You don't want to think about it

The front pages of yesterday's British and Japanese newspapers carried a common story - the hanging of Saddam Hussein's lieutenants, Awad al-Bandar and Barzan al-Tikriti. But virtually all the Japanese versions made a remarkable omission. They made no mention whatsoever of the most remarkable fact about the execution - that the head of al-Tikriti, Iraq's former intelligence chief, was severed from his body by the executioner's noose.

In the Sankei - nothing. In the Mainichi - nothing, and nothing in the Yomiuri. The English-language Daily Yomiuri ran a story from the Associated Press, which certainly did mention the decapitation. But the DY's sub-editors had carefully removed this paragraph in the version they ran, along with all subsequent references to the decapitation. While newspapers across the world were reporting on the international condemnation of the execution, and its botching, the Japanese media had - nothing. Only the liberal Asahi mentioned this most extraordinary thing - that, accidentally or not, a democratically elected government, set up with the military support of Japan, ripped a man's head off his shoulders at the end of a rope.

Why should conscientious newspapers of record omit such a fact?

This was not, after all, a question of whether to run appalling pictures of the executions - unlike the hanging of Saddam Hussein last month, there have so far been no images circulating in public. The Japanese newspapers do not shy away from reporting unpleasant facts about death - all, for example, have reported in detail on the arrest of 32-year old Kaori Mihashi, a Tokyo woman who is accused of killing her husband, and disposing of his body in several different pieces. There's only one explanation I can think of for this uncharacteristic squeamishness, connected with Japan's especially disgusting manner of executing its own condemned criminals.

Japan hangs murderers, on average about two or three a year. They spend decades on death row - ten, twenty, thirty years. Often they are disowned and abandoned by their families. Some receive no visitors at all during the half of a lifetime that they pass awaiting death. They are informed of their imminent execution just a few hours before it happens - they wake every single day, in other words, in the knowledge that it could be their last. Families of the condemned are told of their deaths only after they have taken place, when a lawyer is called to tell them that there is a body for them to come and collect.

The cruelty of such a regime is hard to credit but despite this there is little debate, or even much public awareness, of the rights and wrongs of capital punishment and how it is carried out. Hangings always take place during parliamentary holidays, so that those few members of the Diet who do give a damn about what the state is doing in their name have no opportunity to question ministers or initiate debate. (The last four were on Christmas Day, including two men in their 70s.) When polls are conducted they seem to show a reluctant public consent for capital punishment for the most serious crimes, and Japan's Ministry of Justice, on the rare occasions when anyone asks, points to these in justification. But the entire system is designed to function below the consciousness of moderately aware people. From the moment a death sentence is finalised, everything is done to prevent anyone thinking about it - about what it means, how it is carried out, and what could go wrong.

Hence the eerie silence about the decapitation of Barzan al-Tikriti. (See? It's no coincidence that it was only Japan's most liberal national newspaper, the Asahi, which mentioned it.) It's not that the editors of the Mainichi, Sankei, and Yomiuri care much either way about the death of a vicious Iraqi. But when such a fact is aired, which exposes the stark, physical vileness of capital punishment, it threatens to tear open the fuzzy cocoon of ignorance and unseeing in which Japan's own executions are carried out and sustained.

When people stop to consider know what capital punishment is - what it really means physically to extinguish the life of another human being - most of them are troubled; many begin to question in their conscience whether it is right. It was to prevent their readers from thinking, to stifle natural debate that Japanese newspapers lamentably hid the truth yesterday.

[Update: The Daily Yomiuri does have an AP story mentioning the decapitation today, on page 7. But no mention in the Japanese shimbun, at least as far as I can tell.]

Comments

you may be reading too much into that Mr. Parry. perhaps the newspapers had space considerations. nevertheless, i admire your doggedness in coming up with it.

[Jun Okumura]

The Jan. 16 Yomiuri devoted 16 lines of the 70 line article on the executions to the beheading itself.

The Jan.18 Yomiuri carries two overseas reports that deal with the executions. Both include the beheading as part of the story, and the longer one, directly taken from The Times (Jan. 16), goes on to give details of the craft by way of a short biography of the British executioner Albert Pierpont. By contrast, the shorter article, by the Yomiuri's own correspondent in Washington, is mainly about President Bush's response to Saddam Hussein's execution; the subsequent executions, including the beheading, are tacked on at the end as a sort of epilogue. The executions are being treated as an international issue, and is not being connected to the domestic situation.

This treatment is not surprising for a number of reasons, which all seem to relate in one way or other to public indifference, not the other way around. Media conspiracies no doubt abound, but this case does not seem to be one of them.

I'm giving this some more thought.

[Richard Lloyd Parry]

Thanks, Okumura-san. Please post here again when you have concluded your cogitations.

[Andrew Milner]

I don’t doubt you are right in your analysis. Namely, that the Japanese government would prefer the Japanese domestic media not to dwell on the gory details of Barzan al-Tikriti’s execution. Japanese journalists seem so blissfully unaware on many international issues, one can only assume they skimp on their basic research.
But the big picture is the entire MSM under-reports and distorts. If journalists published all they knew, they’d be out of a job the next day. Take US military casualties in Iraq. So obviously under-reported for political reasons. One example, the attack on US Forward Operation Base Falcon just south of Baghdad on the night of 10 October 2006. The insurgents got lucky and hit the ammunition dump. But BBC’s report of a rocket and mortar attack made it sound like a 4th of July celebration that got a little out of hand. Al-Jazzara, however, spoke of some 500 US military casualties, giving names, rank and military affiliation. Plus, a billion dollars’ worth of damage (that’s $1,000,000,000). Note the date of the attack, some four weeks before the US Senate and Congressional elections. Imagine the impact on voters of several hundred US military fatalities in a single raid.
This is but one example. The mainstream media should be flagging up inconsistencies, inaccuracies and omissions, taking Authority to task with hard-edged, follow-up questions. I’m constantly amazed by the almost total lack of scepticism displayed by foreign members of the press corps at the Press Club in Tokyo; present company excepted, naturally.

[Jun Okumura]

I meant: "Tales of media conspiracies no doubt abound, but this case does not seem to be one of them." It is my belief that the JMSM often follow, rather than lead, the public. What may look like a conspiracy can more often than not be explained as the JSMS following en masse an angle that has caught on with the public (Abe is hot, no, he's not; public servants are corrupt, no politicians are…). The "kisha" clubs, i.e. source-based information cartels, undoubtedly augment this effect.

Anyway:

The story at hand, to the Japanese mind, does not have a Japan angle. We not have a real history with the region. When the JSDF troops left Samawa, our emotional involvement dropped off steeply. Given the huge numbers of violent, gruesome deaths reported out of Iraq daily, and Saddam Hussein's sentence and execution dominating the headlines, the two subsequent executions were almost anticlimactic.

The journalists manning the international desk, where Iraq stories belong, and the people at the "shakai" desk, where Japanese crime and punishment belong, work separately. Unless Japanese nationals are involved, the "shakai" desk, where crime and punishment belong, would not be interested.

The death sentence in Japan is imposed on a very small number of cases under fairly stringent conditions (thinking offhand; serial killers, multiple murders for gain, child murder for gain or sexual purposes). They are an unsympathetic lot. And there is not much public sympathy for or interest in convicts in general.

These things add up to a rather low-key treatment of the botched execution in the Japanese media.

What troubles me most in all of this, as well as on other issues I have in mind, is not the death penalty (I do not oppose it in principle), nor the way it is administered here (the decades-long wait for the denouement is largely, though not solely, due to the ponderous system of appeals and petitions that the condemned prisoner and his supporters often exploit to the fullest); but what I see as our general indifference to the plight, however deserved, of outcasts. And I am not excluding myself here. I have been trying to write a much longer piece on this, but the parts do not come together quite well yet. Perhaps that is why you get paid to write, and I don't. Yet. So I'm putting this memo of sorts up here, since I don't want to keep you waiting forever.

(Note: There have been several celebrated old post-war murder cases where the condemned prisoners have been granted retrials and absolved. That process is always a huge media event, but abolition has never caught on. Barring an irremediable error in a contemporary case, I don't see this public sentiment changing in the foreseeable future.)

[Richard Lloyd Parry]

Okumura-san,

Your point about the essential passivity of much of what is taken as "conspiracy" in the Japanese media is a good one, which I accept. And thanks for pointing out the references to the decapitation on the second day of coverage, of which I wasn't aware. But I still think that in this case something more is going on.

There are no Japanese correspondents based in Iraq. The papers, like those in much of the rest of the world, would have relied on the news agency reports coming out of Baghdad.

The first reference to al-Tikriti's decapitation came at 0800 GMT on Reuters (last Monday 15th); AP followed three minutes later. That's 5pm Tokyo time, in plenty of time for the morning editions. The fact of the decapitation was prominent in all the news agency copy after that - in the first or second paragraph, with quotations from spokesmen further down.

All of this was removed from most of the stories in the main Japanese newspapers. That is active censorship, not passive collusion. It's not adequate to describe it as "low-key treatment"; it's a turning away from unpleasant physical realities. I can think of only one explanation for this.

Of course, those realities were acknowledged the following day (as you helpfully point out), by which time disgust over the decapitation had become an international diplomatic issue. But those stories were inside the newspaper where they were read by fewer people, and had much less impact than the original report. My guess is that half of Japanese, at least, have no idea about the decapitation.

I didn't watch the TV news that day but let me guess that there was no mention of it there either. Has it come up as a widely debated subject of discussion on wide shows, on the radio, or even on the Internet?

Exactly.