Suzugamori, Tokyo, April 16, 2022—Japan has numerous places where unimaginable and horrific cruelty has been committed and victims disgraced, the condition that must have shocked the late Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela whose country had treated its imprisoned African citizens ‘like animals.’ The former Suzugamori Execution Place, which performed at least 100,000 executions over 220 years between 1651 and 1871, is one of many Japanese prisons that have treated people less than like animals.
One that was brought to the place to be incinerated, hands tied with course ropes in the back and wearing only a layer of kimono even in the middle of winter, was bounded and hoisted onto a single steel pillar and the arms tied onto a horizontal beam as if to be crucified. The wardens would place firewood under the victim’s feet and start the fire,keeping a slow burn so that the victim would feel maximum pains and suffer the most. The fire was kept going a long time so the one being executed may be suffocated to death by the smoke billowing from the body, according to a local person in Suzugamori. When the victim died, he/she would be placed on the ground and beheaded on the beheading stone, then the wardens would wash the head with salt water in the beheading well and display the head on the shelf to be seen by passers-by.
Suzugamori Execution Place is located right on the side of the busy former Tokaido Highway that linked the western city of Kyoto and Edo (now Tokyo). It was clearly the Tokugawa Shogunate’s intention to show every frame of public executions to most severely disgrace the victim, scare the public and demonstrate that the feudal government authority shall not be challenged at all.
Another execution method deployed at the place was lancing the victim’s body on the cross (which had nothing to do with Christianity). The warden would stab the chest as many as 20 times to scrape out the organs one by one so that, like the person to be incinerated, the pain and suffering would be the sharpest. He/she also would be beheaded, washed with salt water in the beheading well and the head would be displaced on the shelf for days. The place was located barely 100 yards from Tokyo Bay.
Suzugamori was one of two Edo execution places. The other was in Kozukahara (now Senju). Execution records were either disposed of or Tokugawa did not tally. But together, the two places were said to have executed at least 100,000 people each. Among them, were the 16-year-old girl Yaoya (green grocer) Oshichi, who tried to light fire to her house for having been refused to meet her loved one, Shonosuke, in early 1683. Though the house escaped fire, Oshichi was arrested and incinerated to death at Suzugamori on March 29, 1683. Legion has it that her cries when being burned were heard miles and miles away.
During the Edo period under Tokugawa’s reigns, ‘Okami’ (authority) was absolute and now matter how petty a crime, or no matter whether suspects could not be found, ‘suspects’ were always arrested, tired and punished. As many as 40 percent of the executed were innocent but were leveled false charges to maintain the Okami authority. There was no procedure as appeals for innocence and grievances for lighter sentence. Occasionally, there were self-sacrificing persons that volunteered to be lanced or burned as sacrifices to save families and communities – like Kasuke Tada of Azumino, Nagano.
The 1950s and 60s South Africa administered under apartheid treated the indigenous black people as substandard citizens below the whites. Its prisons for the blacks were beyond eyes can watch, Mandela wrote in his biography, the ‘long Walk To Freedom’ in 1994. The Edo period Japanese prison system was far worse and the contemporary system is not too much different from the olden days: A Sri Lankan woman who was detained and had been locked in a detention center died in 2021 for the detention facility’s refusal to give her proper medical treatment despite her repeated pleas. (See my article)
‘…no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails,’ Mr. Mandela wrote. ‘A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones — and South Africa treated its imprisoned African citizens like animals.’ Read the top part of this tory for confirmation of why Japan is below South African jails.
###