Two years ago today, Japan resumed executions after a break of more than a year with four hangings.
Septuagenarians Yoshio Fujinami (wheelchair-bound) and Yoshimitsu Akiyama (partially blind) both needed the guards’ assistance to reach the trap at Tokyo Detention Center, a mere hour after they were informed of their imminent demise.
Two other prisoners, 64-year-old Michio Fukuoka and 44-year-old Hiroaki Hidaka, were simultaneously hanged in Osaka and Hiroshima, respectively.
Hidaka, a serial killer, had dropped his appeals and thus died a mere 12 years after his crimes. Fukouka died maintaining his innocence of three murders from 1978-81 he said police torture had forced him to confess. The oldest men were on the hook for killings dating to 1975 and 1981. (Much more from The Japan Times.)
Talk about justice delayed.
In Japan’s strange death penalty system, the condemned might await death for decades only to be hanged, as these were, with next to no warning. Their families and supporters did not hear about it until after the deed was done.
These hangings, though protested, were not altogether unexpected, for a break in the Japanese Diet around the end of the year often heralds an appearance on the public stage by the gallows. (Look for them in 2008 as the Diet goes out of session starting today.) And a turnover at the top of the Justice Ministry had replaced a pol disinclined to authorize any hangings, the source of the long break between executions during a decade when Japan’s use of the death penalty has generally been intensifying.
Although at least one particularly pressing motivation for this date’s hanging will not be present this year. After the long hiatus, an anonymous official told a newspaper,
We absolutely wanted to avoid ending the year with zero executions.
Renowned among espionage aficionados for supposedly forewarning Moscow of the exact date of Germany’s planned surprise attack in 1941, Richard Sorge’s work in the pregnant years leading up to World War II produced multiple intelligence coups and could lay claim to the uncommon distinction of having materially affected the course of the war.
His signal achievement was establishing, as a foreigner in a highly xenophobic Japan, a spy ring that for years penetrated the highest levels of the Japanese government and the German embassy, giving Moscow an inside look at Axis planning.
Working under the cover of journalism in the German expat community — he had grown up in a mixed German-Russian household in Berlin and won the Iron Cross for his service in the Kaiser’s army in World War I before embracing communism — Sorge struck Hitler from half a world away. His access to the German embassy was untrammeled — indeed, he had an affair with the ambassador’s wife. His lead Japanese collaborator Hotsumi Ozaki was a major public intellectual similarly privy to sensitive information through his contacts.
The two, along with several other Japanese and foreign collaborators, produced a steady diet of top-shelf intelligence, including the (ignored) forecast of Operation Barbarossa. But the ring’s most important coup — arguably a decisive one in the history of the war as a whole — was to inform Moscow in September 1941 that Japan did not intend to attack the Russian Far East. Relieved of the nightmare prospect of a two-front war, Stalin transfered desperately needed Siberian divisions to help throw back the German advance on Moscow.
Japan by 1941 was a dangerous place to operate, however, and the nerve-rattling work — and the alcoholism to which it contributed — were taking its toll on the master spy just as the authorities were closing in. Sorge and his ring were arrested in October 1941.
Sorge’s decisive communique regarding Japanese intentions in the East had not yet borne its fruit. The war had nearly four years yet to run, and Sorge would languish in prison for most of them — long enough to leave fellow detainees with recollections of the captured operative jubilant at Red Army victories. Soviet tanks were at Germany’s doorstep by the time the two went to the gallows, one after the other, with the few minutes’ notice still customary for Japanese hangings to this day.
The spies in history who can say from their graves, the infomation I supplied to my masters, for better or worse, altered the history of our planet, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Richard Sorge was in that group.
-Frederick Forsythe
Sorge’s personal role in the crucible of world-shaping politics have proven a compelling topic for biographers. Among the notable works:
The Soviet government did not officially acknowledge Sorge until 1964, but the case had immediate and widespread interest in Japan. Ozaki inspired an early Kurosawa film, No Regrets for Our Youth:
The espionage ring’s operations were also the subject of a recent multilingual Japanese epic, Spy Sorge:
The two, along with several other Japanese and foreign collaborators, produced a steady diet of top-shelf intelligence, including the (ignored) forecast of 
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