The Teigin Incident

The precise toxin used is also a subject for debate. At Hirasawa’s trial the prosecution alleged that he had used potassium cyanide to slaughter his victims. Unfortunately for the prosecution, the symptoms displayed by the victims (including the survivors) resemble much more the effects of hydrogen cyanide poisoning. Now some may think that the type of cyanide employed makes little difference in so dreadful a crime, but it definitely does in this case. Unit 731 had long been developing a new and highly lethal toxin named acetone cyanohydrin. Its effects are highly similar to those of hydrogen cyanide poisoning, although not entirely the same, owing to the fact that the element of acetone cyanohydrin most easily absorbed into the body is none other than hydrogen cyanide. There is absolutely no way that a painter like Sadamichi Hirasawa could have obtained acetone cyanohydrin, but members (or former members) of Unit 731 would definitely have had access to such a poison.

Furthermore, the administration of the poison in two seperate doses was a well-known hallmark of Unit 731. It would also require great skill (and presumably no small amount of experience) to successfully administer the poison in such a manner that the victims did not die immediately for, if the first victim began dying before all the victims had been successfully poisoned, the alarm would almost certainly have been raised and perhaps the poisoner could have been apprehended. Again, Sadamichi Hirasawa was a painter, not a chemist or chemical warfare expert. There is absolutely no evidence whatever that he even knew the first thing about poisons and poisoning.

There is also the fact that 33 successive Minister’s of Justice failed to authorise Hirasawa’s execution. Not even Isaji Tanaka, who once signed 23 death warrants in one day, felt able to order that Hirasawa be hanged. Not only is it very strange that so many Ministers, even hardline ones, felt unable to order his death, but many other Japanese convicts were executed while Hirasawa was in the Death House for 32 years. This also neatly torpedoes one old theory for his continued survival, which was that the Japanese custom is that signing a death warrant means bad luck and thus no Minister of Justice wanted to be unlucky.

Also, Hirasawa may have confessed, but he was swift to retract the confession he made on the grounds of alleged torture by his interrogators. Not only that, he had 32 years on Death Row to either give up the lie or accidentally expose himself as a fraud. He did neither during the 32 years he spent waiting for his date with the hangman.

Recent medical tests to examine Hirasawa’s brain tissue confirm a level of deterioration that was not down to old age and far more likely to be a severe case of encephalomyelitis. This would tally well with the defence lawyers pleading partial insanity.

Hirasawa spent 32 years on Death Row, making him officially the longest-serving condemned inmate in the world. He spent much of his time, and he had plenty of it to spend, on painting and writing his autobiography entitled ‘My Will: The Teikoku Bank Case.’
In 1981, a lawyer named Makoto Endo took over leadership of Hirasawa’s legal team. He appealed against the sentence in 1985 on the grounds that Japan’s Statute of Limitations (Japanese inmates must be executed within 30 years of sentencing) had run out and demanded Hirasawa’s release on that basis.

He was overruled by the Japanese courts, who rendered an opinion that Hirasawa’s death penalty would only have begun when his death warrant was signed. As his death warrant was never actually signed, his capital punishment had not, in the opinion of the Japanese courts, even begun yet.

As the 1980’s dragged on, Sadamichi Hirasawa’s health began to deteriorate and he became steadily weaker. He finally died of pneumonia, still a condemned mass murderer under sentence of death, on May 10th 1987.