MVFHR in Japan

In our fall newsletter, we told about the new MVFHR affiliate that was founded in Japan this past June. The group’s name is Ocean, which Masaharu Harada, the Japanese victim’s family member who launched the group, says is a symbol of new life and new hope. MVFHR board member Toshi Kazama has given crucial support to the Japanese victims and other anti-death penalty allies who have taken the courageous step of starting this group in a country where it is very difficult to talk about the experience of losing a loved one to murder in the first place and doubly difficult if one also opposes the death penalty. Toshi and Renny Cushing were invited to give several talks and presentations in Japan last spring, and a few weeks ago Toshi traveled to Japan again, this time with MVFHR board president Bud Welch. .

Toshi and Bud traveled to ten different Japanese cities to give talks at colleges, churches, community centers, and a conference room in the Upper House of the Diet (parliament). Toshi tells us that newspaper and television reporters often attended these presentations and that the events got some good press coverage.

Here is a photo of Bud and Toshi with the professor and students at Kobe Gakuin University, after their public presentation there.



Toshi and Bud also had the opportunity to meet with a small group of Ocean members, including some relatives of victims who had been killed in the chemical attack in Tokyo’s subway in 1995. Toshi also met, on his own, with other victims’ family members who are opposed to the death penalty but feel they cannot express that view publicly. Given how difficult it is to publicly voice such views in Japan, building the group Ocean is a slow process, and Mr. Harada has chosen to focus much of the outreach on the idea of bridging the gap between victims and perpetrators, an idea for which there is somewhat more support. At the meeting that Bud and Toshi attended, there were two sets of parents of people on death row in Japan, and Bud observed that “their sense of shame seemed even greater than such families feel in the U.S.”