FOR THE
RECORD
Government Brutality in Japan
As you read this story, former New York City policeman, Justin Volpe, should be finding out whether he will spend the rest of his life behind bars (sentencing expected on December 6). Volpe as you may recall was the police officer who brutalized Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, with beatings, racial insults and finally a toilet plunger forced into his rectum early in the morning of August 9, 1997 in New York.
A name you very likely may not recognize is Mousavi Abarbe Kouh Mir Hossein, an Irianian immigrant in Japan who was brutalized and murdered by Japanese Immigration officials less than 12 hours before Louima on August 9, 1997. As Louima told ambulance medics the horror of his story, Mousavi's badly bruised corpse lay still and unable to speak on a cold table in a Kita-ku hospital morgue.
Both stories were indeed tragic. In the case of Louima, however, he is still alive, will likely receive a reasonable amount of financial compensation, and his attacker was brought to trial where he pleaded guilty and is now being sentenced. Essentially justice has been served. In the case of Mousavi, his murder was covered up by Immigration authorities, his murderers were never brought to trial, and as far as we can tell these culprits are still entrusted with the "well being" of foreigners placed in their custody.
If this were an isolated case lacking evidence perhaps it could be considered an unavoidable occurrence when living in an imperfect society. However, this is just one of many instances of brutality carried out by Japanese Immigration officials and police against foreigners with impunity in a system that condones such actions by means of its silence and inaction.
Arjang Mehrpooran came to Japan in 1991 from Iran with the same hopes and aspirations as so many other foreigners disembarking at Narita Airport. In 1994 he was living with a Japanese wife in Chiba Prefecture where he had chosen to stay with his new family and pursue his dreams of happiness in a new land of wealth and opportunity.
On June 20, 1994 he was stopped in Ueno and detained by the Japanese police at the Minami Senju Police Station on suspicion of being in the country without a proper visa after failing to produce his passport. He remained in police custody throughout the night, and at 7:10 a.m. the next morning he was dead. Mehrpooran was 31 years old.
Police said that Mehrpooran died from a blood clot in the arteries of the lung, and that he had inflicted the injuries himself, including a three-centimeter gash on his forehead, "with his violent behavior" while being taken to jail. According to police, he deliberately smashed his head against the seats in the prison minibus, thus explaining why his clothes were covered in blood after arriving at the police station. However, numerous small injuries and wounds, severe internal hemorrhaging and bruises on several places on his lower abdomen seemed to suggest that Mehrpooran was a murder victim of police brutality. However, no criminal charges were ever filed against the police.
In October 1994, Tao Yaping, a 31-year-old Chinese woman working as a hostess, was arrested when police raided her club in the Shinjuku part of Tokyo. She was detained and interrogated on suspicion of violating immigration laws. According to an Amnesty International report, the following morning she was "punched several times in the face and other parts of her body" for approximately five minutes after angering Immigration interrogators by swallowing a picture of herself. Tao said she was handcuffed, taken to another room and beaten until unconscious.
Tao was deported to China before she could file charges against the Immigration officers, but lawyers representing her were able to bring a civil suit against the government. Friends who visited her immediately after the incident had taken photographs of her battered face to document her allegations that she was punched in the face as many as 10 times by one guard while six others beat her on the head and kicked her body. The Tokyo Immigration Bureau later acknowledged that the beating had occurred, cut the salary of one guard for two months and gave warnings to six supervisors. In a rare case Tao received damages of Y1 million (approx. US$8,000) in an out-of-court settlement with the government. No apology was received from the government.
On December 10, 1994, the Mainichi Daily News published a front-page story, "Ex-immigration officer: Detainees frequently beaten" in which a former officer at the Tokyo Immigration Bureau, Takeshi Akiyama, described how disobedient detainees were regularly assaulted and beaten. Akiyama said he had witnessed these scenes several times a month, and the victims were usually Chinese, Koreans and Iranians. He was quoted as saying, "Some of my colleagues beat up detainees in order to relieve the stress of their work. Some even laughed after these assaults. Everybody loses awareness of human rights after working there for a while." Later in the same month Akiyama gave a press conference where he reiterated his claims that the beating of detainees at immigration detention centers occurs on a daily basis.
In March 1995, Human Rights Watch issued a report titled "Prison Conditions in Japan" claiming that human rights violations were severe and routine throughout the nation. The report noted that the system was lacking in "openness and transparency" and that this would foster human rights violations.
Later in 1995, Police superintendent Takahisa Ishida was quoted as saying, "I am positive no prisoner has ever been beaten, not even slapped or otherwise mistreated in Japanese police detention...We always try to protect the human rights of the detainees. We never beat them. We use nonviolent persuasion techniques... Physical brutality never occurs in Japanese detention centers, nowhere in Japan. But the officers have the right to defend themselves if they are under threat."
Early in the morning of August 9, 1997, Mousavi Abarbe Kouh Mir Hossein, who had been in the custody of the Tokyo Immigration Bureau at their No. 2 Office in Kita Ward, was taken to a nearby hospital with a broken neck where he soon died. He was 28 years old. According to lawyers for Mousavi's parents, an immigration official who accompanied Mousavi to the hospital told doctors that Mousavi ''was suppressed by several guards after attacking a guard.''
The Tokyo Immigration Bureau told Mousavi's parents that his death had been an accident. The official report, which came out later, said that Mousavi had turned violent after being reprimanded for smoking after 10:00 p.m., which required his hands and feet to be cuffed and to be taken to an isolation cell with a blanket over his head. The Bureau acknowledged that several employees had held Mousavi but denied that they assaulted him. The report went on to say that around 2:15 a.m. a guard went to the cell to remove the restraints when Mousavi, who after rising abruptly threw himself backwards and accidentally hit his head on the concrete floor, knocking himself unconscious. Hossein was then taken to a hospital at 2:50 a.m. and died there at 10:28 a.m. from complications resulting from a broken neck, according to a medical report.
A postmortem examination conducted by the hospital where Mousavi died found many cuts and bruises on his face and body in addition to his dislocated neck. The report also cited bruises in the ''shape of a bar-like object'' on Mousavi's body, and a large bruise above his right eye.
Tokyo police questioned eight immigration officials on suspicion of manslaughter, and in a rare instance, on February 18, 1998 police sent papers to the Tokyo District Prosecutors Office that accused the eight guards of causing Mousavi's death. Police said they sent the papers to the prosecutors because they believe the immigration officers used excessive force in subduing Hossein. However, prosecutors dismissed the case a month later.
Even with all of the modern advances in forensic medicine, the Japanese government was not able to deduce from two badly beaten bodies that any crimes had taken place. If a foreigner had been the perpetrator, perhaps the police would have been able to piece together an intricate, detailed, blow-by-blow account of exactly what happened.
Even after the Tokyo Immigration Bureau acknowledged that as many as six of its officials had administered a five-minute beating to a defenseless foreign woman strapped to a chair, the punishment for this offense was a cut in salary for two months for one guard and warnings to six supervisors. The prosecutor's office did not even think that such a beating warranted criminal charges. Even setting aside the issue of a criminal trial and jail time, it is astounding and unbelievable that the Japanese government could allow the people who did such a thing to continue working as Immigration guards, but it did.
When Japanese government officials can routinely administer beatings to foreign people with impunity, and the Ministry of Justice sits idly by and takes no action, an institutionalized state of injustice exists. Moreover, it seems clear that representatives of the Ministry of Justice are not held accountable to the same laws as other citizens over whom they rule.
There is no doubt that police and immigration officials are under a lot of stress at times, and any society that values its security and safety wants to give the police the benefit of the doubt. At the same time, these people are supposed to be trained professionals and know how to properly deal with detainees whose custody they have been entrusted with. Regardless, of how much stress they may be under, however, society cannot allow crimes by government officials such as assault, torture and murder to go unpunished.
In present day Japan, there is an government system that strongly resists acknowledging wrongdoing and lacks transparency; there is a largely uniform national media that mostly regurgitates information spoon fed to it by the police; and there is a homogeneous population that is mostly indifferent to foreign victims of Japanese government brutality. Subsequently several government officials, who have committed grave crimes, remain unpunished and to this date even keep working inside the Japanese Ministry of Justice and Immigration Bureau. Who will be their next victims?
by James C. Gibbs
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