January 23, 2008
TOKYO, JAPAN
This is a very sad story on a lengthy confinement of a Japanese Hurricane Carter named IWAO HAKAMADA, who has been in jail for forty-one years though he is apparently not guilty. Hakamada, formerly Japanfs #6 ranked featherweight contender in 1960fs, was a durable and game club-fighter whose overall record was 16-10-3, just a KO. He was such a tough guy as he was never knocked out, nor stopped in his career.@He fought eighteen bouts only in 1960, including nine consecutive wins.
Tomorrow (Thursday) there will be an important show at the Korakuen Hall promoted by Japan Professional Boxing Association (JPBA), the union of all licensed managers the president of which is Masahiko gFightingh Harada and also supported by Japan Boxing Commission (JBC) in order to appeal for freedom of Hakamada in jail. The JBC will grant a license emeritus to the convict to encourage his fighting spirit to continually ask for his own freedom, and eleven ex-world champs will engage in sparring sessions to raise money to financially help supporting groups to release Hakamada, the 70-year-old ex-fighter.
The notorious gHakamada Affairh was as follows. Somebody killed four persons of a family and set fire to their house in Shimizu City at about 2AM on June 30, 1966. The victims were an executive director (41) of a factory producing miso (fermented soybean paste), his wife (38), daughter (17) and son (14). The burnt corpses had been covered with slash wounds, forty-five in total on the four dead, by somebody using a knife.
Hakamada, the ex-boxer working at the miso factory, then lived in a dormitory, woke up with his companionfs shout and endeavored to put out the fire. Then he sustained a slight cut on the middle finger in extinguishing the fire with other workers.
Forty-eight days later, on August 18 that year, Hakamada was arrested chiefly due to his finger injury and bloodstains on his pajamas, since the police suspected that they were caused in killing the four victims with a knife. At that time there was such a social prejudice against retired boxers as some became outlaws or bodyguards of gangsters because of their lack of vocational trainings.
On September 11, 1968, Hakamada was found guilty and sentenced to death. He had been coerced into making a confession by such violence as the police torturing him for 12 hours a day, 17 hours at maximum, due to its discrimination against the ex-boxer every day. He had to confess under severe torture.
His desperate appeal was dismissed in 1980. Hakamada again applied for a retrial in 1981, but it was miserably rejected in 1984. The attorneys presented the final petition to the court to save the victim out of the false charge on August 3, 2001, and have been waiting for the final verdict. Faded evidences of the affair, however, seem to make it hard to prove his innocence.
It was startling that the very judge Norimichi Kumamoto of the first trial who sentenced Hakamada to death in 1968, now a lawyer, admitted?this year?that he believed that Hakamada had been not guilty. Hakamada has been pleading his innocence for 41 years from jail, but suffered such a mental breakdown and despair from a too long custody that he refused to meet even his elder sister Hideko, 74, for three years and eight months until their reunion in November 2006. Shosei Nitta, ex-OPBF bantam champ and a JPBA member, 40, recently visited the jail for an interview with his senior boxer last June, and promised that all boxing people would make their best efforts to set him free.
Previously there were not a few false charges such as a Sacco-Vanzetti case or a Dreyfus affair, of course, including a Hurricane Carter case. And the Hakamada affair may be one of those, as the Japanese jurisdiction hasnft executed the alleged condemned criminal for forty years since it is not convinced of his guilt.
Hakamada wrote a letter to his son, gThe police repeatedly beat me with a cudgel to force my false confession from morning till night. Itfs their investigation. My soncI will prove your father never killed any person. It is the police that know it well, and it is the judge himself that feels sorry to me. Your father will undo this chain and return home to see you.h (February 8, 1983)
The Japanese boxing fraternity, which has produced fifty-five world champs so far, must call our comrades together and help free Hakamada, the Japanese Hurricane Carter. The memorial boxing show for this strong move will take place tomorrow.
(1-23-08)