by Jesse Ball
Interview
[Int. note. I had intended to give you more of Ko Eiji’s serialization, but I find that I want, again and again, to intercede and explain things. Therefore, I believe, we will continue, as if on foot, together. I decided to try to find Mr. Ko; indeed, I managed to find Mr. Ko, and he consented to speak to me about the trial. I present the results of that interview below.]
[This interview took place in Ko Eiji’s own home, a shabby building on the south side of Sakai. His daughter let me in, but left immediately after seeing that I was situated and given various measures of hospitality. We sat by a long series of windows looking out toward the harbor. The old journalist explained that he liked to sit there in the mornings, but that the noise became too much in the afternoon, and he would retire then to the far side of the house. I told him that the interview would likely not take such a long time as that.]
INT.
Mr. Ko, I wonder if you would give an explanation of the final days of the trial of Oda Sotatsu. Your coverage of it was quite sensational at the time, and syndicated throughout the country. How did events play out?
KO
He simply wouldn’t speak. There were, I suppose, many things he might have said. He said none of them. Apart from the moment when he was made to speak, at the trial’s beginning, he did not speak again. It simply wasn’t the way a prisoner should behave, certainly not the way an innocent man would. The whole thing defied reason. If it was a joke, it was the strangest joke in the world, and for a person to risk his own life, and with no sense of what anything might mean? I just don’t know.
INT.
Some have said that the forced feeding that went on, that may have made him willful. Do you believe that view?
KO
Certainly, after the fourth day of trial when he was becoming seriously ill from his fast, that’s when they began to feed him. I think then there was a definite change in his manner. While his behavior was outwardly the same, he seemed resigned. There was even less to be found in his eyes than before.
INT.
And you were all hoping that he would speak about the victims?
KO
The judges questioned him repeatedly and at great length about the victims. It was to no avail. His own lawyer, I believe it was Yano Haruo, the defense counsel …
INT.
It was Mr. Uchiyama, I believe.
KO
Oh, yes, dear me, it has been so many years. Uchiyama Isao. He is dead, I believe. Just a few years back. A man with a large family. They have always lived in Sakai, I believe, many generations.
INT.
You were saying that the defense counsel …
KO
The defense counsel, let me see … ah, yes, the defense counsel even tried to convince him, tell all, please tell all, it will be the best for you and all concerned. He really was a good man, a very good, just man, Uchiyama. Very respected. He tried everything he could with Oda. I spoke to him alone about it, long afterward. It was a great regret of his, the whole thing. Some blamed him. Unfairly, but, well, some did. Uchiyama told me he kept a picture of Oda in his house for many years, the rest of the time he was practicing, just to remind him—we know so little about our fellow men. There is always more to know. Do you know what he said to me? What Uchiyama said? On the day he retired, he tore the picture up and threw it out. He didn’t want to look at it anymore. I think he felt he had tried with Oda. He had begged him to speak and explain himself. But Oda was unmoved.
INT.
And the result was?
KO
The result was that the trial came to an end. He wouldn’t speak, and the facts seemed relatively clear. He had said in his confession that the twelve victims were taken from this place and that place, all information that was nowhere else to be found, not in the newspapers, nowhere. I think the newspapers had only known about some of the victims anyway. There is a burden, a revelation of secret that has to occur—and that was it. The confession is never enough on its own, or shouldn’t be. Perhaps it sometimes is. It shouldn’t be. In this case there was more. All these people had disappeared. You have to understand, we were very concerned. Everyone in Sakai, in Osaka Prefecture, we were very concerned.
INT.
I do, I appreciate that.
KO
There was just no way anyone could have known.
INT.
And the sentence—did Mr. Oda accept it in the same spirit that he accepted the rest?
KO
The sentence was, as you know, he would be hanged. He would go to a prison and wait for some time, and thereafter be hanged. Some had spoken of leniency in the case, based on his silence, his aberrant behavior. Perhaps he was mad? He did not appear mad to me, or to the judges. No one in the room thought he was mad. The work of the court is to give justice, it is the one measure of a society, when all other measures are abandoned. How do you give justice? Here we had twelve …
INT.
Eleven, I believe.
KO
Yes, yes, eleven victims. Who was to speak for them?
INT.
But the reading of the sentence. Did it affect him?
KO
Not noticeably. I believe he was aware that it would come. It was not a surprise to any of us.
INT.
I will read to you what you wrote on that occasion. You wrote, So ends the long, painful story of the Narito Disappearances. Sadly, we know as little at the end as we did at the beginning. We have found someone to blame for it, but are no better equipped to factually answer the question, where are our lost family members and why were they taken? These are secrets it seems that Oda Sotatsu will bear with him to the grave. May they give him no solace there.
(A minute’s pause.)
INT.
How does that sound to you now?
(Tape-device clicks off.)
[Int. note. Here Ko Eiji chose to stop the interview.]
Int. Note
[That afternoon, I left Ko Eiji’s house and went to the industrial area round about. I walked for a very long time, eventually making my way back to the hotel where I was staying. When I got there, his daughter was sitting outside on a bench. She said there was something more her father wanted to tell me. Would I come back with her right then? I agreed, and we hailed a cab. It was pleasant, riding in a cab with this young woman who so clearly disapproved of me and of my treatment of her father. She did not like having been dispatched on such an errand. When we got to the house, she unlocked the door, and we went up the stairs. She showed me to where her father was, and again went away. I don’t actually know if this was even Ko Eiji’s daughter. Perhaps it was his assistant or amanuensis. I certainly didn’t ask. Yet one would imagine, if she had been his helper, she would not have been so reluctant to go here and there on his errands. Who can say? I sat down and turned on my tape-device.]
KO
Let’s not worry about that for a moment.
(He brings out a shogi board.)
KO
Do you play?
INT.
Badly. I am much better at …
KO
at Western chess, I suppose?
(Laughs.)
INT.
Yes, certainly.
KO
Do you know how the pieces move?
INT.
I do. I believe I do. You might have to remind me of a rule or two.
KO
Then let us play a game.
[We played three games of shogi, and in each I was soundly beaten. When the games were over, we sat for a while, not saying anything. Ko Eiji’s assistant brought us something hot to drink. The light changed slowly as the streetlamps lit up all along the roads and avenues. The day lasted longest out on the water, but even there it eventually fell away, perhaps most completely.]
KO
I don’t like the way this ended, our conversation. That’s why I asked you back.
INT.
Our conversatio
n?
KO
Our conversation. I don’t like this conclusion. I have something else to say. This is what it is: I went there to the prison during the fast.
INT.
To see Sotatsu?
KO
To see him.
INT.
And what did you see?
KO
He was weak and tired, but the guards woke him up. The chief guard on duty accompanied me and they made a big show of presenting Oda with his food, which he did not eat. It was strange, and at the time, I felt odd about it. Now I feel, well, you see, it isn’t clear, not even now, which way it was.
INT.
Whether …
KO
Whether they were starving him or not. But they put this food in front of him and he didn’t eat it. I saw that. My photographer took pictures of him and we left. I looked him in the eye, or tried to. But, I saw nothing. He didn’t appear to even see me. I suppose I looked like any of the others.
INT.
But you weren’t like the others?
KO
I was a journalist. I was trying to see what was there.
INT.
But even with that, you …
KO
Yes, even then, I failed.
INT.
Can you say …
KO
I want you to know it wasn’t that easy for me—not as easy as the newspaper accounts make it sound. We knew so little. I just, I couldn’t understand it. Well …
(Silence on the tape for another minute, and then it clicks off.)
Int. Note: Transfer to Death Row
Following the trial, Oda Sotatsu was transferred from the jail where he was being held to an actual prison. Within that prison, he was placed on what is known as death row. Oda Sotatsu did not appeal the verdict of his trial, or the sentence of death by hanging. He merely continued in silence. His family did not visit him at the prison, with the exception of his brother, Jiro, who came as often as he could. There was one other visitor: Jito Joo. But that account will follow in the second section of this book. For now, we shall proceed through the last months of Oda Sotatsu. The information we have about this time comes from Jiro, and from interviews I have conducted with men who were guards.
Interview 10 (Brother)
[Int. note. In the meantime, Jiro had heard about my interview with his father, and had heard of the argument that had broken out (in his father’s estimation). It seems that by turning his father against me, I had obtained some measure of trust from Jiro. He was much more open and warm with me. He wanted actually to see the transcript of my interview with his father. This, of course, I could not allow. He did caution me that his father was considered by many people to be demented, and that I should not in any way take his opinions seriously, although certainly he understood that I was likely to include them in the account. He invited me to visit a house he owned in a different part of Osaka Prefecture. I could stay for some days and obtain the rest of the information I needed. He was to be there with his wife and children for three weeks, a vacation of some kind. He could be at my disposal. This enormous change was very moving. I felt immediately that I ought to have unintentionally offended his father long before, if this was the tangible result. This first (of the second session of interviews) interview took place outdoors in a pavilion on Oda Jiro’s land. The “house,” as he termed it, was rather a modest estate. There were two main buildings and several small outbuildings. A creek ran through the property and there was a fine garden as well as a curated wood with a walk set through it. In short, it was a magical place, designed by Jiro himself, giving a clear indication that his sister had perhaps paid her youngest brother short shrift when she accounted him a philistine. As I said, for this first interview regarding Sotatsu’s time on death row, we sat at an outdoor pavilion. Jiro’s daughter, who was six, had taken a liking to me and was repeatedly bringing me flowers—these are the interruptions in the tape, which I may or may not omit from the transcript in the book proper. In any case, as you can see, even as things became grimmer for Sotatsu, I had emerged into a place of sunlight. I felt full of hope: now I truly would be able to tell the whole story of this tragic life.]
INT.
I wonder if you could speak at all on the subject of your brother’s starvation attempt, or hunger strike, as some have called it. As I understand the facts, you were unable to be in the courtroom for the trial, but you visited him during that period at the jail. Is that so?
JIRO
I visited him three or four times during the trial. My foreman at the plant where I worked had become frustrated with me and was looking for any excuse to fire me, which he eventually did. I could only manage to get time on perhaps seven or eight occasions, and on at least four of those I arrived at the jail only to be told I could not see him, that he was being exercised, fed, etc.
INT.
Do you know what these feedings consisted of?
JIRO
I do not. They found some way of forcing him to eat. I don’t know if they used a tube or held him and forced things down his throat. I don’t know. It could have been as simple as a priest with a spoon. My brother had an irrational liking for priests.
INT.
But you had seen that he was not eating? On your visits there, you had seen that?
JIRO
I noticed that he was thinner. His appearance was grim all along. At some point, he did seem very weak. You have to remember, we were no longer speaking at this point. There had been speech at that one time, when I brought the lawyer. Apart from that, we just stood and looked at each other. When he became very weak, he would just drag himself over to the bars and sit hunched against them, letting the bars press into his back as far as they would go.
INT.
And you couldn’t tell he was starving?
JIRO
You ask that now and it seems like a good question, a good clever question, but there’s no cleverness in situations like this. Could his spirit have been broken? Could his mind have broken? Could his nerves have broken? Could his body have broken? Any of these things could have been the case. All of these things were likely, even. So, it isn’t as clear as it sounds, not at all.
INT.
I didn’t mean to suggest …
JIRO
Just continue.
INT.
Did you notice a change in him once they began to feed him again?
JIRO
He got more energy. He began standing again. They tell me he was carried into the courtroom on the day of his trial, that he was propped up on the chair, and that a bailiff had to stand by and keep him in it or he would fall out.
INT.
I hadn’t heard that.
JIRO
But you know what I believe?
INT.
…
JIRO
I think that the hunger strike wasn’t real. I think it was another tool they used to try to break him, to try to get him to sign another confession, confessing more.
INT.
Because the first confession wasn’t enough …
JIRO
It wasn’t enough. They wanted more from him. Maybe they started to starve him and he turned it around. Maybe he said to himself, fine, then I won’t eat. Then I’ll just die. I think he saw it as a way out. Things had become so bad, and there was no door. Then they showed him this door of not-eating.
(A minute of silence, tape running.)
INT.
And there would be no way to know, to know which it was.
JIRO
No way, a hunger strike imposed by the guards on a prisoner who won’t break would look identical to a hunger strike staged by a prisoner as a protest. No one could tell the difference.
INT.
But in this case they didn’t want to starve him to death. They wanted to execute him.
JIRO
Right, so they had to make him eat.
Interview 11 (Watanabe Garo)
>
[Int. note. Through a very peculiar and wonderful action of chance, the landlady who rented me the property on which I conducted many of the interviews had a friend whose brother had worked in the prison where Oda Sotatsu sat on death row. Apparently the high profile of the case had led to this brother’s stories of Oda becoming common anecdotes that were told and retold in that family, eventually reaching the ears of the landlady to whom I came. When she learned what I was writing about, she put me in touch with the brother. I spoke to him several times on the telephone and once in person at a ramen house in Osaka. He was an extremely vain man in his sixties and he boasted at every conceivable opportunity. Even the ramen house we met at, it was a personal connection. He would get us some kind of special service, he said. In fact, they did not know him at all. It is my belief that this man did not personally know Oda Sotatsu at all, but rather that he relayed all manner of prison lore and anecdotes about Oda Sotatsu, casting them in the first person as though he were the one having had the experiences. As anyone familiar with oral histories will attest, this is quite a common occurrence. His narratives of the time are quite compelling, however. Whether that is because he actually knew Oda, actually was there, or whether it is due to him repeating the anecdotes countless times, I can’t say. However it may be, he was an invaluable source of otherwise unobtainable data about this time period and I am grateful that he consented to speak to me.]
[This first interview occurred via telephone. The house in which I lived (the leased property) had no telephone, so I made use of the telephone situated on the property immediately adjoining.]
