Japan hanged Sunao Takami, 58, at the Osaka Detention House on 21 August, the first execution carried out since Sanae Takaichi became prime minister on 21 October 2025.
Takami had been convicted of killing five people in an arson attack on a pachinko parlour in Osaka in 2009. At his 2011 trial, a six-member jury sitting with a panel of three judges rejected the defence argument that he was mentally ill at the time of the crime. Japan’s recent record includes executions of death row inmates with suspected mental illness.
Sixth execution since 2020
The hanging was the sixth execution in Japan since 2020 and the first since June 2025. There are currently 100 prisoners under sentence of death, including six women.
Japan is one of the few industrialised democracies that retains and carries out capital punishment, and executions there are conducted by hanging.
Calls for a moratorium
Anti-death-penalty organisations urged the Japanese government to take concrete steps towards abolition by acting on recommendations that states and United Nations human rights mechanisms have made for years. Those recommendations include declaring an official moratorium on executions, ratifying the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, commuting all death sentences to prison terms, and bringing conditions for death row prisoners into line with international standards.
The same organisations called on the government to abstain on the UN General Assembly’s biennial resolution on a moratorium on the use of the death penalty. Japan has consistently voted against that resolution in the past.
The Second Optional Protocol, which sits at the centre of one of those demands, commits states parties not to execute anyone within their jurisdiction and to take the measures needed to abolish the death penalty. Japan has not ratified it.
This report was produced by the HuMedia newsroom.
