On Sun, 03 Aug 2003 14:50:21 +0900, Eric Takabayashi
<etakajp@yahoo.co.jp> belched the alphabet and kept on going with:

>Did you hear this last month?
>
>http://tinyurl.com/ivop

Nope, I missed that. Thanks for sharing. It just emphasizes even more
that despite Hirasawa having been dead for 16 years, the legal battle
is far from over.

Some remarks on the article, if I may:


===================================================================
It started Jan. 26, 1948, when a man claiming to be a public health
official walked into a branch of Teikoku Ginko (Imperial Bank) in
Tokyo's Shiinamachi district and told 16 clerks and customers
dysentery had broken out in the neighborhood. 

He told them to drink a liquid he claimed was a remedy.

The liquid was actually poison.

Twelve of the 16 people died, and the murderer escaped from the bank
with cash and checks.
===================================================================

It started the previous year when someone did something similar at two
other banks in Tokyo. The prosecution presents those two cases as
failed attempts. The defense argues that since nobody was injured in
either of them, they may have been dry-run practices.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Seven months later, Hirasawa, then a famous painter, was arrested as a
suspect. A health ministry official whose business card was presented
by the perpetrator of a similar poisoning attempt told police Hirasawa
was among those to whom he had given his card.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

This refers to the second "dry-run" incident. I hadn't heard it was a
health ministry official, though it may have been. The card was from a
Dr. Matsui, first name Shigeru, of Sendai. This was a man Hirasawa met
*one* time when they both passengers aboard the ferry from Aomori to
Hakodate. The card was presented to the manager of the second bank,
the person attempting to pass himself off as Dr. Matsui.

It turns out that this particular card came from a set of 100 cards
that Dr. Matsui had printed at a particular print shop. The cards
could be so identified because the shop didn't have the correct type
for the kanji he used for his first name. Instead, they jury-rigged a
type out of two others, giving the cards in this set a distinctive
appearance.

A Tokyo detective went to Dr. Matsui and interviewed him on people he
had exchanged cards with. Magnifying the problem greatly was the fact
that at the same period of time, in addition to the 100 unique cards,
Dr. Matsui was also using a batch of 500 cards he had had printed
elsewhere. 

Of the 100 unique cards:

        Still in Dr. Matsui's possession                7
        Still in recipient's possession                62
        No longer in recipient's possession            23
        Can't recall who he gave them to                8

Naturally, only the 69 cards in the first two lines are a sure thing.
The other 31 definitely went *somewhere*, with one of them being used
in the second bank case. Hirasawa no longer had the card he had
received, claiming it was inside a valise which was stolen at a train
station in Tokyo. Furthermore, remember that the doctor was using
cards from a different batch of 500 at the same time he was using the
batch of 100. Among the people who no longer had the card, for
whatever reason, it can't even be established *which* card they got.

There is a rumor that the investigator narrowed the list of people who
couldn't account for their cards down to about 14...and then consulted
a fortune teller who analyzed all the names based on their readings,
stroke count and whatnot. Then, based on all this hoo-doo he declared
that Hirasawa was the culprit. Again, that's just a rumor.

So far in the discussion of the card, while there is nothing that
directly irrefutably points at Hirasawa, there is also nothing that
exonerates him. Keep reading, here comes the good part...

At the trial it came out that Dr. Matsui's cards didn't bear his home
address. For those people whom he wished to have that info, he would
write it on the back with a pencil when he handed them his card. Dr.
Matsui had done so on the card he gave to Hirasawa. But at the time of
the trial it was found that although there had previously been writing
on the back of the card, it had been erased. Since the card was the
sole piece of physical evidence the prosecution had presented to link
Hirasawa to the crimes, a lot was riding on what had been written on
the card. The card was turned over to the Tokyo Police crime lab to be
analyzed. It was found that the erased writing originally said

        板橋区練馬安田銀行現場

Shades of O.J. Simpson evidence handling here. The cop who collected
the card from the Yasuda Bank crime scene wrote that on the card to
identify it. Later on, when somebody informed the dumbass that such is
*not* the way to be treating evidence, he (or they) compounded the
error by erasing it.

At any rate, it shows that the card left at the scene was *not* the
one that Hirasawa received.

====================================================================
He was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. The Supreme Court
upheld the sentence in 1955, mainly on the basis of a written
confession Hirasawa later retracted. He continued to maintain his
innocence.
====================================================================

No wonder he "retracted" it, he didn't even make it. He and the
prosecutors weren't even in the same building on the two days the
confessions were made.

That the confessions were forgeries was suspected by a MoJ lawyer, and
backed up by analysis from Osaka City College's crime lab and
statements from the head of the facility where Hirasawa was held. The
defense team used this as the basis for requesting a new trial.

The new trial was denied.

Under Japanese law, if you want to do something like that, it must
first be legally established that the item was a forgery. And they
have a very bizarre test for this: somebody has to be convicted of
making the forgery. So basically they say, "We don't give a shit if it
is demonstrably a forgery. Unless somebody had been arrested,
prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced for it, you can't use it".

So the defense team went to the prosecutor's office and filed a
criminal complaint regarding the forgery. The matter was referred to a
local branch of the prosecutor's office, which refused to take action
on it. With good reason, though. The statute of limitations for
prosecuting the forgery had expired 8 years previously. The law does
provide that in such cases, a new trial can be requested even without
a conviction, but it isn't clear whether the team did so or not.

One reason why it isn't clear is because the courts/prosecutors deny
the defense team access to or copies of PUBLIC records regarding the
case.



///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
The main piece of evidence in the 19th appeal is a memorandum by a
deceased investigator that indicates investigators at the time
believed someone from a secret unit within the old Imperial Japanese
Army must have been involved in the Teigin Incident.


The investigators believed the rare poison used in the murder could
only have been obtained by certain people, such as those working for
the notorious Unit 731, a secret organization within the army believed
to have conducted experiments on human victims during the war in an
effort to produce chemical arms and other weapons of mass destruction.

The supporters claim the poison was not potassium cyanide as the
courts ruled, because the poisoning symptoms weren't immediate.

But the investigators suddenly switched their attention to Hirasawa,
leading defense lawyers to suspect that pressure from government
authorities, who wanted to keep the unit's wartime activities secret,
was exerted on the investigative team.

The Japan Times: July 5, 2003
(C) All rights reserved 

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

And, reportedly, lots of records on the case from the GHQ side of the
matter have been obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. I
haven't read far enough to find anything that absolutely declares the
culprit to have been a Unit 731 member being protected by the US
military, but the records (that I've read so far) do support the
assertion that from the very beginning Japanese investigatory efforts
were focused squarely on people involved with that or similar units.
They sure as hell weren't rooting around for a 56 year-old artist.



















































--

Michael Cash



"There was a time, Mr. Cash, when I believed you must be the most useless
thing in the world. But that was before I read a Microsoft help file."

                                Prof. Ernest T. Bass
                                Mount Pilot College


http://www.sunfield.ne.jp/~mike/