Hirasawa on the first day of his trial.
Many books have been written, documentaries and movies made on the famous Teigin Case.
It was a murder and robbery case in 1948, where a man disguised as a Government health worker entered a Teikoku Bank (“Teigin“) branch and told the employees that there was a sudden outbreak of dysentery and the US occupation forces ordered to drink medicine. The “medicine” given by the man was in fact poison. The workers obeyed and 12 people were killed. The man fled with cash and checks from the bank.
The investigators believed that the poison used in the murder was a rare poison, obtained by few people, such as those working for a secret Unit 731 of the Japanese army during the WWII, which is said to have conducted experiments on human beings.
However, the police arrested Sadamichi Hirasawa, then a famous painter. Hirasawa was sentenced to death in 1950 by the trial court. He died while on death row in 1987 at the age of 95.
Read about the ongoing efforts to exonerate Hirasawa here.
Excerpt:
TOKYO (Kyodo) — When a death row inmate convicted of a 1948 mass murder died of natural causes 25 years ago, most people believed the “Teigin Incident” had left unanswered questions that would now never be solved.
However, a group of lawyers and experts in pharmacy and psychology are still struggling to unearth the truth behind the most notorious mass-poisoning case in postwar Japan and exonerate Sadamichi Hirasawa, who passed away on May 10, 1987, at a prison hospital in Tokyo at the age of 95.
“We will complete presenting new evidence by the end of next year to reopen the case,” said Nobuyoshi Araki, one of the lawyers involved in the petition for a posthumous retrial of Hirasawa, who was a painter.
The 19th petition was filed with the Tokyo High Court by Hirasawa’s adopted son, Takehiko, on May 10, 1989, the second anniversary of his death. The first had been filed in 1955 and rejected the next year.
One of the focuses in the petition is on the poison used to kill the 12 victims ……While the courts determined the murderer used potassium cyanide, Hiroyoshi Endo, former dean of the pharmacology department at Teikyo University, said, “I can’t specify what the poison was, but as a scientist, I can say it was not potassium cyanide.” Continue reading
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