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Japan carries out three executions with 'confidence'

Japan executed three people yesterday, including notorious serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, a fetishist convicted of murdering four young girls and eating some of their bodies, officials said.

Miyazaki, 45, was nicknamed the “killer nerd” for his obsession with sexual cartoons and pornography. But defense lawyers contended he was mentally ill and could not be held fully responsible for his actions.

Japan is the only major industrialized nation other than the US to apply the death penalty and has been stepping up the pace of executions, which enjoy wide public support.

“We are carrying out executions by selecting the people whom we can execute with a feeling of confidence and responsibility,” Japanese Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama told a press conference.

Hatoyama said he had signed the order to send the trio to the gallows to “realize justice.”

He said he was aware that Miyazaki’s defense counsel had been preparing to seek a retrial with a fresh psychiatric test.

Shigeru Hashizume, 75, who headed the police investigation into the Miyazaki killings, said the execution had “drawn the curtain” on the case.

“I hope this will teach young people a lesson that they would end up like this if they commit a felony,” Hashizume said, as quoted by Jiji Press.

Miyazaki was arrested in July 1989 while trying to take naked pictures of a girl outdoors and the details that emerged from his case stunned Japan.

He confessed to having killed four girls, aged between four and seven, in Tokyo and its suburbs and eating some of the remains of two of them.

Miyazaki mutilated the bodies of the victims, slept next to the corpses and drank their blood.

During the nearly two-decade judicial process, Miyazaki never uttered a word of remorse.

He also distanced himself from his family. When his father, unable to come to terms with what his son did, jumped into a river to his death in 1994, Miyazaki wrote to a publisher: “I feel refreshed.”

Hirokazu Hasegawa, a clinical psychologist who saw Miyazaki in 2006, said the killer believed his crimes would resurrect his grandfather, who died three months before he committed his first crime in 1988.

The death penalty has drawn criticism from the country’s human rights groups and lawyers, as well as the EU.

Japan had a de facto moratorium on executions for 15 months until 2006 as then-justice minister Seiken Sugiura said the death penalty went against his Buddhist beliefs.

Japan has since executed 23 people. The day’s executions left 102 people on death row.

The other inmates executed yesterday — Shinji Mutsuda, 37, and Yoshio Yamasaki, 73 — were both convicted murderers.
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