TOKYO, Nov. 10, 2022—As a popular long-time partner of Japan’s most-famous comedian-actor, the late Ken Shimura, Masashi ‘Marcy’ Tashiro had used a toothpick to give a more animated, cute expression on a wooden doll he was assigned to handcraft, when a young warden walked up and shouted, ‘What’s this?!’
When Marcy told the warden that using a toothpick is more efficient in making wooden dolls, the warden retorted, ‘Don’t give me a bullshit, Idiot?!’ Tashiro was ordered into a solitary confinement cell for weeks denied reading, television and other activities except daily meals and once-a-week shower and exercise. At another time, a young warden told Tashiro: ‘Shame on you for being slighted so badly by the young guys (inmates) (presumably for his past self-deprecating comedian acts)!
Tashiro, 66, was one of key partners and disciples of Ken Shimura, Japan’s most popular comedian who died of Corvid-19 in March 2020 at age 70. Tashiro had been appearing in television comedy shows with Shimura since the 1980s. Their shows continue drawing millions of viewers in Japan, Taiwan and Asian countries even after Shimura’s death. Shimura began recruiting Tashiro less frequently over years after Tashiro’s arrest for drug use. He was arrested five times and served three prison terms, the most recent 30 months since July 2020, weeks after his second term. He served the full 30 months at the Kurobane penitentiary in Fukushima province and was released on Oct. 27. Tashiro told his prison experience to the monthly magazine Flash, which published the article on-line on Nov. 9, 2022.
The Japanese prison system ranks inmates 1-5 grades, 5 being the lowest. Tashiro had been stuck at 5 throughout the 30 months. The penitentiary did not even allow visitors to hand color pencils to Tashiro. He also was denied purchasing sweets from outside vendors twice a month. Grade 1 inmates were allowed to buy up to 1,000 yen ($7) equivalent of sweets, and grade 5 were totally denied. Those details are instituted by Japanese prison law.
Tashiro’s horrific story was no exaggeration. Naoki Nemoto, a freelance writer who covered the Kurobane prison, wrote in the Sept. 2, 2020 Diamond Online magazine about a 48-year-old inmate who described some prison wardens for their ‘violent language’ and almost ‘insane’ stares at inmates.
‘If you are watched by what I saw as a troublesome warden, you’ll receive shouts such as ‘I’ll kill you, SOB’ and every other conceivable dirty expressions,’ he said. Japanese prisons, he explained to the author, work outside the rules of law.
That’s exactly what the current Justice minister, Yasuhiro Hanashi, described Nov. 9 night, saying his duty is ‘only for signing off on capital punishment’ to hang death penalty criminals, leaving the rest to the ministry’s bureaucracy for a vast areas of administration regardless of details written in laws and regulations in handling inmates and those in detention and numerous others.
As Hanashi honestly admitted, the justice minister is a post one of the least visible and idle of the Japanese cabinet. The ministry by law supervises the public prosecutors, human rights, juveniles, civil lawsuits and disputes, lawyers and many more, but they all have bureaucrats installed respectively and do not take orders from the minister.
Sri Lankan woman’s death
So it was little wonder that a 33-year-old Sri Lankan woman, Wishma Sandamali, detained in the Nagoya immigration detention center died for not given property medical treatment in March 2021 for overstaying her visas. The decision not to treat her was made by the facility’s wardens, even though laws and regulations provide that she qualifies for treatment. Her family filed a lawsuit demanding damages and punishment of the wardens, but the Nagoya public prosecutors office ruled the unnamed wardens as not guilty.
Leprosy patients facility
A few kilometers away from one of the most famous hot spring spas in Japan, where winter temperatures plunge below 10 degrees Celsius, a vast former leper confinement facility and residential homes spread off the highway shrouded by trees with a narrow entrance and a small facility sign, the National Sanatorium Kuriu Rakusenten. The facility is one of 15 national leper facilities.
Kuriu annexes the Jyu-kanbo National Museum of Detention for Hansen’s Disease Patients. (www.nhdm.jp) where dozens of seriously-affected lepers from across Japan were literally dragged into solitary, unlit, unheated small cells, not allowed to go out at all, for months and years.
Jyu-kanbo was used between 1938 and 1947 when the American occupation forces, horrified by the utterly inhumane conditions, ordered it be shut down to improve leper treatment. During the 9 years of operation, 93 patients were locked in several tiny cells, of which 23 died. No records of the patients, their conditions, causes of death, and other details are available, and the building that housed the cells were destroyed by the Japanese health ministry (probably happily to destroy records) soon after the U.S. occupation’s orders.
I visited the facility on an overcast day of mid-February 2022 when the area was covered by thick snow and temperatures were way below 10 Celsius. The facility’s office was closed for the winter but I somehow persuaded an official to let me in. By standing in front of the re-created Jyu-kanbo, which literally means ‘heavy confinement cell,’
I wanted to know how the poor lepers felt when they were shoved into the cells, 23 of them for no return, and how the wardens that forced the reluctant and resisting lepers into the frigid holes where they were given only a thin lawyer of cooked but unpolished rice with one ‘umeboshi’ or picked plum and a cup of tea twice a day and ordered to sleep on a thin futon mattress with one thin bed cover. The toilet was a hole and nothing else.
The wardens ,whose identities have never been disclosed to this day, must have had the same mindset as the warden of the Kurobane penitentiary, that is, they are charged to punish the lepers for their disease and can do much harm to them to the extent their brutal acts won’t be known publicly. The chief warden was given the full authority and he was the rule of law of Jyu-kanbo. The museum’s archives and/or Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare documents do no have name lists of Jyu-kanbo officers.
A Jyu-kanbo official told me in a telephone call Nov. 10 that the names of the 93 patients forcefully confined in the cells are kept and exhibited in redacted form in the museum but that the names of officers that served as chief wardens and wardens are ‘scrapped.’ The Nagoya detention center officials’ names, likewise, have not been released to date, even though they effectively killed Ms.
Sadamali.
Many countries, including the United States, are more lenient to public sector workers, including police officers, but Japan is more paternalistic to such workers. It’s a key reason why bureaucrats begin acting with arrogance after reaching mid-career levels.
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