The Shadow of Sayama: The Composition of the Discrimination Trial, 1963

The Shadow of Sayama: The Composition of the Discrimination Trial, 1963

In 1963, a high school girl was murdered in Sayama, Saitama Prefecture, and Kazuo Ishikawa, a young man from a discriminated Buraku tribe, was arrested. Without sufficient evidence, the police coerced a confession from him during a lengthy interrogation, and he was convicted on the basis of this confession. In the midst of Japan's rapid economic growth, the prejudice of "Buraku = criminal" dominated investigations and news reports in a society with a deep-rooted sense of discrimination. Despite many inconsistencies in the physical evidence, such as Ishikawa's handwriting and footprints, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Supreme Court in 1977. Support groups and the Buraku Liberation Movement have launched a nationwide retrial campaign of the Sayama case as a symbol of the accusation of the discriminatory structure of the judicial system and the bias of the press. The case became a microcosm of postwar Japan, where state power and minorities, truth and social prejud
ice intersected. The Sayama discrimination trial is not a false accusation of the past, but a contemporary challenge to reexamine "justice" and "human dignity.