Illustrations by Matt Rota

On a sunny morning in October 2023, a 90-year-old woman in a blue blazer walked slowly toward the main courthouse in Shizuoka, a city on the Japanese coast about a two-hour drive south of Tokyo. The woman, Hideko Hakamada, led a procession of lawyers and supporters carrying a broad, sky-blue banner, and as they approached the courthouse, a throng of some 300 people began clapping and chanting encouragement. A cluster of TV-news crews had set up nearby, and Hideko turned to greet them.

As she told the court later the same morning, she had come to right a wrong that had been done in that very building 55 years earlier. Hideko Hakamada is the sister of Iwao Hakamada, a former professional boxer whose long struggle for justice has become one of the most celebrated legal causes in Japanese history. He was found guilty of murdering four people in 1966, in a trial so flawed that it has become a textbook example of wrongful conviction.

Hakamada was sentenced to death, and spent the next five decades in a state of debilitating fear. Prisoners in Japan are not told when they will be executed; they listen every morning for the footsteps that could precede a key turning in their cell door and then a short walk to the hanging chamber. No warning is given to their lawyers or family members. Hakamada spent longer on death row than anyone else in history, earning a spot in Guinness World Records. He wrote eloquently about the daily mental torture he endured, and in the end it drove him mad. His agony changed the lives of many people around him, including one of the original judges, who became convinced of his innocence and spent the rest of his own life racked with guilt.

In recent years, Hakamada, who is now 88, has become a symbol in Japan not just of wronged innocence but of what is known as hitojichi shiho, or “hostage justice.” Police in Japan have the power to hold suspects and interrogate them for months without giving them access to a lawyer. The goal is to extract a confession, which Japanese prosecutors see as the centerpiece of any successful criminal case. Hakamada was subjected to brutal interrogations for 23 days—lasting up to 16 hours a day—until he signed a confession (which he recanted soon afterward).

These routine practices have led to a conviction rate of 99.8 percent for cases that go to trial. They have also led to so many accusations of coercion that there is now a Japanese word for the phenomenon—enzai, meaning “false accusations leading to imprisonment.” The system is also heavily weighted against granting retrials that might give convicted people a second chance. In Hakamada’s case, it took more than 50 years for him to receive one.

The Japanese fixation on obtaining confessions is centuries old. As Takashi Takano, a prominent Tokyo attorney and a critic of the system, explained to me, it is rooted in a belief that the state must elicit remorse from offenders in order to rehabilitate them and bolster social harmony. One of Takano’s clients was Carlos Ghosn, the former Nissan CEO, who was smuggled from Japan in a musical-equipment box in 2019 after being arrested on charges of financial misconduct and interrogated for hundreds of hours. The Ghosn case gave the outside world a rare glimpse of the power of Japanese prosecutors.

The facts of the Hakamada case were egregious enough to anger even insiders. In 2014, a judge released Hakamada from prison, granting him a retrial and delivering a stinging rebuke to the police, strongly suggesting that they had fabricated the evidence—a pile of bloodstained clothing—that had helped convict him. According to the judge, the man who supervised Hakamada’s interrogation was known among lawyers as the “king of torture.” The long-delayed retrial concluded in May, and Hakamada was finally acquitted in late September.

At this point, Hakamada may be beyond understanding what his exoneration means. He has sometimes said things that suggest he believes he was never in prison. He appears to have survived only by escaping into an imaginary world where he is all-powerful—a king, an emperor, even “the almighty God.” (Hakamada embraced Catholicism while in prison.) But the prospect of a retrial helped galvanize a reform movement led by lawyers, ex-judges, other wrongly convicted people, and even some Japanese boxers, who see Hakamada as both a figure of heroic suffering and the victim of a lingering social prejudice against their sport. These advocates have been pushing Japanese officials to rewrite the laws that undergird the practice of hostage justice. Many of them have drawn inspiration from Hakamada’s own prison writings, copied and passed around in samizdat form.

“Conscience is the only voice that protects the life of an innocent man,” he wrote in a journal entry in 1981, when he was still lucid. “The voice of conscience echoing ever louder and higher for as long as the agonizing nights last.”

When I first saw Iwao Hakamada, he was sitting at a table in the third-floor apartment he shares with Hideko, eating cooked eel and rice from a bowl. He still has the small, sturdy frame of a featherweight boxer, along with a large, sloping forehead and small eyes that give him the look of a sleep-addled bear.

Hideko, who had met me at the door, introduced me to her brother. I bowed a greeting, but Hakamada glanced up only briefly and went back to his eel and rice. The apartment was relatively large by Japanese standards, and it struck me that it must have seemed vast when Hakamada was released from his tiny cell. With Hideko’s encouragement, I said a few words about why I was there and asked my first question, about why he had become a boxer.

“Because I decided I needed to be strong,” he replied. It was a promising start for a man who was said to have lost touch with reality. But then he got up quickly and walked away, signaling that the interview was over. Hideko had warned me that her brother was no longer capable of telling a stranger his story.

Nonetheless, the long arc of his incarceration—from passionate self-defense to deepening despair to encroaching insanity—is captured in some 5,000 handwritten letters and journal entries that Hakamada produced in prison. In a sense, those pages are where his soul resides, perhaps more so than in the ghostly old man who was now sitting in a leather armchair in the next room. They were the real reason I had come.

Hideko got me a cup of tea and began carrying heavy boxes of Hakamada’s prison letters and journals to the table, brushing off my efforts to help. She is small but impressively fit for her age, with a habitual expression of resilient good humor on her face. The pages are in bound volumes, each one as thick as a bible.

She began leafing through them, showing me how Hakamada’s handwriting had changed over the years. It starts out wobbly and cartoonish; he had never been a good student, she said. He was the youngest of six siblings born to a working-class family in a village near Shizuoka, a quiet boy who loved animals and used to bring home cats and birds and give them names. Hideko was the second-youngest, by her own account a tomboy and a loudmouth. “He would imitate what I did,” she said. He began boxing when he was 19—there was a gym nearby—and turned professional at the age of 23, boxing 19 matches in a single year (a record in Japan). But he decided to retire after an injury, and eventually got a job at a small miso factory not far from his parents’ home. He married a local woman, and the couple had a child.

Hideko paused, resting her hand on one of the binders, and then told me about the night that changed everything: June 30, 1966. A fire broke out after midnight in the home of the miso factory’s director, and after the flames had been put out, investigators discovered the burned bodies of the director, his wife, and two of their children. They had all been stabbed to death. The following morning, Hakamada went to his parents’ house, where Hideko was still living, to talk about the shocking news. Meanwhile, the police settled on Hakamada as the most likely suspect among the firm’s employees, believing the crime to have been an inside job and apparently seeing his boxing skills as proof of a capacity for violence.

Matt Rota

During the 23 days of interrogation in a Shizuoka station house, the police used methods that were common in Japan when authorities were trying to extract a confession: sleep deprivation, threats, beatings. I spoke with two other people who had tried to maintain their innocence in similar circumstances, and both told me they had become so physically and emotionally spent that they would have said or signed almost anything to escape. The confession Hakamada ultimately signed is implausible on its face: He admitted to multiple scenarios, all of which seem to have been suggested to him by the police. Cash had been stolen from the home, but the police were never able to trace any of it to him.

“Please, God, I am not the killer,” he wrote in one of many letters to his mother during the first trial. “I am screaming it every day, and one day I hope people will hear my voice that reaches them through this Shizuoka wind.”

Hakamada could not have known it, but one of the judges who faced him as he first entered the courthouse in 1967 was a silent rebel against the Japanese way of justice. At 30, Norimichi Kumamoto was only a year younger than Hakamada, but in most ways their lives could not have been more different. Kumamoto was the eldest of four children, and had been recognized as brilliant from an early age. In pictures, he is austerely handsome, with creased brows and a firmly set mouth. He was well known at university, one of his classmates, Akira Kitani, told me, not just for his intellect but for his displays of brazen independence in a culture that fostered conformity. During the oral part of the bar exam, Kumamoto argued with his examiners—a shocking act of insubordination. “He won the argument, but they failed him” for talking back, Kitani, who later became a distinguished criminal-court judge, told me. (Kumamoto went on to earn the top score out of 10,000 students after he was allowed to retake the exam.)

Kumamoto also stood out for his interest in defendants’ rights. Seiki Ogata, a Japanese journalist who wrote a book about the judge, described him as an admirer of Chief Justice Earl Warren, who wrote the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1966 Miranda decision requiring that suspects be read their rights before being interrogated. This was an unusual perspective in a country where law-enforcement officials have openly declared their belief that, as one of them put it, “the right to silence is a cancer.”

Kumamoto appears to have sensed that something was wrong soon after Hakamada’s trial began. The prosecutors had no plausible evidence tying Hakamada to the crime and no plausible motive for him to have been involved in the killings. Years afterward, according to Ogata’s biography, the judge recalled being moved by the boxer’s air of confidence as he asserted his innocence; unlike some other defendants, Hakamada did not seem drawn by an urge to explain himself. “I rather feel that we are being judged from now on,” Kumamoto remembered telling one of the two other judges hearing the case, according to the biography. (Some serious criminal trials are handled by three judges in Japan.)

Almost a year into the trial—the Japanese justice system tends to take its time—the police claimed to have discovered a pile of bloody clothes at the bottom of a miso tank from the factory. They declared—though they could not prove—that the clothes were Hakamada’s, and that he had hidden them there after the murders.

Judge Kumamoto thought the discovery of the new evidence was far too convenient to be real. The bloodstains were oddly fresh-looking on clothes that were said to have been stewing in a miso vat for 14 months, and at trial, the clothes would be shown not to fit Hakamada. Kumamoto wanted to acquit. But according to Ogata, the other two judges on the panel, both senior to him, could not believe that the police or prosecutors had coerced a false confession.

Such faith remains common among Japanese judges. Some spend an entire career on the bench without once delivering an acquittal. “In theory, the prosecutors monitor the police, and the judge monitors the prosecutors,” Hiroshi Ichikawa, who spent almost 13 years as a prosecutor and is now a defense lawyer, told me. “But it doesn’t work like this at all. The prosecutor basically does what the police want, and the judges follow what the prosecutor wants. So the criminal-justice system is basically controlled by the police.”

Prosecutors are afraid to cross the police, who have much larger investigative resources, and often cover up their mistakes. Ichikawa startled me by disclosing that he had once, as a prosecutor, personally threatened to kill a suspect if he didn’t confess. He said his former colleagues mostly haven’t changed their ways.

In the summer of 1968, after weeks of difficult arguments among themselves, the three judges in the Hakamada trial held a vote. Kumamoto was alone in finding Hakamada not guilty. Then came a second blow: As the presiding judge on the panel, he was obliged to write the decision justifying the verdict.

Kumamoto reluctantly agreed—to refuse might have ended his career—but he produced a 350-page document that is a poignant record of a tortured conscience. He criticized the investigators’ tactics at length and appeared to be headed for an acquittal. But he then concluded that the defendant was guilty and must be executed.

Another judge who reviewed Kumamoto’s ruling many years later told me that the document was “very unusual, to the point that it’s abnormal … If you read the verdict, you can see that there was not just disagreement but serious conflict of opinion” among the judges.

Kumamoto refused to sign his own ruling. He said he tried to visit Hakamada in jail to apologize, but was not granted permission. “Kumamoto believed the higher courts would overturn the verdict, but they didn’t,” Ogata, his biographer, told me. “In the end, he felt really responsible for what happened.” That feeling would shape the remainder of his life.

The 1968 death sentence was a reckoning for everyone in the Hakamada family. Hakamada’s mother, who had been healthy and strong, fell into despair and died two months after the sentencing. His father died not long afterward. Hakamada was so attached to his parents that his siblings kept the news from him for more than a year. He continued to write to his mother regularly, and finally the siblings decided they had to tell him. “I felt a great shock, and my whole body instantly froze,” he wrote in a letter to his brother. “I could do nothing except look at my uncontrollably trembling hands. Feeling the trepidation like dark waves overtaking my body, I was taken by the urge to curse every being in this world.”

Hideko showed me more of Hakamada’s writings from the years that followed. He studied hard in prison, and his kanji characters become impressively neat and elegant, in perfectly ordered lines; they look like the work of a different person. His thoughts are more focused. He talks about the details of his case, and sometimes expounds on the nature of freedom and solitude. In a letter from December 1976, he describes feeling relief and inspiration after meeting with students from a human-rights group: “They believe I’m innocent. That’s why they support my cause. It’s clear that the verdict of the high court is nonsense … It is extremely brutal and unfair, prejudiced, to give a sentence based on a factual error.”

Hakamada also wrote a diary entry addressed to his son, who was 2 and a half years old when he was arrested. “Son, I want you to grow up honest and brave,” he wrote.

There is no need to be afraid. If someone asks how your father is, you should reply like this: My father is battling an unfair iron chain … Son, as long as you try to do good and survive by learning lessons even from this society that is full of agonies and unkindness, I will be able to return to you in good health not too far in the future. I will prove to you then that your father never killed anyone and that the police know it best, and that the judge is the one who must feel most sorry.

He seems to have been referring to Judge Kumamoto, though the entry does not say so.

Hakamada’s wife had divorced him while he was in prison. It was there Hakamada learned that the boy had been placed in an orphanage and that the letters he sent to his son never reached him, Hideko told me. She said she has not seen the boy since he was a toddler, and seemed reluctant to talk about him. But her brother sometimes still calls out his son’s name: Akira. He would be 60 years old today.

Some of the letters and meditations Hakamada produced in prison are lyrical. “For some reason, moonlight gives me hope and peace,” he wrote. “When I think that many people outside prison are also looking at the moon, I feel a sense of freedom with other people who also gaze at the moonlight.”

Although he was on death row, Hakamada remained both hopeful and angry throughout the 1970s, sure that his conviction would be overturned on appeal. At times, he wrote about other cases of wrongful conviction that he became aware of through friends or lawyers. “This scream that I have continued to vocalize has not been listened to for the past 13 years,” he wrote to a boxing commentator. “The lack of responsibility of Japan’s justice system is so serious that my skin boils from anger.”

In 1980, Japan’s supreme court confirmed Hakamada’s death sentence. Six months later, the man in the cell next to him, who had become a friend, was taken out one morning without warning and hanged. This was a period of terrible suffering, Hideko told me. She felt as if her heart would stop every time she heard about an execution on TV. Hakamada’s journal entries and letters are a dark window into his state of mind. “Death-row inmates unanimously agree they fear execution very much,” he wrote in a letter to his brother. “In fact, it’s not the execution itself they fear: They fear so much the mind that fears execution. This agony, the pain that comes from extreme anxiety, completely differs from the pain and suffering accompanied by the concept of death.”

A shadow seemed to fall over Hideko’s face as she showed me some of the pages that followed, from the 1980s. “He started to talk about people sending him signals by radio waves,” she said, pointing to the Japanese script. Later, there was talk of monkeys in his cell with him, and he started wearing bags on his head and arms to protect himself from harmful emanations.

Among the most striking letters are those in which Hakamada seems to be persuading himself that he can find meaning in his suffering. “My wish to win innocence is something that is purified and deepened when I accept loneliness,” he wrote from his cell, a concrete box about seven feet on each side. “Loneliness is certainly very sad and painful, but it is never meaningless. When one endures and humbly accepts loneliness, one will surely realize the deep meaning of the path to victory.”

But as the years passed with no hope of release—and with sudden execution a daily possibility—his mind continued to unravel. You can see it in his handwriting, which gradually loses its discipline and becomes loopy and uneven again, as if he were returning to his childhood self. At times, he seemed to hover between madness and reason within a single paragraph:

I am the king of Japan. I want to run flat out, as fast as I can. If I won my freedom, first I would make this boundless dream come true, cutting through the wind with shoulders and hips. Just thinking of it makes my body ache. Could I be champion if I just kept on running? When I was young, I used to think so. But now I have another answer ready.

All through the decades of Hakamada’s imprisonment, Kumamoto was tormented by his role in the case. He resigned his judgeship in disgust less than a year after the verdict, a shocking decision for someone who had been seen as a rising star. He found work as a lawyer and university lecturer. He also became an alcoholic. Two marriages ended in divorce. He grew estranged from his two daughters, who didn’t understand the source of his misery until many years later, Ogata told me.

According to Ogata, Kumamoto once turned himself in to the police, saying he’d committed a murder; he may have been drunk at the time. He seems to have carried Hakamada everywhere, like an accusing ghost. On learning that Hakamada had embraced Catholicism in prison, Kumamoto also embraced Catholicism. At one point, he went to a church and asked to confess his sins, because he “wanted to feel closer” to him, Ogata wrote in his book.

Kumamoto appears to have kept his belief in Hakamada’s innocence almost entirely to himself. Japanese judges are expected to remain silent about their deliberations, and stoicism about one’s suffering has long been a part of Japan’s culture, perhaps especially for men. But in 2007, while living in retirement in southern Japan, Kumamoto began hearing about an emerging movement to free Hakamada, which had attracted the attention of some lawmakers. He sent a note to one of the activists, offering to help. Soon afterward, he appeared on a public panel about the death penalty, where he discussed his role in the trial and declared that he believed Hakamada was innocent. He also made an apology. “This is the moment when something that had been stuck in my throat and was suffocating me finally disappeared,” Kumamoto later told his biographer.

Kumamoto’s comments were reported widely in Japan, partly because he had violated the judicial code of silence. He spoke again at a session of Japan’s Parliament. The story of his long-repressed guilt and grief captured the public’s imagination, and gave rise to a feature film that was released in 2010, titled Box: The Hakamada Case, in reference to Hakamada’s career as a fighter. It was not a great movie—dramatizing a man sitting alone in a cell for almost five decades is hard—but the film did help draw more attention to Hakamada’s situation, both in Japan and beyond.

Hideko met Kumamoto at the time of his public apology. She told me she was deeply grateful to him for what he had done. Her brother was still locked up, but he was no longer seen as a monster. “Since the news report went out, the world has changed,” she said. “Even strangers greeted me on the street with a smile.”

Hideko has become something of a public figure in her own right. A manga-style graphic novel about her was published in 2020. She has the kind of life force that you sense the moment you walk into a room—her head cocked slightly, her eyes gleaming with amusement. She seems immune to regret, and laughs so often that it is easy to forget what she has been through.

She was 35 when Hakamada was convicted of murder, and it turned her into a pariah, along with the rest of the family. The local papers were full of stories portraying her brother as a demon. She got hate mail from strangers. She grew lonely and depressed, and drank herself to sleep every night for three years, she told me. But she pulled herself together, recognizing that she was her brother’s only hope. She visited him in prison as often as she could. She lived alone, working long hours at a government office and then at an accounting firm. I later learned—from the graphic novel about her life—that she had been briefly married as a young woman, but she’d never mentioned that to me. In a sense, she was married to her brother’s cause.

Starting in the ’90s, with Hideko’s help, a movement to exonerate Hakamada slowly coalesced. It attracted a diverse collection of people, and some pursued the cause with the kind of nerdy obsessiveness characteristic of otaku—a Japanese term for a person with a consuming hobby. One volunteer performed meticulous experiments with bloody clothing soaked in miso over long periods to show that the prosecution’s claims in the original trial did not hold up. These experiments were so rigorous and well documented that they were cited by the defense at Hakamada’s retrial many years later.

Among the movement’s most passionate supporters were Japanese boxers. One of them, a retired bantamweight champion named Shosei Nitta, started accompanying Hideko on her prison visits in the early 2000s. Then he began going alone, once a month. “You couldn’t converse in a normal way, except about boxing,” Nitta told me when I visited him at his Tokyo boxing gym. Nitta cocked his arm, showing me how he and Hakamada would discuss the best technique for a hook punch. Dozens of champion boxers protested in front of the supreme court, calling for a retrial.

Among the many things the boxers did for Hakamada was reach out to Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the American prizefighter who was catapulted to fame after Bob Dylan wrote a song about his wrongful murder conviction. (He served 19 years behind bars before his release in 1985.) Hakamada himself had written to Carter in 1989, congratulating him on his exoneration and pledging to “follow in your footsteps.” Two decades later, a fellow boxer traveled to the United States and brought back a videotape of Carter offering his support to Hakamada, who was still on death row.

“In the boxing community, we share this mysterious bond,” Nitta told me. “But in mainstream society, it’s not really approved of. We are trying to resist this prejudice, and I think that is why Hakamada means so much to us.”

Social prejudice appears to be a common thread in many wrongful-conviction cases in Japan. One of Hakamada’s death-row companions—their cells were adjoining—was a man named Kazuo Ishikawa, who belongs to the burakumin, the descendants of a feudal caste that was consigned to low-status jobs and still suffers from discrimination. Ishikawa was convicted of a 1963 murder on the basis of a coerced confession and a ransom note, even though he was illiterate at the time. He was paroled in 1994, but has always maintained his innocence and is still, at age 85, trying to clear his name.

Hideko and her eclectic band of boxers and otaku have helped elevate a broader effort to address the flaws in Japan’s criminal-justice system. More people are coming forward to contest their verdicts, and several nonprofits have sprung up to support those they believe to have been wrongly convicted. There is now an Innocence Project Japan, inspired by the American group formed in 1992, that uses DNA evidence to challenge convictions. The movement has had some modest victories: Defense lawyers have gained more discovery rights and have pushed back against detention orders. Some police interrogations are now recorded. A “lay judge” initiative, begun in 2009, allows a mixed panel of three professional judges and an average of six citizens to decide guilt and sentencing in some serious criminal cases.

There have also been setbacks. A lawsuit challenging Japan’s long-standing practice of notifying death-row inmates only hours before their execution—which likely played a role in driving Hakamada insane—was dismissed by the Osaka district court in April.

Change of any kind comes slowly in Japan, where those who question authority are more likely to be slapped than rewarded. Most people seem to have deep confidence in the justice system, and they are not entirely wrong: Japan incarcerates far fewer people per capita than the United States, partly because prosecutors are cautious about pressing charges for less serious crimes. Sentences tend to be relatively light, especially for those who admit their guilt and express remorse. Prosecutors believe they have a responsibility to help offenders return to a useful life.

But they bridle at the notion that justice can be arrived at through a messy legal tussle, as in American courtrooms. In Japan, the legal system behaves more like some archaic deity: kind to those who accept its judgments, and merciless to those who do not.

Matt Rota

In 2014, after his legal team had spent more than 30 years pleading for a retrial, Hakamada was finally granted one by a district court. Hideko was then 81 years old and retired. She went to the prison to give her brother the good news, trailed by a film crew. As she was leaving, a guard offered her boxes full of her brother’s belongings. Hakamada then walked into the room and sat down next to her. The judge, it turned out, had ordered Hakamada’s immediate release. Hideko was totally unprepared. They had to ask for a ride from the film crew, but Hakamada, who hadn’t been in a car in decades, got motion sickness. They ended up spending the night in a Tokyo hotel before heading home to Hamamatsu, the city where Hideko now lives.

Hideko struggled to get her head around the magnitude of what had just happened. The judge had not only released Hakamada and granted a retrial; he had taken a sledgehammer to the entire case. He asserted that the investigators appeared to have faked the evidence. He cited DNA evidence, not available during the first trial, showing that the blood on the clothes from the miso tank was neither Hakamada’s nor the murder victims’.

It might have ended there. The judge had made clear that he believed Hakamada was innocent, and his ruling seemed unanswerable. Instead, prosecutors appealed his call for a retrial. As Hakamada moved in with his sister and began readapting to a world he had not inhabited since the mid-1960s, his case staggered from one false ending to another. Finally, in 2023, the Tokyo High Court affirmed his right to a retrial. Prosecutors, who were widely expected to give up, declared that they would seek his conviction for murder all over again.

There was little logic in their decision. They had no new evidence, and their chances of victory were near zero. But as Makoto Ibusuki, a professor at Tokyo’s Seijo University and an authority on wrongful convictions, explained to me, Japanese prosecutors tend to see their institution as infallible. There may have been an added spur in this instance. The prosecutors who brought the original case had been accused in the 2014 ruling of using fabricated evidence. David Johnson, an expert on the Japanese legal system who teaches at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told me that their successors may have felt obliged to defend their reputation.

The retrial, which began in October 2023, was like a bad case of déjà vu, with the same exhibits of bloodstained clothes and miso tanks that had been used half a century earlier—though the state quietly withdrew Hakamada’s discredited confession. “The prosecutors just repeat what has already been said,” Hideko told me. “The expressions on their faces said, Why do we have to be here? ”

For all its frustrations, the retrial gave a big platform to opponents of hostage justice. The movement’s buoyant mood was on display at a memorial service I attended this past April at a Tokyo meeting hall. It was held to honor a man who had been exonerated years earlier after serving nearly three decades for murder. I found myself chatting with an 80-year-old man in an ill-fitting brown blazer who said he had served 20 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. We were standing by a big picture window, and he pointed out the headquarters of the National Police Agency across the street. He had been tortured in there for weeks on end, he said, in a basement room with no windows and no clocks. “I understand completely how an innocent man ends up writing a confession,” he said.

But much of the Japanese public does not understand. The widow of the exonerated man being honored gave a brief but powerful speech, during which she said her father hadn’t wanted her to marry a man who had been convicted of a crime, because he believed that “the courthouse never lies.”

A nonpartisan group of some 200 Parliament members now wants to make it easier for defendants to receive a retrial and is preparing to propose amendments to the law. But getting any such measure past Japan’s powerful Justice Ministry will not be easy. It is dominated by prosecutors, and has sent clear signs that it is opposed to reform.

When Hakamada got out of prison, Hideko didn’t ask him about his time on the inside. “I was waiting until he spoke,” she told me. But he never has. Occasionally, he refers obliquely to his time there as “training,” as if it had been preparation for some otherworldly combat.

He talks about being visited by the spirits of his dead friends, the ones who were led away to the execution chamber, where a prison official stands behind a blue curtain and presses a button that ends a person’s life. “When he first came here, he’d say there were spirits of the dead trapped in the closet,” Hideko told me. “He’d tap on it and try to release them.”

Hakamada’s days revolve around a long, mostly silent, drive that he is taken on every afternoon, his eyes focused on the passing streets. He believes that evil influences lurk unseen, Hideko told me, and that he alone can fight them, like the boxer he once was. “He feels very strongly that he must surveil,” she said. “He needs to go all over Hamamatsu city. To surveil and protect.”

The acquittal that arrived in September was a balm for Hideko and her supporters. But it came too late for one of them. Judge Kumamoto, the author of the 1968 decision, was already seriously ill with cancer when Hakamada was released. The two men’s lives had been deeply intertwined for decades, but they had never met outside the courtroom.

In early 2018, Hideko brought her brother to Kumamoto’s hospital bed; he was pale and skeletal, an oxygen tube strapped under his nose. He looked to be on the verge of death, though he would live for two more years.

The meeting was captured on film. The two visitors, dressed in heavy winter clothes, appear somber and dumbstruck as they gaze down at the stricken man. Her brother didn’t seem to understand whom he was looking at, Hideko told me. But Kumamoto clearly knew the face of the man he had condemned 50 years earlier.

“Iwao,” the judge said, in a scratchy whisper. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “A Boxer on Death Row.”

Just after college, I went to teach English as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small village school in West Africa. To help relieve the loneliness, I packed a shortwave radio, a Sony Walkman, and, among other books, a paperback copy of Thomas Mann’s very long novel The Magic Mountain. As soon as I set foot in Togo, something began to change. My pulse kept racing; my mouth went dry and prickly; dizzy spells came on. I developed a dread of the hot silence of the midday hours, and an awareness of each moment of time as a vehicle for mental pain. It might have helped if I’d known that my weekly antimalarial medicine could have disturbing effects, especially on dreams (mine were frighteningly vivid), or if someone had mentioned the words anxiety and depression to me. At 22, I was a psychological innocent. Without the comfort of a diagnosis, I experienced these changes as a terrifying void of meaning in the universe. I had never noticed the void before, because I had never been moved to ask the questions Who am I? What is life for? Now I couldn’t seem to escape them, and I received no answers from an empty sky.

I might have lost my mind if not for The Magic Mountain. By luck or fate, the novel—which was published 100 years ago, in November 1924—seemed to tell a story a little like mine, set not in the West African rainforest but in the Swiss Alps. Hans Castorp, a 23-year-old German engineer, leaves the “flatlands” for a three-week visit to his cousin Joachim, a tuberculosis patient who is taking the cure in one of the high-altitude sanatoriums that flourished in Europe before the First World War. Hans Castorp (Mann’s detached and amused, yet sympathetic, narrator always refers to the protagonist by his full name) is “a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man,” a slightly comical young bourgeois.

Arriving on the mountain, he immediately loses his bearings. In the thin air, his face goes hot and his body cold; his heart pounds, and his favorite cigar tastes like cardboard. His sense of time becomes warped. Many of the patients spend years “up here.” No one speaks or thinks in terms of days. “ ‘Home in three weeks,’ that’s a notion from down below,” his ailing cousin warns. Hans Castorp’s companions at the sanatorium’s five lavish daily meals are a cosmopolitan and macabre gallery of mostly young people who fill the endless hours gossiping, flirting, quarreling, philosophizing, and waiting to recover or die. The proximity of death is unsettling; it’s also funny (when the roads are blocked by snow, corpses are sent flying down the mountain on bobsleds) and strangely alluring.

[From the January 1953 issue: Thomas Mann on the Making of The Magic Mountain]

When Hans Castorp catches a cold, the sanatorium’s director examines him and finds a “moist spot” on one of his lungs. That and a slight fever suggest tuberculosis, requiring him to remain for an indeterminate time. Both diagnosis and treatment are dubious, but they thrill Hans Castorp: This hermetic world has begun to cast a spell on him and provoke questions “about the meaning and purpose of life” that he’d never asked down in the flatlands. Answered at first with “hollow silence,” they demand extended contemplation that’s possible only on the magic mountain.

The director’s assistant, trained in psychoanalysis, explains in one of his biweekly lectures that sickness is “merely transformed love,” the body’s response to repressed desire. Fever is the mark of eros; the decay of a diseased body signifies life itself. Mann had ventured onto this terrain before. In his novella Death in Venice (1912), the famous writer Gustav von Aschenbach, infatuated with a Polish boy at his hotel, stays in the plague-ridden city while other visitors flee. Hans Castorp stays too, obsessed with his own temperature chart, and with the entrancing Clavdia Chauchat, a young tubercular Russian with “Kirghiz eyes,” bad posture, and a habit of letting the dining-room door slam behind her. Almost half the novel goes by before Hans Castorp—who has by now been on the mountain for seven months—talks with Clavdia, just as she’s about to depart. On the night before she leaves, he makes one of the most bizarre declarations of love in literature: “Let me take in the exhalation of your pores and brush the down—oh, my human image made of water and protein, destined for the contours of the grave, let me perish, my lips against yours!” Clavdia leaves Hans Castorp with a framed X-ray of her tubercular lung.

I fell under the spell of Hans Castorp’s quest story, as the Everyman hero is transformed by his explorations of time, illness, sciences and séances, politics and religion and music. The climactic chapter, “Snow,” felt as though it were addressed to me. Hans Castorp, lost in a snowstorm, falls asleep and then awakens from a mesmerizing and monstrous dream with an insight toward which the entire story has led him: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.”

Hans Castorp remains on the mountain for seven years—a mystical number. The Magic Mountain is an odyssey confined to one place, a novel of ideas like no other, and a masterpiece of literary modernism. Mann analyzes the nature of time philosophically and also conveys the feeling of its passage, slowing down his narrative in some spots to take in “the entire world of ideas”—a day can fill 100 pages—and elsewhere omitting years. Reading this dense yet miraculously seductive book becomes an experience like Hans Castorp’s interlude on the mountain. As I made my way through the novel by kerosene lamplight, I took Mann’s bildungsroman as a guide to my own education among the farmers, teachers, children, and market women who became my closest companions, hoping to find myself on a journey toward enlightenment as rich and meaningful as its hero’s. That was asking too much of even great literature; afraid of my own suicidal thoughts, I went home before the end of my two years. But on a few particularly dark nights, The Magic Mountain probably saved my life.

I recently returned to The Magic Mountain, without the intense identification of the first time (you have to be young for a book to inspire that), but with a larger sense that, a century later, Mann has something important to tell us as a civilization. The Mann who began writing the novel was an aristocrat of art, hostile to democracy—a reactionary aesthete. Working on The Magic Mountain was a transformative experience, turning him—as it turned his protagonist—into a humanist. What Hans Castorp arrives at, lost and asleep in the snow, “is the idea of the human being,” Mann later wrote, “the conception of a future humanity that has passed through and survived the profoundest knowledge of disease and death.” In our age of brutal wars, authoritarian politics, cultures of contempt, and technology that promises to replace us with machines, what is left of the idea of the human being? What can it mean to be a humanist?

Mann conceived of The Magic Mountain in 1912, when he was 37, after a three-week visit to a sanatorium in Davos where his wife, Katia, was a patient. “It was meant as a humorous companion-piece to Death in Venice and was to be about the same length: a sort of satire on the tragedy just finished,” he later wrote. He soon discovered that his story resisted the confines of a comic novella. But before he could realize its possibilities, World War I broke out, in August 1914. With Hans Castorp still in his first week at the sanatorium, Mann abandoned the manuscript as Europe plunged into unprecedented destruction. In a letter to a friend in the summer of 1915, he left a clue as to where things stood with his unfinished novel: “On the whole the story inclines towards sympathy with death.” And he now saw an ending—the war itself.

Mann published no fiction for the duration of the war. Instead, he became a very public defender of imperial Germany against its adversaries. For Mann, the Great War was more than a contest among rival European powers or a patriotic cause. It was a struggle between “civilization” and “culture”—between the rational, politicized civilization of the West and Germany’s deeper culture of art, soul, and “genius,” which Mann associated with the irrational in human nature: sex, aggression, mythical belief. The kaiser’s Germany—strong in arms, rich in music and philosophy, politically authoritarian—embodied Mann’s ideal. The Western powers “want to make us happy,” he wrote in the fall of 1914—that is, to turn Germany into a liberal democracy. Mann was more drawn to death’s mystery and profundity than to reason and progress, which he considered facile values. This sympathy wasn’t simply a fascination with human evil—with a death instinct—but an attraction to a deeper freedom, a more intense form of life than parliaments and pamphleteering offered.

Mann scorned the notion of the writer as political activist. The artist should remain apart from politics and society, he believed, free to represent the deep and contradictory truths of reality rather than using art as a means to advance a particular view. In his wartime nonfiction writing, he mocked “civilization’s literary man,” a self-important poseur who takes sides on public issues and signs petitions. Mann was aiming at his brother Heinrich, a novelist and an essayist of nearly equal renown, whose liberal politics led him to support Germany’s enemies, France and Britain. The brothers exchanged indirect but caustic volleys in print, and their fraternal dispute became so bitter that they didn’t speak for seven years.

Before setting aside The Magic Mountain, Mann had created a version of this writer figure in a character named Lodovico Settembrini, another patient at the sanatorium, who is an irascible and hyper-articulate advocate for all things progressive: reason, liberty, virtue, health, the active life, social improvement. He declares music, the most emotionally overpowering of the arts, “politically suspect.” Mann at his most satiric has Settembrini contributing an essay to a multivolume project whose purpose is to end suffering. In short, Settembrini, like Heinrich, is a “humanist”—but in Mann’s usage, the term has an ironic sound. As he wrote elsewhere, it implies “a repugnant shallowness and castration of the concept of humanity,” pushed by “the politician, the humanitarian revolutionary and radical literary man, who is a demagogue in the grand style, namely a flatterer of mankind.”

Settembrini becomes a philosophical tutor to Hans Castorp, who listens with respectful interest but resists the liberal catechism. He responds more powerfully to the erotic allure of Clavdia Chauchat, the careless door slammer, who believes in “abandoning oneself to danger, to whatever can harm us, destroy us.” Yet Settembrini also has the wisdom to warn our hero against the seductions of the sanatorium, which separates young people from the society “down there,” infecting them with lassitude and rendering them incapable of ordinary life. As an artist above politics, Mann didn’t want simply to criticize “civilization’s literary man,” but to show him as “equally right and wrong.” He intended to create an intellectual opponent to Settembrini in a conservative Protestant character named Pastor Bunge—but the war intruded.

Mann spent the war years making his case for the German soul, steeped in the “passion” of Wagner and “manliness” of Nietzsche, amid a global catastrophe that remained bloodlessly abstract to him at his desk in Munich. He published his wartime writings in the genre-defying Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man in October 1918, one month before the armistice. Katia Mann later wrote, “In the course of writing the book, Thomas Mann gradually freed himself from the ideas which had held sway over him … He wrote Reflections in all sincerity and, in doing so, ended by getting over what he had advocated in the book.”

When Mann unpacked the four-year-old manuscript of The Magic Mountain in the spring of 1919, the novel and its creator were poised to undergo a metamorphosis. The war that had just ended enlarged the novel’s theme into “a worldwide festival of death”; the devastation, he would go on to write in the book’s last pages, was “the thunderbolt that bursts open the magic mountain and rudely sets its entranced sleeper outside the gates,” soon to become a German soldier. It also confronted Mann himself with a new world to which he had to respond.

[From the January 1953 issue: Thomas Mann on the making of The Magic Mountain]

Defeated Germany was in a state of revolution. In Munich, demobilized soldiers, right-wing paramilitaries, and Communist militants fought in the streets, while leaders of the new Weimar Republic were routinely assassinated. A local war veteran named Adolf Hitler began to electrify crowds in cramped halls with speeches denouncing the “traitors”—republican politicians, leftists, Jews—who had stabbed Germany in the back. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was born in Munich; Hitler’s attempted coup in November 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, took place less than two miles from the Mann house.

Some German conservatives, in their hatred of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles, embraced right-wing mass politics. Mann, nearing 50, vacillated, hoping to salvage the old conservatism from the new extremism. In early 1922, he and Heinrich reconciled, and, as Mann later wrote, he began “to accept the European-democratic religion of humanity within my moral horizon, which so far had been bounded solely by late German romanticism, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner.” In April of that year, in a review of a German translation of Walt Whitman’s selected poetry and prose, he associated the American poet’s mystical notion of democracy with “the same thing that we in our old-fashioned way call ‘humanity’ … I am convinced there is no more urgent task for Germany today than to fill out this word, which has been debased into a hollow shell.”

The key event of Mann’s conversion came in June, when ultranationalists in Berlin murdered his friend Walther Rathenau, the Weimar Republic’s Jewish foreign minister. Shocked into taking a political stand, Mann turned a birthday speech in honor of the Nobel Prize–winning author Gerhart Hauptmann into a stirring call for democracy. To the amazement of his audience and the German press, Mann ended with the cry “Long live the republic!”

Mann the novelist had meanwhile returned to The Magic Mountain, and his work on it took a swerve in the same crucial year of 1922. His hero would have to struggle with the political battle that had beset Mann during the war. Abandoning Pastor Bunge as outmoded, he created a new counterpart to Settembrini who casts a sinister shadow over the second half of the novel: an ugly, charismatic, and (of course) tubercular Jesuit of Jewish origin named Leo Naphta. The intellectual combat between him and Settembrini—which ends physically, in a duel—provides some of the most dazzling passages in The Magic Mountain.

Just when you want to give up on their high-level dialectics, one of them, usually Naphta, says something that shocks you into a new way of thinking. Naphta is neither conservative nor liberal. Against capitalist modernity, whose godless greed and moral vacuity he hates with a sulfurous rage, Naphta offers a synthesis of medieval Catholicism and the new ideology of communism. Both place “anonymous and communal” authority over the individual, and both are intent on saving humanity from Settembrini’s soft, rational humanism. Hans Castorp calls Naphta “a revolutionary of reaction.” At times sounding like a fanatical parody of the Mann of Reflections, Naphta argues that love of freedom and pleasure is weaker than the desire to obey. “The mystery and precept of our age is not liberation and development of the ego,” he says. “What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.” Mann understood the appeal of totalitarianism early on.

It’s Naphta, a truly demonic figure—not Settembrini, the voice of reason—who precipitates the end of the hero’s romance with death. His jarring arrival allows Hans Castorp to loosen himself from its grip and begin a journey toward—what? Not toward Settembrini’s international republic of letters, and not back toward his simple bourgeois life down in the flatlands. The answer comes 300 pages before the novel’s end, when Hans Castorp puts on a new pair of skis and sets out for a few hours of exercise that lead him into the fateful blizzard and “a very enchanting, very dreadful dream.”

In it, he encounters a landscape of human beings in all their kindness and beauty, and all their hideous evil. “I know everything about humankind,” he thinks, still dreaming, and he resolves to reject both Settembrini and Naphta—or rather, to reject the stark choice between life and death, illness and health, recognizing that “man is the master of contradictions, they occur through him, and so he is more noble than they.” During his years on the mountain, he’s become one of death’s intimates, and his initiation into its mysteries has immeasurably deepened his understanding of life—but he won’t let death rule his thoughts. He won’t let reason either, which seems weak and paltry before the power of destruction. “Love stands opposed to death,” he dreams; “it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death.”

The Magic Mountain makes no clear political statement. The novel remains true to Mann’s belief that art must include everything, allowing life its complexity and ambiguity. But the vision of “love” that Hans Castorp embraces just before waking up is “brotherly love”—the bond that unites all human beings. The creation of this novel, which won Mann international fame, is “a tale of two Thomas Manns,” in the words of Morten Høi Jensen, a Danish critic whose The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of “The Magic Mountain” is due to be published next year. The Mann of wartime could not have written the sentence that awakens Hans Castorp from his dream.

[From the October 1944 issue: Thomas Mann’s “In My Defense”]

Mann now recognized political freedom as necessary to ensure the freedom of art, and he became a sworn enemy of the Nazis. A Nobel Prize winner in exile, he emerged as the preeminent German spokesman against Hitler who, in lectures across the United States in 1938, warned Americans of the rising threat to democracy, which for him was inseparable from humanism: “We must define democracy as that form of government and of society which is inspired above every other with the feeling and consciousness of the dignity of man.”

He was speaking at a moment when the dignity of man was locked up in Nazi concentration camps, liquidated in Soviet show trials, buried under piles of corpses. Yet Mann urged his audiences to resist the temptation to deride humanity. “Despite so much ridiculous depravity, we cannot forget the great and the honorable in man,” he said, “which manifest themselves as art and science, as passion for truth, creation of beauty, and the idea of justice.”

Could anyone utter these lofty words today without courting a chorus of snickers, a social-media immolation? We live in an age of human self-contempt. We’re hardly surprised when our leaders debase themselves with vile behavior and lies, when combatants desecrate the bodies of their enemies, when free people humiliate themselves under the spell of a megalomaniacal fraud. It takes a constant effort not to accept this as normal. We might even feel, without acknowledging it to ourselves, that we deserve it: After all, we’re human, the lowest of the low.

In driving our democracy into hatred, chaos, and violence we, too, grant death dominion over our thoughts. We succumb to the impulse to escape our humanness. That urge, ubiquitous today, thrives in the utopian schemes of technologists who want to upload our minds into computers; in the pessimism of radical environmentalists who want us to disappear from the Earth in order to save it; in the longing of apocalyptic believers for godly retribution and cleansing; in the daily sense of inadequacy, of shame and sin, that makes us disappear into our devices.

The need for political reconstruction, in this country and around the world, is as obvious as it was in Thomas Mann’s time. But Mann also knew that, to withstand our attraction to death, a decent society has to be built on a foundation deeper than politics: the belief that, somewhere between matter and divinity, we human beings, made of water, protein, and love, share a common destiny.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Magic Mountain Saved My Life.”

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