of the grave, the Japan Times reported.
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“We sincerely apologize for conducting the illegal investigation and arrest,” Tetsuro Kamata, deputy superintendent-general of Tokyo Metropolitan Police, said during a televised meeting with the family.
Aishima’s wife said: “I accept the apology but I won’t be able to forgive.”
The three men were detained and indicted in March 2020 on charges they illegally exported spray dryers capable of producing biological weapons — exports they argued were legal.
Aishima was diagnosed with progressive cancer in October 2020, but prosecutors kept him detained, arguing that he could destroy evidence if released. He was admitted to a hospital a month later.
His two colleagues were released in February 2021 on condition that they would not meet with Aishima, preventing them from seeing him before he died that same month.
Prosecutors later dropped the charges, prompting Aishima’s family and colleagues to sue authorities.
The Tokyo police and Tokyo prosecutors apologized directly to the company and others in June, the Japan Times reported. In its report on the investigation, police said that “it lacked fundamental investigative principles as an organization, and that the chain of command was dysfunctional,” the outlet reported.
The Tokyo High Court found that the investigation, arrests and indictment were illegal and not supported by evidence.
The family’s lawyer Tsuyoshi Takada told a press conference that the men’s detention — authorized several times in court — “was not the mistake of a single judge.”
“We need to change the mistaken attitudes of all judges,” he said. “The court must learn from this and think about what they can do so that there won’t be more victims of ‘hostage justice’ in the future.”
Aishima’s eldest son said he had mixed feelings about the apologies and requested a new investigation of the case, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported.
“I take them as a step forward, as they acknowledged the unlawfulness of the arrest, detention requests and prosecution,” he said. “I cannot accept the findings of your reviews and the disciplinary actions taken.”