Where Is the Justice?: Media Attacks, Prosecutorial Abuse, and My 13 Years in Japanese Court

On June 18, 1988, Asahi Shimbun newspaper printed a scoop on alleged bribery of the deputy mayor of Kawasaki City by growing media company Recruit. It was the beginning of the Recruit Affair, a scandal that shook Japanese politics at the height of the bubble economy, and of a living hell for Hiromasa Ezoe, the founder and president of the company. Established newspapers reported that the company had transferred pre-listed shares in subsidiary Recruit Cosmos to bureaucrats and prominent politicians of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. This directed huge public anger towards Ezoe, setting him up as a villain, even though the transfer arrangement was a perfectly legal transaction. As a result, the investigative team from the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office felt obliged to detain Ezoe. A series of interrogations by prosecutors in the detention centre inflicted physical and mental abuse. Purely on the basis of untrustworthy sensational reports in the popular media (newspapers, TV news programmes and weekly magazines) they browbeat a confession out of him. As many prominent LDP policymakers were shown to have accepted the share transfer offer, the Takeshita cabinet was ultimately forced to resign the following year. Ezoe was so exhausted physically and psychologically from his treatment in the detention centre that he agreed to sign the interrogation records based on conjecture by prosecutors. He was given a suspended sentence, and resigned from the business he had founded from scratch as a Tokyo University student. For the first time, Ezoe is able to reveal to the world the truth of the Recruit Scandal. The passage of 20 years has allowed him to use official documents as well as the notes he took himself while in the detention centre to prove the injustices that were heaped upon him by the Japanese Establishment to serve their own purposes. Many experts of the contemporary Japanese politics say that the Recruit Affair was a significant turning point as postwar Japan moved from the bubble economy to the following Lost Decade. This book provides damning testimony to the harsh reality of collusion between the Judiciary and the media in Japan.

About Hiromasa Ezoe