In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Tokyo District Court procurators had the authority to suspend prosecution or to indict Teijin stock sale suspects. Without indictments, this business scandal would probably have faded from public view with the conclusion of the Jiji shinpò series. But Procurators Kuroda Etsurò and Biwada Gensuke zealously pursued this investigation, indicting important politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen. What motivated Kuroda and Biwada? Already noted is their disgust with corrupt members of the elite who sought personal gain at the expense of community and national interests . Moreover, Kuroda and Biwada worked at the epicenter of the state’s anticorruption campaign; the Tokyo bureau during the early Showa era indicted suspects in a number of high-profile corruption cases. Indeed, the bureau’s success must have emboldened Kuroda and Biwada. Furthermore , as explained earlier, Kuroda, together with colleagues, was eager to settle a score with Finance Ministry bureaucrats. Although these reasons are enough to explain Kuroda’ s and Biwada’ s motive, they are inadequate in explaining why two seasoned professionals managed to wade ever deeper into a “no facts” legal quagmire. A clue is provided by a look at the investigative culture in which these procurators operated. David Johnson has produced the best work in English on this procuratorial culture. Although Johnson focuses primarily on the postwar era, his conclusions are also applicable to the 1930s. Most procurators, he writes, want to secure justice (the reader should recall that Procurator Shiono Suehiko, head of the Tokyo bureau, stressed the pursuit of justice in the face of strong resistance). A cardinal objective of procurators, notes Johnson, is the discovery of truth; the most direct and perfect route to this goal is a suspect’s confession.1 A veteran procurator told Johnson: “Only God knows the truth. . . . But if we try hard we can come closer to the truth, even if we are never able to see it perfectly. . . . We have constructed a Chapter 8 Conclusion 206 system of prosecution that makes finding the truth our first priority.”2 To clarify “truth,” procurators prepare a dossier during the investigation, of which the section containing a suspect’s confession is the crucial part.3 “Prosecutors . . . do not record confessions verbatim. Instead, they prepare a summary statement which organizes and summarizes the suspect’s testimony . These summaries often synthesize statements the suspect has given over several sessions (or even days) of testimony. . . . Prosecutors frequently filter through the raw materials suspects provide, using the parts deemed most relevant to assemble the suspect’s confession.”4 When this process is complete, procurators have constructed the “truth.” Thus, it is clear that procuratorial attitudes and goals in the prewar and postwar eras are remarkably similar. Kuroda and Biwada, positive that the defendants were guilty, interrogated isolated suspects repeatedly as they compiled an official version of “truth.” Readers will recall that when suspects’ stories did not mesh, procurators reconstructed facts as required. Kuroda and Biwada, who had carried out earlier investigations in this manner, may even have felt that the stressed suspects were telling the truth as they confessed to various crimes. Nevertheless, this normal investigative procedure, which worked in some investigations, resulted in multiple errors and flawed confessions in the Teijin case. Ironically, Kuroda’s and Biwada’s relentless pursuit of “truth,” which involved a manipulation of facts, resulted in a “no facts” court verdict. Thus, in a sense, the procurators were victims of the same flawed system that victimized the sixteen defendants. In analyzing why the Tokyo bureau did so well in earlier corruption cases but so poorly in the Teijin case, one can conclude that Kuroda’s team was careless, forgetting important points made by Shiono Suehiko, who ran the bureau until October 1930. In one pep talk to subordinates, Shiono stressed strong performance and pride of accomplishment as they carried on the important work of maintaining justice. Facing each case with a letter of resignation in hand, he said, procurators should do their duty. Interestingly, he added that procurators must understand social conditions and must possess common sense.5 In his memoirs, Shiono points out that the Tokyo bureau picked corruption targets with care, playing off one major political party against the other. Shiono notes: “If we had not used the scalpel skillfully, our own heads would have been in danger.”6 Kuroda and Biwada either forgot or simply ignored these instructions about common sense and limiting investigative targets, because they attacked simultaneously elite members of the political, bureaucratic, and business worlds. A plaintive comment by procurator Hirata Susumu...

Share