Iwao Hakamada Was the World’s Longest-Held Death-Row Inmate. He Was Also Innocent.

On a sunny morning in October 2023, a 90-year-old woman in a blue blazer walked slowly toward the main courthouse in Shizuoka, a city on the Japanese coast about a two-hour drive south of Tokyo. The woman, Hideko Hakamada, led a procession of lawyers and supporters carrying a broad, sky-blue banner, and as they approached the courthouse, a throng of some 300 people began clapping and chanting encouragement. A cluster of TV-news crews had set up nearby, and Hideko turned to greet them.

As she told the court later the same morning, she had come to right a wrong that had been done in that very building 55 years earlier. Hideko Hakamada is the sister of Iwao Hakamada, a former professional boxer whose long struggle for justice has become one of the most celebrated legal causes in Japanese history. He was found guilty of murdering four people in 1966, in a trial so flawed that it has become a textbook example of wrongful conviction.

Hakamada was sentenced to death, and spent the next five decades in a state of debilitating fear. Prisoners in Japan are not told when they will be executed; they listen every morning for the footsteps that could precede a key turning in their cell door and then a short walk to the hanging chamber. No warning is given to their lawyers or family members. Hakamada spent longer on death row than anyone else in history, earning a spot in Guinness World Records. He wrote eloquently about the daily mental torture he endured, and in the end it drove him mad. His agony changed the lives of many people around him, including one of the original judges, who became convinced of his innocence and spent the rest of his own life racked with guilt.

In recent years, Hakamada, who is now 88, has become a symbol in Japan not just of wronged innocence but of what is known as hitojichi shiho, or “hostage justice.” Police in Japan have the power to hold suspects and interrogate them for months without giving them access to a lawyer. The goal is to extract a confession, which Japanese prosecutors see as the centerpiece of any successful criminal case. Hakamada was subjected to brutal interrogations for 23 days—lasting up to 16 hours a day—until he signed a confession (which he recanted soon afterward).

These routine practices have led to a conviction rate of 99.8 percent for cases that go to trial. They have also led to so many accusations of coercion that there is now a Japanese word for the phenomenon—enzai, meaning “false accusations leading to imprisonment.” The system is also heavily weighted against granting retrials that might give convicted people a second chance. In Hakamada’s case, it took more than 50 years for him to receive one.

The Japanese fixation on obtaining confessions is centuries old. As Takashi Takano, a prominent Tokyo attorney and a critic of the system, explained to me, it is rooted in a belief that the state must elicit remorse from offenders in order to rehabilitate them and bolster social harmony. One of Takano’s clients was Carlos Ghosn, the former Nissan CEO, who was smuggled from Japan in a musical-equipment box in 2019 after being arrested on charges of financial misconduct and interrogated for hundreds of hours. The Ghosn case gave the outside world a rare glimpse of the power of Japanese prosecutors.

The facts of the Hakamada case were egregious enough to anger even insiders. In 2014, a judge released Hakamada from prison, granting him a retrial and delivering a stinging rebuke to the police, strongly suggesting that they had fabricated the evidence—a pile of bloodstained clothing—that had helped convict him. According to the judge, the man who supervised Hakamada’s interrogation was known among lawyers as the “king of torture.” The long-delayed retrial concluded in May, and Hakamada was finally acquitted in late September.

At this point, Hakamada may be beyond understanding what his exoneration means. He has sometimes said things that suggest he believes he was never in prison. He appears to have survived only by escaping into an imaginary world where he is all-powerful—a king, an emperor, even “the almighty God.” (Hakamada embraced Catholicism while in prison.) But the prospect of a retrial helped galvanize a reform movement led by lawyers, ex-judges, other wrongly convicted people, and even some Japanese boxers, who see Hakamada as both a figure of heroic suffering and the victim of a lingering social prejudice against their sport. These advocates have been pushing Japanese officials to rewrite the laws that undergird the practice of hostage justice. Many of them have drawn inspiration from Hakamada’s own prison writings, copied and passed around in samizdat form.

“Conscience is the only voice that protects the life of an innocent man,” he wrote in a journal entry in 1981, when he was still lucid. “The voice of conscience echoing ever louder and higher for as long as the agonizing nights last.”

When I first saw Iwao Hakamada, he was sitting at a table in the third-floor apartment he shares with Hideko, eating cooked eel and rice from a bowl. He still has the small, sturdy frame of a featherweight boxer, along with a large, sloping forehead and small eyes that give him the look of a sleep-addled bear.

Hideko, who had met me at the door, introduced me to her brother. I bowed a greeting, but Hakamada glanced up only briefly and went back to his eel and rice. The apartment was relatively large by Japanese standards, and it struck me that it must have seemed vast when Hakamada was released from his tiny cell. With Hideko’s encouragement, I said a few words about why I was there and asked my first question, about why he had become a boxer.

“Because I decided I needed to be strong,” he replied. It was a promising start for a man who was said to have lost touch with reality. But then he got up quickly and walked away, signaling that the interview was over. Hideko had warned me that her brother was no longer capable of telling a stranger his story.

Nonetheless, the long arc of his incarceration—from passionate self-defense to deepening despair to encroaching insanity—is captured in some 5,000 handwritten letters and journal entries that Hakamada produced in prison. In a sense, those pages are where his soul resides, perhaps more so than in the ghostly old man who was now sitting in a leather armchair in the next room. They were the real reason I had come.

Hideko got me a cup of tea and began carrying heavy boxes of Hakamada’s prison letters and journals to the table, brushing off my efforts to help. She is small but impressively fit for her age, with a habitual expression of resilient good humor on her face. The pages are in bound volumes, each one as thick as a bible.

She began leafing through them, showing me how Hakamada’s handwriting had changed over the years. It starts out wobbly and cartoonish; he had never been a good student, she said. He was the youngest of six siblings born to a working-class family in a village near Shizuoka, a quiet boy who loved animals and used to bring home cats and birds and give them names. Hideko was the second-youngest, by her own account a tomboy and a loudmouth. “He would imitate what I did,” she said. He began boxing when he was 19—there was a gym nearby—and turned professional at the age of 23, boxing 19 matches in a single year (a record in Japan). But he decided to retire after an injury, and eventually got a job at a small miso factory not far from his parents’ home. He married a local woman, and the couple had a child.

Hideko paused, resting her hand on one of the binders, and then told me about the night that changed everything: June 30, 1966. A fire broke out after midnight in the home of the miso factory’s director, and after the flames had been put out, investigators discovered the burned bodies of the director, his wife, and two of their children. They had all been stabbed to death. The following morning, Hakamada went to his parents’ house, where Hideko was still living, to talk about the shocking news. Meanwhile, the police settled on Hakamada as the most likely suspect among the firm’s employees, believing the crime to have been an inside job and apparently seeing his boxing skills as proof of a capacity for violence.

During the 23 days of interrogation in a Shizuoka station house, the police used methods that were common in Japan when authorities were trying to extract a confession: sleep deprivation, threats, beatings. I spoke with two other people who had tried to maintain their innocence in similar circumstances, and both told me they had become so physically and emotionally spent that they would have said or signed almost anything to escape. The confession Hakamada ultimately signed is implausible on its face: He admitted to multiple scenarios, all of which seem to have been suggested to him by the police. Cash had been stolen from the home, but the police were never able to trace any of it to him.

“Please, God, I am not the killer,” he wrote in one of many letters to his mother during the first trial. “I am screaming it every day, and one day I hope people will hear my voice that reaches them through this Shizuoka wind.”

Hakamada could not have known it, but one of the judges who faced him as he first entered the courthouse in 1967 was a silent rebel against the Japanese way of justice. At 30, Norimichi Kumamoto was only a year younger than Hakamada, but in most ways their lives could not have been more different. Kumamoto was the eldest of four children, and had been recognized as brilliant from an early age. In pictures, he is austerely handsome, with creased brows and a firmly set mouth. He was well known at university, one of his classmates, Akira Kitani, told me, not just for his intellect but for his displays of brazen independence in a culture that fostered conformity. During the oral part of the bar exam, Kumamoto argued with his examiners—a shocking act of insubordination. “He won the argument, but they failed him” for talking back, Kitani, who later became a distinguished criminal-court judge, told me. (Kumamoto went on to earn the top score out of 10,000 students after he was allowed to retake the exam.)

Kumamoto also stood out for his interest in defendants’ rights. Seiki Ogata, a Japanese journalist who wrote a book about the judge, described him as an admirer of Chief Justice Earl Warren, who wrote the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1966 Miranda decision requiring that suspects be read their rights before being interrogated. This was an unusual perspective in a country where law-enforcement officials have openly declared their belief that, as one of them put it, “the right to silence is a cancer.”

Kumamoto appears to have sensed that something was wrong soon after Hakamada’s trial began. The prosecutors had no plausible evidence tying Hakamada to the crime and no plausible motive for him to have been involved in the killings. Years afterward, according to Ogata’s biography, the judge recalled being moved by the boxer’s air of confidence as he asserted his innocence; unlike some other defendants, Hakamada did not seem drawn by an urge to explain himself. “I rather feel that we are being judged from now on,” Kumamoto remembered telling one of the two other judges hearing the case, according to the biography. (Some serious criminal trials are handled by three judges in Japan.)

Almost a year into the trial—the Japanese justice system tends to take its time—the police claimed to have discovered a pile of bloody clothes at the bottom of a miso tank from the factory. They declared—though they could not prove—that the clothes were Hakamada’s, and that he had hidden them there after the murders.

Judge Kumamoto thought the discovery of the new evidence was far too convenient to be real. The bloodstains were oddly fresh-looking on clothes that were said to have been stewing in a miso vat for 14 months, and at trial, the clothes would be shown not to fit Hakamada. Kumamoto wanted to acquit. But according to Ogata, the other two judges on the panel, both senior to him, could not believe that the police or prosecutors had coerced a false confession.

Such faith remains common among Japanese judges. Some spend an entire career on the bench without once delivering an acquittal. “In theory, the prosecutors monitor the police, and the judge monitors the prosecutors,” Hiroshi Ichikawa, who spent almost 13 years as a prosecutor and is now a defense lawyer, told me. “But it doesn’t work like this at all. The prosecutor basically does what the police want, and the judges follow what the prosecutor wants. So the criminal-justice system is basically controlled by the police.”

Prosecutors are afraid to cross the police, who have much larger investigative resources, and often cover up their mistakes. Ichikawa startled me by disclosing that he had once, as a prosecutor, personally threatened to kill a suspect if he didn’t confess. He said his former colleagues mostly haven’t changed their ways.

In the summer of 1968, after weeks of difficult arguments among themselves, the three judges in the Hakamada trial held a vote. Kumamoto was alone in finding Hakamada not guilty. Then came a second blow: As the presiding judge on the panel, he was obliged to write the decision justifying the verdict.

Kumamoto reluctantly agreed—to refuse might have ended his career—but he produced a 350-page document that is a poignant record of a tortured conscience. He criticized the investigators’ tactics at length and appeared to be headed for an acquittal. But he then concluded that the defendant was guilty and must be executed.

Another judge who reviewed Kumamoto’s ruling many years later told me that the document was “very unusual, to the point that it’s abnormal … If you read the verdict, you can see that there was not just disagreement but serious conflict of opinion” among the judges.

Kumamoto refused to sign his own ruling. He said he tried to visit Hakamada in jail to apologize, but was not granted permission. “Kumamoto believed the higher courts would overturn the verdict, but they didn’t,” Ogata, his biographer, told me. “In the end, he felt really responsible for what happened.” That feeling would shape the remainder of his life.

The 1968 death sentence was a reckoning for everyone in the Hakamada family. Hakamada’s mother, who had been healthy and strong, fell into despair and died two months after the sentencing. His father died not long afterward. Hakamada was so attached to his parents that his siblings kept the news from him for more than a year. He continued to write to his mother regularly, and finally the siblings decided they had to tell him. “I felt a great shock, and my whole body instantly froze,” he wrote in a letter to his brother. “I could do nothing except look at my uncontrollably trembling hands. Feeling the trepidation like dark waves overtaking my body, I was taken by the urge to curse every being in this world.”

Hideko showed me more of Hakamada’s writings from the years that followed. He studied hard in prison, and his kanji characters become impressively neat and elegant, in perfectly ordered lines; they look like the work of a different person. His thoughts are more focused. He talks about the details of his case, and sometimes expounds on the nature of freedom and solitude. In a letter from December 1976, he describes feeling relief and inspiration after meeting with students from a human-rights group: “They believe I’m innocent. That’s why they support my cause. It’s clear that the verdict of the high court is nonsense … It is extremely brutal and unfair, prejudiced, to give a sentence based on a factual error.”

Hakamada also wrote a diary entry addressed to his son, who was 2 and a half years old when he was arrested. “Son, I want you to grow up honest and brave,” he wrote.

He seems to have been referring to Judge Kumamoto, though the entry does not say so.

Hakamada’s wife had divorced him while he was in prison. It was there Hakamada learned that the boy had been placed in an orphanage and that the letters he sent to his son never reached him, Hideko told me. She said she has not seen the boy since he was a toddler, and seemed reluctant to talk about him. But her brother sometimes still calls out his son’s name: Akira. He would be 60 years old today.

Some of the letters and meditations Hakamada produced in prison are lyrical. “For some reason, moonlight gives me hope and peace,” he wrote. “When I think that many people outside prison are also looking at the moon, I feel a sense of freedom with other people who also gaze at the moonlight.”

Although he was on death row, Hakamada remained both hopeful and angry throughout the 1970s, sure that his conviction would be overturned on appeal. At times, he wrote about other cases of wrongful conviction that he became aware of through friends or lawyers. “This scream that I have continued to vocalize has not been listened to for the past 13 years,” he wrote to a boxing commentator. “The lack of responsibility of Japan’s justice system is so serious that my skin boils from anger.”

In 1980, Japan’s supreme court confirmed Hakamada’s death sentence. Six months later, the man in the cell next to him, who had become a friend, was taken out one morning without warning and hanged. This was a period of terrible suffering, Hideko told me. She felt as if her heart would stop every time she heard about an execution on TV. Hakamada’s journal entries and letters are a dark window into his state of mind. “Death-row inmates unanimously agree they fear execution very much,” he wrote in a letter to his brother. “In fact, it’s not the execution itself they fear: They fear so much the mind that fears execution. This agony, the pain that comes from extreme anxiety, completely differs from the pain and suffering accompanied by the concept of death.”

A shadow seemed to fall over Hideko’s face as she showed me some of the pages that followed, from the 1980s. “He started to talk about people sending him signals by radio waves,” she said, pointing to the Japanese script. Later, there was talk of monkeys in his cell with him, and he started wearing bags on his head and arms to protect himself from harmful emanations.

Among the most striking letters are those in which Hakamada seems to be persuading himself that he can find meaning in his suffering. “My wish to win innocence is something that is purified and deepened when I accept loneliness,” he wrote from his cell, a concrete box about seven feet on each side. “Loneliness is certainly very sad and painful, but it is never meaningless. When one endures and humbly accepts loneliness, one will surely realize the deep meaning of the path to victory.”

But as the years passed with no hope of release—and with sudden execution a daily possibility—his mind continued to unravel. You can see it in his handwriting, which gradually loses its discipline and becomes loopy and uneven again, as if he were returning to his childhood self. At times, he seemed to hover between madness and reason within a single paragraph:

All through the decades of Hakamada’s imprisonment, Kumamoto was tormented by his role in the case. He resigned his judgeship in disgust less than a year after the verdict, a shocking decision for someone who had been seen as a rising star. He found work as a lawyer and university lecturer. He also became an alcoholic. Two marriages ended in divorce. He grew estranged from his two daughters, who didn’t understand the source of his misery until many years later, Ogata told me.

According to Ogata, Kumamoto once turned himself in to the police, saying he’d committed a murder; he may have been drunk at the time. He seems to have carried Hakamada everywhere, like an accusing ghost. On learning that Hakamada had embraced Catholicism in prison, Kumamoto also embraced Catholicism. At one point, he went to a church and asked to confess his sins, because he “wanted to feel closer” to him, Ogata wrote in his book.

Kumamoto appears to have kept his belief in Hakamada’s innocence almost entirely to himself. Japanese judges are expected to remain silent about their deliberations, and stoicism about one’s suffering has long been a part of Japan’s culture, perhaps especially for men. But in 2007, while living in retirement in southern Japan, Kumamoto began hearing about an emerging movement to free Hakamada, which had attracted the attention of some lawmakers. He sent a note to one of the activists, offering to help. Soon afterward, he appeared on a public panel about the death penalty, where he discussed his role in the trial and declared that he believed Hakamada was innocent. He also made an apology. “This is the moment when something that had been stuck in my throat and was suffocating me finally disappeared,” Kumamoto later told his biographer.

Kumamoto’s comments were reported widely in Japan, partly because he had violated the judicial code of silence. He spoke again at a session of Japan’s Parliament. The story of his long-repressed guilt and grief captured the public’s imagination, and gave rise to a feature film that was released in 2010, titled Box: The Hakamada Case, in reference to Hakamada’s career as a fighter. It was not a great movie—dramatizing a man sitting alone in a cell for almost five decades is hard—but the film did help draw more attention to Hakamada’s situation, both in Japan and beyond.

Hideko met Kumamoto at the time of his public apology. She told me she was deeply grateful to him for what he had done. Her brother was still locked up, but he was no longer seen as a monster. “Since the news report went out, the world has changed,” she said. “Even strangers greeted me on the street with a smile.”

Hideko has become something of a public figure in her own right. A manga-style graphic novel about her was published in 2020. She has the kind of life force that you sense the moment you walk into a room—her head cocked slightly, her eyes gleaming with amusement. She seems immune to regret, and laughs so often that it is easy to forget what she has been through.

She was 35 when Hakamada was convicted of murder, and it turned her into a pariah, along with the rest of the family. The local papers were full of stories portraying her brother as a demon. She got hate mail from strangers. She grew lonely and depressed, and drank herself to sleep every night for three years, she told me. But she pulled herself together, recognizing that she was her brother’s only hope. She visited him in prison as often as she could. She lived alone, working long hours at a government office and then at an accounting firm. I later learned—from the graphic novel about her life—that she had been briefly married as a young woman, but she’d never mentioned that to me. In a sense, she was married to her brother’s cause.

Starting in the ’90s, with Hideko’s help, a movement to exonerate Hakamada slowly coalesced. It attracted a diverse collection of people, and some pursued the cause with the kind of nerdy obsessiveness characteristic of otaku—a Japanese term for a person with a consuming hobby. One volunteer performed meticulous experiments with bloody clothing soaked in miso over long periods to show that the prosecution’s claims in the original trial did not hold up. These experiments were so rigorous and well documented that they were cited by the defense at Hakamada’s retrial many years later.

Among the movement’s most passionate supporters were Japanese boxers. One of them, a retired bantamweight champion named Shosei Nitta, started accompanying Hideko on her prison visits in the early 2000s. Then he began going alone, once a month. “You couldn’t converse in a normal way, except about boxing,” Nitta told me when I visited him at his Tokyo boxing gym. Nitta cocked his arm, showing me how he and Hakamada would discuss the best technique for a hook punch. Dozens of champion boxers protested in front of the supreme court, calling for a retrial.

Among the many things the boxers did for Hakamada was reach out to Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the American prizefighter who was catapulted to fame after Bob Dylan wrote a song about his wrongful murder conviction. (He served 19 years behind bars before his release in 1985.) Hakamada himself had written to Carter in 1989, congratulating him on his exoneration and pledging to “follow in your footsteps.” Two decades later, a fellow boxer traveled to the United States and brought back a videotape of Carter offering his support to Hakamada, who was still on death row.

“In the boxing community, we share this mysterious bond,” Nitta told me. “But in mainstream society, it’s not really approved of. We are trying to resist this prejudice, and I think that is why Hakamada means so much to us.”

Social prejudice appears to be a common thread in many wrongful-conviction cases in Japan. One of Hakamada’s death-row companions—their cells were adjoining—was a man named Kazuo Ishikawa, who belongs to the burakumin, the descendants of a feudal caste that was consigned to low-status jobs and still suffers from discrimination. Ishikawa was convicted of a 1963 murder on the basis of a coerced confession and a ransom note, even though he was illiterate at the time. He was paroled in 1994, but has always maintained his innocence and is still, at age 85, trying to clear his name.

Hideko and her eclectic band of boxers and otaku have helped elevate a broader effort to address the flaws in Japan’s criminal-justice system. More people are coming forward to contest their verdicts, and several nonprofits have sprung up to support those they believe to have been wrongly convicted. There is now an Innocence Project Japan, inspired by the American group formed in 1992, that uses DNA evidence to challenge convictions. The movement has had some modest victories: Defense lawyers have gained more discovery rights and have pushed back against detention orders. Some police interrogations are now recorded. A “lay judge” initiative, begun in 2009, allows a mixed panel of three professional judges and an average of six citizens to decide guilt and sentencing in some serious criminal cases.

There have also been setbacks. A lawsuit challenging Japan’s long-standing practice of notifying death-row inmates only hours before their execution—which likely played a role in driving Hakamada insane—was dismissed by the Osaka district court in April.

Change of any kind comes slowly in Japan, where those who question authority are more likely to be slapped than rewarded. Most people seem to have deep confidence in the justice system, and they are not entirely wrong: Japan incarcerates far fewer people per capita than the United States, partly because prosecutors are cautious about pressing charges for less serious crimes. Sentences tend to be relatively light, especially for those who admit their guilt and express remorse. Prosecutors believe they have a responsibility to help offenders return to a useful life.

But they bridle at the notion that justice can be arrived at through a messy legal tussle, as in American courtrooms. In Japan, the legal system behaves more like some archaic deity: kind to those who accept its judgments, and merciless to those who do not.

In 2014, after his legal team had spent more than 30 years pleading for a retrial, Hakamada was finally granted one by a district court. Hideko was then 81 years old and retired. She went to the prison to give her brother the good news, trailed by a film crew. As she was leaving, a guard offered her boxes full of her brother’s belongings. Hakamada then walked into the room and sat down next to her. The judge, it turned out, had ordered Hakamada’s immediate release. Hideko was totally unprepared. They had to ask for a ride from the film crew, but Hakamada, who hadn’t been in a car in decades, got motion sickness. They ended up spending the night in a Tokyo hotel before heading home to Hamamatsu, the city where Hideko now lives.

Hideko struggled to get her head around the magnitude of what had just happened. The judge had not only released Hakamada and granted a retrial; he had taken a sledgehammer to the entire case. He asserted that the investigators appeared to have faked the evidence. He cited DNA evidence, not available during the first trial, showing that the blood on the clothes from the miso tank was neither Hakamada’s nor the murder victims’.

It might have ended there. The judge had made clear that he believed Hakamada was innocent, and his ruling seemed unanswerable. Instead, prosecutors appealed his call for a retrial. As Hakamada moved in with his sister and began readapting to a world he had not inhabited since the mid-1960s, his case staggered from one false ending to another. Finally, in 2023, the Tokyo High Court affirmed his right to a retrial. Prosecutors, who were widely expected to give up, declared that they would seek his conviction for murder all over again.

There was little logic in their decision. They had no new evidence, and their chances of victory were near zero. But as Makoto Ibusuki, a professor at Tokyo’s Seijo University and an authority on wrongful convictions, explained to me, Japanese prosecutors tend to see their institution as infallible. There may have been an added spur in this instance. The prosecutors who brought the original case had been accused in the 2014 ruling of using fabricated evidence. David Johnson, an expert on the Japanese legal system who teaches at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told me that their successors may have felt obliged to defend their reputation.

The retrial, which began in October 2023, was like a bad case of déjà vu, with the same exhibits of bloodstained clothes and miso tanks that had been used half a century earlier—though the state quietly withdrew Hakamada’s discredited confession. “The prosecutors just repeat what has already been said,” Hideko told me. “The expressions on their faces said, Why do we have to be here? ”

For all its frustrations, the retrial gave a big platform to opponents of hostage justice. The movement’s buoyant mood was on display at a memorial service I attended this past April at a Tokyo meeting hall. It was held to honor a man who had been exonerated years earlier after serving nearly three decades for murder. I found myself chatting with an 80-year-old man in an ill-fitting brown blazer who said he had served 20 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. We were standing by a big picture window, and he pointed out the headquarters of the National Police Agency across the street. He had been tortured in there for weeks on end, he said, in a basement room with no windows and no clocks. “I understand completely how an innocent man ends up writing a confession,” he said.

But much of the Japanese public does not understand. The widow of the exonerated man being honored gave a brief but powerful speech, during which she said her father hadn’t wanted her to marry a man who had been convicted of a crime, because he believed that “the courthouse never lies.”

A nonpartisan group of some 200 Parliament members now wants to make it easier for defendants to receive a retrial and is preparing to propose amendments to the law. But getting any such measure past Japan’s powerful Justice Ministry will not be easy. It is dominated by prosecutors, and has sent clear signs that it is opposed to reform.

When Hakamada got out of prison, Hideko didn’t ask him about his time on the inside. “I was waiting until he spoke,” she told me. But he never has. Occasionally, he refers obliquely to his time there as “training,” as if it had been preparation for some otherworldly combat.

He talks about being visited by the spirits of his dead friends, the ones who were led away to the execution chamber, where a prison official stands behind a blue curtain and presses a button that ends a person’s life. “When he first came here, he’d say there were spirits of the dead trapped in the closet,” Hideko told me. “He’d tap on it and try to release them.”

Hakamada’s days revolve around a long, mostly silent, drive that he is taken on every afternoon, his eyes focused on the passing streets. He believes that evil influences lurk unseen, Hideko told me, and that he alone can fight them, like the boxer he once was. “He feels very strongly that he must surveil,” she said. “He needs to go all over Hamamatsu city. To surveil and protect.”

The acquittal that arrived in September was a balm for Hideko and her supporters. But it came too late for one of them. Judge Kumamoto, the author of the 1968 decision, was already seriously ill with cancer when Hakamada was released. The two men’s lives had been deeply intertwined for decades, but they had never met outside the courtroom.

In early 2018, Hideko brought her brother to Kumamoto’s hospital bed; he was pale and skeletal, an oxygen tube strapped under his nose. He looked to be on the verge of death, though he would live for two more years.

The meeting was captured on film. The two visitors, dressed in heavy winter clothes, appear somber and dumbstruck as they gaze down at the stricken man. Her brother didn’t seem to understand whom he was looking at, Hideko told me. But Kumamoto clearly knew the face of the man he had condemned 50 years earlier.

“Iwao,” the judge said, in a scratchy whisper. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

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This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “A Boxer on Death Row.”