Sayama Incident - Arrest and Trial

Arrest and Trial

In order to cover up their mistake, the police went into a Buraku community on May 23 and arrested 24-year-old Kazuo Ishikawa (石川 一雄, Ishikawa Kazuo?, born on January 14, 1939) on an unrelated charge. Although at first he denied the charge, from June 20 he capitulated to the pressure and began confessing that he had kidnapped and killed her.

He and his supporters insist that the police forced him to make a false confession by isolating and threatening him for almost a month. As is often the case with the people from Burakumin villages, he could not read or write. He also did not have the slightest knowledge of what a lawyer was. The police exploited that and made him seem suspicious by giving him false information about his lawyer. Finally, the police arranged a plea bargain that he would be freed within ten years if he confessed to the murder. The police then wrote up a confession for him which he signed.

Ishikawa was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, later changed to life imprisonment. In 1969 the Buraku Liberation League took up his case but mostly just to criticize his lawyer as a supporter of the Japanese Communist Party. The Communist Party in turn criticized the Buraku Liberation League. In 1975 he dismissed his lawyer, who cited Ishikawa's anti-Communist sympathies in his letter of resignation. The battle between the two groups continued into 1976. Ishikawa's brother is the chief of the Sayama, Saitama branch of the Buraku Liberation League.

He was paroled and released from prison in 1994. Along with his supporters, he is still seeking a fair retrial and the chance to clear his name. "I want the label of murderer, which is bearing so heavily on me, removed", Ishikawa said in 2002.

He remains guilty now. Since he was a resident of a discriminated burakumin social minority, human rights groups and lawyers claimed that the courts made the assumption that he was the criminal.