Path: ccsf.homeunix.org!ccsf.homeunix.org!news1.wakwak.com!nf1.xephion.ne.jp!onion.ish.org!onodera-news!newsfeed.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp!npeer.de.kpn-eurorings.net!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!fe030019.fl.freebit.ne.JP!not-for-mail From: Michael Cash Newsgroups: fj.life.in-japan Subject: Re: Teigin A Walk Down Memory Lane Date: Sun, 03 Aug 2003 17:02:36 +0900 Lines: 246 Message-ID: References: <11soivkr9infso60pu0homl7mnsj3ebvje@4ax.com> <3F2CA29D.F168B20F@yahoo.co.jp> NNTP-Posting-Host: fe030019.fl.freebit.ne.jp (219.112.30.19) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-2022-jp Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: news.uni-berlin.de 1059897752 25136934 219.112.30.19 (16 [51151]) X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 1.8/32.548 Xref: ccsf.homeunix.org fj.life.in-japan:3896 On Sun, 03 Aug 2003 14:50:21 +0900, Eric Takabayashi 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/