What Is the Death Penalty? Japan, the World, and the Case For and Against Capital Punishment

On August 21, 2026, Japan executed Sunao Takami. He had been sentenced to death for a 2009 arson attack on an Osaka pachinko parlor that killed five people and injured ten. It was Japan’s first execution since June 2025. After the hanging, 100 people remained under sentence of death, 43 of them seeking retrials, according to the justice minister.Associated Press

The case immediately evokes two powerful intuitions.

One says that a person who deliberately took five lives may justly lose his own. The other asks why the state must deliberately kill someone who has already been captured and separated from society.

The first step toward a serious debate is to separate two questions:

1. Does this offender deserve death?
2. Should a fallible state possess an institutional power to execute?

They are not the same question.

One can believe that a murderer deserves the harshest possible condemnation and still oppose giving the state an irreversible power. One can also support capital punishment not as private vengeance but as public justice imposed after a fair trial.

To think philosophically about the death penalty is not to minimize murder or demand forgiveness from victims’ families. It is to ask how justice and the limits of state violence can be respected at the same time.

How Japan’s death penalty works

Article 11 of Japan’s Penal Code provides that a death sentence is carried out by hanging inside a penal institution. Prisoners are ordinarily informed on the morning of their execution. The detailed process by which an individual is selected for execution is not made public.

Japanese courts use a group of sentencing considerations commonly called the Nagayama criteria:

• the nature of the offense;
• motive;
• the manner of the crime, particularly its persistence and cruelty;
• the gravity of the result, especially the number of victims killed;
• the feelings of the bereaved family;
• social impact;
• the defendant’s age;
• prior convictions; and
• conduct and circumstances after the crime.

The Supreme Court has said that these circumstances must be considered together and that death may be selected where it is unavoidable from the perspectives of proportionality and general deterrence.Supreme Court judgment

Victim count therefore matters, but it is not a mechanical formula. Some single-victim cases have resulted in death sentences, while some multiple-victim cases have resulted in life imprisonment. The decision is a human judgment made by judges and, in applicable cases, lay judges.

Does Japanese public opinion decisively support execution?

In the Japanese government’s October 2024 survey, 83.1 percent chose “the death penalty is unavoidable,” while 16.5 percent chose “the death penalty should be abolished.”Government survey questionnaire

“Unavoidable,” however, is not identical to “desirable.” Nor does the result necessarily show what people would choose after comparing life imprisonment, possible life without parole, wrongful convictions, execution practices, and independent forms of victim support.

Public opinion matters to democratic legitimacy. But a majority vote cannot by itself make every punishment just. Torture and corporal punishment would still require a human-rights analysis even if popular. The same is true of an irreversible penalty.

The Hakamada case and the difference between reversible judgment and irreversible punishment

Iwao Hakamada was sentenced to death in 1968 and his sentence became final in 1980. A retrial ended in an acquittal in 2024. According to a Justice Ministry press conference, he was the fifth person in postwar Japan to be acquitted at retrial after a death sentence had become final.

Imprisonment is not fully reversible. Lost decades, damaged health, and broken relationships cannot simply be returned. Yet while a prisoner lives, the state can release him, declare him innocent, compensate him, and allow him to speak in his own name.

Execution removes the very person to whom a future correction would be owed.

This is not an accidental administrative problem. It is a structural conflict between an infallible punishment and a fallible human institution.

The death penalty worldwide: a majority has moved away, while executions concentrate

According to Amnesty International’s figures for 2025, the world stood as follows at the end of that year:

Legal or practical status	Countries	Examples	Meaning
Abolitionist for all crimes	113	EU states, the UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa	No death penalty for ordinary or exceptional crimes
Abolitionist for ordinary crimes	9	Brazil, Chile, Israel	Retained only for exceptional offenses such as certain wartime crimes
Abolitionist in practice	23	South Korea, Russia, Algeria, Morocco	Retained in law but no executions for a prolonged period
Retentionist	54	Japan, the US, China, India, Singapore, Iran, Saudi Arabia	Retained for ordinary crimes

The 113 fully abolitionist countries and the broader total of 145 abolitionist in law or practice represent roughly 73 percent of the 199 countries in Amnesty’s classification. Retentionist states account for about 27 percent.

Yet a larger abolitionist majority does not necessarily mean fewer executions each year.

At least 2,707 executions were recorded in 17 countries in 2025, up 78 percent from 1,518 in 2024 and the highest total Amnesty has recorded since 1981. This excludes the thousands believed to have been carried out in China, where the figures are secret, and does not capture the full scale of executions in countries such as North Korea and Viet Nam.

Iran alone executed at least 2,159 people and Saudi Arabia at least 356. The United States executed 47, and Japan one. The world is therefore moving in two directions at once: most states are leaving capital punishment behind, while a small number are using it with extraordinary intensity.

In December 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for a moratorium on executions with a view to abolition by 130 votes to 32, with 22 abstentions.UN voting record

The resolution is not legally binding. It nevertheless shows that capital punishment is increasingly treated not only as a domestic criminal-justice choice but as an international human-rights question.

The strongest arguments for the death penalty

Reducing support for execution to cruelty or revenge avoids the strongest version of the case. Serious retentionist arguments are about the value of victims’ lives and the agency of offenders.

1. Proportional punishment for the gravest wrong

When a person intentionally takes a life, the state may appear to trivialize that wrong if it refuses the highest available punishment. A legal order that responds to minor theft and mass murder with no meaningful difference would fail to express differences in culpability.

Death is therefore defended as society’s strongest declaration that the victim’s life was not disposable.

2. Treating the offender as a responsible agent

If an offender is described only as a product of environment, illness, or impulse, the law can begin to treat him as a dangerous object to be managed. If he acted as a choosing person, holding him answerable can be a form of respect for his agency.

3. Complete incapacitation

An executed person cannot reoffend, escape, kill inside prison, or harm someone after release. Yet strict confinement can prevent most of the same risks, so the necessity of execution still requires a separate argument.

4. Public trust and the moral claims of victims’ families

If the state is seen as responding inadequately to extreme crimes, citizens may lose faith in law and turn toward private vengeance. Bereaved families’ desire for the harshest sentence should not be dismissed by outsiders as primitive revenge.

Their demand can express a morally serious refusal to let the victim’s life be treated as cheap.

Kant: execute the last murderer even if society dissolves

Immanuel Kant offers the most uncompromising philosophical defense of capital punishment.

Punishment, he argued, must not use the offender for a future social benefit. If the state executes a person merely to frighten others, it treats that person as an instrument of public safety. Punishment is permissible because the offender committed the crime and deserves a proportionate response.

For murder, Kant maintained that no substitute for death could satisfy justice. Even a painful life sentence and death are not the same kind of loss.

His famous island thought experiment makes the claim stark.

Imagine that every inhabitant of an island agrees to dissolve the state and disperse across the world. One convicted murderer remains in prison. Because the community will cease to exist the next day, execution can no longer protect it, rehabilitate the prisoner, deter its future criminals, or prepare him for return.

Kant nevertheless says the murderer must be executed before the people leave.

This is not an argument that capital punishment is useful. It asks whether justice requires execution even when it protects no one and produces no future benefit.

Kant’s strength is to detach punishment from propaganda and utility and connect it to the offender’s own responsibility.

Its difficulties are equally clear:

• Why must proportionality mean returning the same harm rather than expressing the highest condemnation?
• We do not beat assailants or torture torturers; why is homicide the exceptional case in which like must be returned for like?
• Can pure retribution be realized through courts that can make mistakes?
• If the victim’s life is beyond price, why may another life be offered as its equivalent?

Retributivism can support death. Death does not follow automatically from every retributive theory.

Hegel: can punishment be a form of respect?

Hegel also rejected the view that punishment is merely a device for managing danger.

The offender is a rational subject who chose an act that denied the legal order. Punishment takes that choice seriously and restores the right the crime denied. It addresses a person capable of understanding reasons, rather than placing a dangerous animal in a cage.

This is why punishment is sometimes described, in Hegelian terms, as a right of the criminal.

But Hegel did not simply write that abolishing death insults death-row prisoners. That claim combines his account of punishment as recognition with his acceptance that death can correspond to murder. He also welcomed the historical narrowing of capital punishment and treated it as increasingly exceptional.

The Hegelian point that survives is important: holding someone responsible and executing that person are not identical.

The strongest arguments against the death penalty

1. Wrongful execution cannot be corrected

Judges, jurors, prosecutors, police officers, witnesses, and experts are human. Evidence disappears, memories fail, forensic claims are revised, and officials can act improperly.

Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is designed to reduce error, not eliminate it. Execution ensures that when the legal system discovers its mistake, the person to whom it owes a remedy no longer exists.

2. If long-term confinement protects society, killing may be unnecessary

If punishment aims at public safety, the relevant comparison is not death versus release. It is death versus secure long-term or life imprisonment.

Japanese life imprisonment permits the legal possibility of parole. Abolition would therefore require serious choices about parole standards, continuing dangerousness, and review. But the need to design an alternative does not itself establish a need to execute.

3. A unique deterrent effect has not been established

It is possible that the threat of execution deters some people. The policy question, however, is whether it deters more homicide than long-term or life imprisonment.

The US National Research Council concluded that existing research could not show whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates and should not be used to support claims in any of those directions.

That is not proof that deterrence is impossible. It means the distinctive preventive benefit needed to justify an irreversible punishment has not been reliably demonstrated.

4. The state must select who is eligible to die

Capital punishment does more than condemn murder. It creates an institution that classifies some prisoners as people the state may kill.

Results can vary with evidence quality, legal representation, geography, prosecutorial policy, the composition of a jury or lay-judge panel, and chance differences in victim count. Around the world, capital punishment often falls disproportionately on poor people, minorities, foreign nationals, political opponents, and defendants in drug cases.

The question is therefore not only whether anyone can deserve death. It is whether the state can identify that person consistently and without unacceptable error.

5. An execution does not restore the victim

Some families experience an execution as a necessary conclusion. Others find that suffering continues, and some oppose execution altogether.

If the state describes death as something done “for the family,” it risks transferring its institutional responsibility to bereaved people. Families must be heard and supported, but they should not be made morally responsible for the state’s decision to kill.

Beccaria and Bentham: do not inflict suffering that is unnecessary

In the eighteenth century, Cesare Beccaria argued against capital punishment in On Crimes and Punishments.

People surrender some liberty to create a state that protects them, he reasoned, but it is difficult to say that they surrendered a right to have the state kill them. He also believed that a certain and continuing loss of liberty could deter more effectively than a spectacular death.

In Bentham’s utilitarianism, punishment is itself an evil because it creates suffering. It is justified only when necessary to prevent greater harm. If a lesser punishment can achieve the same protective purpose, the greater one should not be imposed.

The practical comparison looks like this:

Interest or harm	Execution	Long-term or life imprisonment
Separation from society	Complete	High under secure administration
Reoffending	Impossible by that person	Risks inside prison or after release require management
General deterrence	Distinctive effect unproven	Deterrence may depend more on certainty than extremity
Remedy after error	Impossible after execution	Release, retrial, compensation remain possible while alive
Continuing responsibility	The responsible subject is eliminated	Time remains to confront guilt and disclose truth
State power	Irreversible deprivation of life	Severe and prolonged deprivation of liberty

Beccaria’s alternative is not automatically humane. If the argument is that decades of suffering are more frightening than death, abolition can become only a more efficient technology of pain.

Ending execution does not make imprisonment just by definition. Permanent isolation, solitary confinement, and a sentence without any hope can also destroy a person. The deeper question is how a state should make an offender bear responsibility without reproducing the wrong it condemns.

Rawls: “Would you say that if your own family were murdered?”

A familiar challenge to abolitionists asks:

Would you still oppose the death penalty if someone murdered your family?

The question has moral force because it tests whether an abstract theory has forgotten the lived pain of victims.

As a rule for choosing public institutions, however, it moves in only one direction. It asks us to occupy the single position of a bereaved relative.

Applying John Rawls’s veil of ignorance, we would have to select a policy without knowing whether we would be:

• a murder victim;
• a bereaved relative;
• a future victim of crime;
• an offender;
• an offender’s family member;
• a person wrongly sentenced to death;
• the family of a person wrongly executed; or
• a justice minister, judge, juror, or prison officer responsible for the sentence and execution.

The inquiry must therefore run both ways:

Would you still support abolition if your family were murdered?

and

Would you still support execution if you or your family could be executed in error?

Rawls did not derive a single direct answer about capital punishment from this device. The method instead asks us to acknowledge grief while choosing a rule that people in every possible position could accept.

Derrida: if life is incomparable, “a life for a life” also fails

Jacques Derrida did not dismiss Kant as merely cruel. He treated Kant as the philosopher who built the most coherent case for death and then questioned that case from within.

Kant’s logic can be stated this way:

A human life cannot be exchanged for money or years in prison. Therefore only the murderer’s life can correspond to the life taken.

Derrida reverses the claim:

If life is truly beyond exchange, how can the victim’s life and the offender’s life be treated as equal units in an exchange?

Adding the offender’s death does not undo the victim’s death. It produces a second loss. Calling the two “balanced” may itself turn incomparable lives into items in an account.

Ordinary punishment also leaves behind a subject who can complete a sentence. Capital punishment removes the person who is supposed to answer for the wrong.

Execution is distinct even from imprisonment until natural death. The state chooses a date, controls notice, restrains the body, and organizes the moment of death. For Derrida, capital punishment is an exceptionally pure expression of sovereignty: the power to master another person’s remaining time.

Force of Law: legality is not the same as justice

In his 1989 lecture “Force of Law,” Derrida argued that law is deconstructible while justice is not.

The point can be stated simply:

• Laws are general rules made by people and can be revised when they prove unjust.
• Justice is the continuing demand to ask whether the rule treats this particular person rightly.
• A judge must follow law but cannot decide justly by mechanical application alone.
• Complete knowledge is never available, yet a decision cannot be postponed forever.

A lawful judgment can later be recognized as unjust.

Most punishments preserve at least some time in which law can correct itself. Execution ends that opportunity by force.

Derrida’s challenge is not “do not punish murder.” It is this:

Can a second incalculable loss become the equivalent of the first? May fallible law destroy the possibility of its own correction by a justice still to come?

Victim-centered justice does not have to mean execution

An abolitionism that forgets victims will fail morally and politically.

Victims and families need truth, participation, respectful treatment, security, compensation, and long-term medical, psychological, and financial support. Their harm does not end when a trial ends.

Restorative justice does not require a family to forgive, meet, or reconcile with the offender. It asks:

• What was taken?
• Who bears responsibility?
• What do victims and families need?
• What responsibilities can the offender still carry while alive?
• What must society change to prevent similar harm?

Keeping an offender alive is not acquittal or forgiveness. The state can restrict liberty severely, declare guilt publicly, continue to seek truth, and demand responsibility.

Retaining execution also does not automatically produce adequate victim support. Support is an independent obligation of the state, whatever punishment it chooses.

Three institutional choices: retention, moratorium, or abolition

Japan’s options are not limited to an immediate yes-or-no choice.

1. Retain the current penalty

This choice emphasizes retribution, the value of victims’ lives, social condemnation, and public opinion. Even under retention, Japan would still need stronger disclosure of evidence, recording of interrogations, retrial procedures, defense resources, transparency in selecting prisoners for execution, and a more humane notice system.

2. Establish a moratorium

Japan could leave the legal penalty in place while suspending executions and reviewing wrongful-conviction safeguards, alternative sentences, victim support, and conditions on death row. A moratorium prevents an erroneous execution while allowing time for democratic deliberation.

3. Abolish and redesign the alternative

Abolition would end the state’s irreversible taking of life while preserving severe punishment and long-term public protection. It would require redesigning life imprisonment and parole review.

Life without parole is not a complete philosophical solution. A sentence that permanently removes all hope raises its own questions about dignity, aging, illness, remorse, and changes in dangerousness.

Changing the system means more than deleting one penalty. It means reconstructing public safety, responsibility, victims’ rights, retrial, parole, and humane confinement together.

Conclusion: separate deserving death from authorizing execution

The strongest argument for capital punishment refuses to cheapen the victim’s life and insists that the offender be treated as a responsible agent. Kantian retribution gives this demand its clearest form.

The strongest argument against it is not sympathy for murder. It is the asymmetry between a state that can err and a punishment that cannot be corrected. Rawls asks whether the rule is fair from every possible position. Derrida questions both the exchange of one unique life for another and the sovereign power of law to close itself to future correction.

Retributive theory can defend death at the level of principle.

As an institution administered by actual human beings, however, a moratorium followed by a concrete examination of abolition and alternatives is easier to justify.

The reason is not that extreme crimes must be forgiven.

1. Secure long-term confinement can protect society.
2. The strongest condemnation need not be expressed only through execution.
3. Judicial error cannot be reduced to zero.
4. Execution alone completely removes the possibility of remedy to the person wrongly condemned.

Abolition would not mean that life guarantees immunity from punishment. It would mean that a state may demand the strictest responsibility while also setting a boundary to its own power.

Frequently asked questions

Are there more abolitionist or retentionist countries?

At the end of 2025, 113 countries had abolished capital punishment for all crimes, and 145 were abolitionist in law or practice. Fifty-four were retentionist. Yet recorded executions surged in 2025 and were concentrated in a small group of states.

How does Japan carry out executions?

Article 11 of the Penal Code provides for hanging inside a penal institution. Prisoners are ordinarily told on the morning of execution. Japan carried out an execution on August 21, 2026, after which 100 people remained under sentence of death.

Does the death penalty deter murder?

A deterrent effect is possible, but reliable evidence has not established that execution reduces homicide more than long-term or life imprisonment. Major research reviews conclude that the existing studies cannot determine whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates.

Is “what if your family were murdered?” a decisive argument?

It is a powerful reminder not to erase victims’ suffering. For a fair institutional choice, however, we must also imagine that we or our family could be executed in error. Personal grief and a rule applied to every citizen are related but distinct.

Why did Kant demand the last execution before society dissolved?

Because he treated punishment as a duty of justice for a past crime, not as a tool of deterrence, rehabilitation, or public protection. The thought experiment asks whether retribution remains obligatory even when execution has no practical benefit.

NOW IN QUESTION

Suppose someone certainly guilty deliberately killed the person you loved most. You might feel that person deserves death.

Now take one step away from that position.

You might be the bereaved. You might be the person falsely condemned. You might be the juror who signs the verdict or the officer who prepares the execution.

In a society where you do not know which position will be yours, would you still give the state the final power to make its own error impossible to correct?

Or would refusing that power fail to acknowledge the full weight of the life that was taken?

References

• e-Gov, Penal Code of Japan
• Supreme Court of Japan, judgment discussing death-sentence factors
• Government of Japan, Basic Legal System Public Opinion Survey
• Ministry of Justice press conference on Iwao Hakamada’s final acquittal
• Associated Press, “Japan executes a man convicted of setting fire that killed 5”
• Amnesty International, Death penalty in 2025: Facts and figures
• UN General Assembly, Moratorium on the use of the death penalty, A/RES/79/178
• National Research Council, Deterrence and the Death Penalty
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Legal Punishment
• Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Part I: The Doctrine of Right
• G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§99–101
• Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, Chapter 28
• Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Volume I; “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority”