(This report covers the period January-December 1997)   One possible prisoner of conscience was held. There were renewed reports of ill-treatment of detainees, including foreign nationals held in prisons and immigration detention centres. An Iranian man died in suspicious circumstances. Four prisoners were executed. Prime Minister Hashimoto Ryutaro reshuffled his cabinet in September after his Liberal Democratic Party (ldp) regained an absolute majority in the Diet (parliament), following defections to the ldp by members of opposition parties. The government's stated aim of reforming the structure of government appeared to be stalling in November, following the economic downturn affecting much of southeast and east Asia. Japan continued its efforts to gain permanent membership of the UN Security Council. The issue of compensation for former "comfort women" (women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army during the Second World War) remained unresolved. Few of the women accepted "atonement" payments from a non-governmental fund, with most continuing to demand that the Japanese Government accept responsibility for having forced them into prostitution, and that the funds disbursed be from official rather than private sources. One possible prisoner of conscience was held for three months. Li Song, a Chinese pro-democracy activist, was detained on 4 June and released in September following the imposition of a suspended prison sentence for "resisting arrest". Li Song was detained as he was driving towards the site of a planned demonstration in Tokyo to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen incident in Beijing, China, after allegedly attempting to drive through a police road-block. Li Song and other activists contended that, after his car hit a police barrier, he had been dragged out, beaten and kicked by police officers. Prisoners and detainees in police custody were often subjected to arbitrary punishments, which frequently amounted to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. For example, in January Hoshino Fumiaki, serving a life sentence in Tokushima Prison, ended a four-month period of solitary confinement for breaking a prison rule in August 1996. According to his wife and his lawyer, he was punished because he had washed his foot without permission one evening, after having inadvertently stepped on a cockroach in his cell, and because he did not immediately obey a guard who ordered him to stop washing his foot. As a result, he was given a 20-day term of detention in a "punishment cell" in which he had to sit all day without moving; this was followed by four months in solitary confinement. Foreign nationals in prisons and detention centres were also subjected to harsh rules which resulted in ill-treatment. For example, Kevin Mara, a us national imprisoned in Tokyo's Fuchu prison in connection with a drugs offence, was punished with solitary confinement on at least three occasions for minor breaches of prison rules. In one instance in 1993 he was accused of failing to keep his eyes closed, as regulations require, before starting a meal. Following his decision to sue the prison authorities for ill-treatment, he had been placed in continuous solitary confinement in 1996, and remained there throughout 1997. He was released in December after completing his term. His lawsuit seeking compensation from the authorities had not concluded by the end of the year. Yu Enying, a Chinese national, remained in detention throughout the year in harsh conditions together with her one-year-old child and elderly mother. She was arrested in January 1996 in connection with an alleged false marriage declaration, and sentenced to a suspended term of imprisonment in May 1997. After the trial all three were immediately transferred to Nagoya Immigration Detention Centre pending deportation, on the grounds that Yu Enying's visa had expired while they were awaiting trial. They were first held in Nagoya Immigration Detention Centre, where they were kept in an insanitary and overcrowded cell, and Yu Enying was reportedly denied essential medical care. In June they were transferred to the East Japan Immigration Detention Centre in Tokyo, where their health reportedly continued to deteriorate as the three of them were held in a cell apparently intended for only one person. Applications by Yu Enying for provisional release had not been answered by the end of the year. There was one death in suspicious circumstances of a foreign national held in an immigration detention centre pending deportation from Japan. Mousavi Abarbekouh Mir Hossein, an Iranian national, died suddenly in Kita-ku Immigration Detention Centre in Tokyo in August. His neck was broken. He had been detained there in July pending deportation to Iran. According to immigration officials, he was reprimanded after a cigarette lighter was discovered in his cell; this allegedly led to a scuffle with eight officers, who covered his head with a blanket. Officials claimed that he died after banging his head on the concrete floor. No investigation was known to have been held into the circumstances surrounding his death. Four prisoners were executed in one day in August. They included Nagayama Norio, arrested for murder when aged 19, who had spent 28 years in prison before his execution in Tokyo and had become a renowned author. He was first sentenced to death in 1979 but the sentence was reduced to life imprisonment in 1981. In 1983, however, the Supreme Court ordered a revision of his trial, which led to his death sentence being reinstated. Kanda Hideki, convicted of murder in 1986, was executed in Tokyo after he had withdrawn an appeal against his death sentence. A married couple, Hidaka Nobuko and Hidaka Yasumasa, were executed in Sapporo. They had been sentenced to death in 1987 for murdering a coal miner's family. Like Kanda Hideki, they had withdrawn their appeal against their death sentences. According to their lawyers, they withdrew the appeal because they expected their sentences to be commuted before the death of Emperor Showa in 1989. They attempted to seek commutation again after Emperor Akihito assumed the throne, but this was rejected on the grounds that they had withdrawn their earlier appeal. Official secrecy continued to surround the executions, and the government did not confirm the identity of those executed. As in previous years, neither the prisoners nor their relatives and lawyers were given advance notice of the executions. However, the Minister of Justice, following the precedent he set in 1996, confirmed to the press after the executions that he had signed four execution orders. In September the Nagoya High Court overturned the death sentences passed by a Nagoya area district court on Yamaguchi Masuo and Nitta Sadashige, jointly accused of murder. The High Court ordered a retrial because the lower court had unlawfully appointed the same lawyer for both defendants, therefore giving rise to a conflict of interest for the lawyer in determining the two men's respective roles in the murder. Their retrial had not concluded by the end of the year. At the end of the year at least 50 prisoners were under sentence of death whose death sentences had been finally approved by the Supreme Court. In August Amnesty International condemned the execution of four prisoners and called for the Diet to open a debate on the use of the death penalty in Japan. In June representatives of Amnesty International visited Japan to investigate conditions of detention and in November the organization issued a report, Japan: Ill-treatment of foreigners in detention, summarizing reports of ill-treatment against foreign nationals detained in prisons, police custody and immigration detention centres. The report set out detailed recommendations aimed at preventing the recurrence of ill-treatment. In written comments on Amnesty International's report, the government questioned some of the organization's views, provided further information on some individual cases, but stopped short of endorsing Amnesty International's recommendations

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