Japan executes Osaka pachinko arsonist

Japan executed Sunao Takami on Friday for a 2009 arson attack on an Osaka pachinko parlour that killed five people, Justice Minister Hiroshi Hiraguchi said.

Takami, 58, doused the pachinko arcade near his home with petrol and set it on fire, killing four customers and one employee. Pachinko is a mechanical game involving thousands of small steel balls.

Hiraguchi told reporters he ordered the execution after giving the case “the most careful consideration possible”. He said Takami was informed of his impending execution on Friday morning, which he described as standard practice in Japan. Broadcaster NHK said Takami was hanged in Osaka.

The hanging was Japan's first execution since Takahiro Shiraishi, known as the “Twitter killer”, was put to death in June 2025 for murdering and dismembering nine people.

Japan and the United States are the only G7 countries that still use capital punishment. A Japanese government survey in 2024 found that 83 percent of respondents considered the death penalty “unavoidable”, while support for abolition rose to 17 percent from nine percent five years earlier.

The justice ministry told AFP last year that Japan carried out one execution in 2022, three in 2021, three in 2019 and 15 in 2018. There were around 100 people on death row.

Amnesty International said in May that recorded executions worldwide rose 78 percent in 2025 to 2,707, the highest number it had documented since 1981. The group said that total did not include thousands of executions it believes continued to be carried out in China.

Japanese law says executions must be carried out within six months of a final verdict after appeals are exhausted. In practice, many inmates spend years, and sometimes decades, in solitary confinement.

Japan's death penalty system has faced scrutiny over wrongful convictions. Iwao Hakamada spent decades on death row over a 1966 quadruple murder before being released in 2014 and exonerated in 2024 at age 88. A court ruled that investigators had tampered with evidence and said he had suffered “inhumane interrogations meant to force a statement”.