National
Ida Torres on Jun 14 2013
Parolee Kazuo Ishikawa is seeking a retrial to clear his name in the 1963 kidnap-murder of a girl from
Saitama Prefecture for which he was convicted in 1964. Speaking at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, he claims that the police grilled him for hours, lied to his face and withhold important evidence that could have exonerated him, all just to get him to confess to the kidnap, rape and strangling of Yoshie Nakata.
The Japanese government has formally made adjustment in order to allow more than 99% of the country's over-the-counter (OTC)
medicines to be sold over the internet. While this sales method was previously banned, a ruling by the Supreme Court in January of this year
labelled the act as unlawful. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is planning to announce the official lifting of the ban later this week in Tokyo.
The city of Minamata in
Kumamoto Prefecture held a memorial service for all the victims of the disease named after the city, to commemorate the 57th year since the government officially recognized the disfiguring disease as an industrial pollutant. Kumamoto Gov. Ikuo Kabashima led the ceremony that was attended by around 750 people who have been affected by it.
In June 2006, Japanese police office Manabu Hirata shot Luo Cheng, a
Chinese trainee whom the police officer had come to arrest. Luo later died in the hospital after sustaining a gunshot wound in the abdomen. Almost seven years after, the Japanese
Supreme Court is upholding the “not guilty” verdict originally handed by the Tokyo High Court.
Japan's
Supreme Court has upheld a decision by the Fukuoka High Court which posthumously recognizes Chie Mizoguchi as a victim of Minamata disease. The original ruling of the high court in 2012 was in favor of the plaintiffs, Mizoguchi's relatives, who filed a lawsuit against the Kumamoto Prefectural Government for rejecting their claims that she suffered from the ailment. Mizoguchi passed away in 1977 at the age of 77.
It’s certainly not a record to be proud of, but the Guinness World Records has certified 77-year-old Japanese prisoner
Iwao Hakamada as being the world’s longest-serving death row inmate. Incarcerated at the Tokyo Detention House, Hakamada was officially recognized by the world-famous records-keeping organization on March 10, 2011, on his 75th birthday and his 42nd year in death row. To date, he is still behind bars and serving his 44th year.
The Japanese
Supreme Court ruled last week that a woman pay her ex-husband 50,000 yen (approx. $535) for each time that she denied him access to visit their daughter. The mother had agreed to regular meetings between the child and father in a family court settlement, and this marks the first time that Japan's highest court has ordered penalties on a parent with custody for breaking their visitation agreements.
A 25 year old single mother was sentenced to 30 years in prison in
Osaka this week for killing her two young children by starving them to death. Sanae Nakamura was found guilty of locking her 3 year old daughter and 1 year old son in her apartment and leaving them alone for a significant amount of time, an act she carried out several times before.
Right after the
lower house elections last December, two separate teams of lawyers
filed 14 different lawsuits in eight high courts and six branches all over Japan. They prayed for the nullification of the election results because of the existence of a large vote-value gap.
On Wednesday the Tokyo High Court rule that the December 2012 House of Representatives
election was unconstitutional due to the voter disparity of 2.34 in Tokyo's single-seat constituency. The plaintiffs were demanding that the court nullify the results, but that was rejected on the basis that parliament has already made the necessary corrections to the electoral district zoning in order to reduce the vote-value gap.
