Japan has executed a man in secret over a fatal fire at an Osaka gaming venue.
The Justice Ministry has announced that Sunao Takami, 58, was hanged on Friday.
Takami was earlier convicted of killing five people at a pachinko parlour – a neon-lit gaming space filled with pinball-like machines – in 2009.
He spread gasoline and threw a lit match to ignite a blaze that engulfed the building, Justice Minister Hiroshi Hiraguchi said.
Ten other people were injured in the fire.
“It caused extremely serious outcomes and dealt a major shock and fear to the society,” Mr Hiraguchi said at a news conference.
”The victims whose lives were taken away must have felt unimaginable pain and fear, and those who suffered injuries ... were forced to live with long-term effects.”
Takami was convicted of murder, attempted murder, and arson.
He was sentenced to death in 2011, with a subsequent appeal to the Supreme Court rejected in 2016.
Mr Hiraguchi said that he had ordered Takami’s execution “after careful and thorough considerations”.
Japan now has 100 people on death row, including 43 seeking retrials.
The country has faced growing criticism over its use of the death penalty, as a majority of the international community has abolished capital punishment.
Japan and the United States are the only two countries in the Group of Seven leading industrialised nations, which also includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK, that put people to death.
Calls to abolish capital punishment or increase transparency have grown after the 2024 acquittal of the world’s longest-serving death-row inmate, Iwao Hakamada.
Executions are carried out in secrecy in Japan, and prisoners are not informed of their fate until the morning of their hanging.
Since 2007, Japan has begun disclosing the names of those executed and some details of their crimes, but disclosures are still limited.
Mr Hiraguchi said that he has no intention to change the ongoing practice, saying that disclosure of additional details would disturb the mental state of the death-row inmates.
Friday’s hanging was the first by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government and comes during a parliamentary recess.
The move was criticised as a tactic to avoid public debate, but Mr Hiraguchi denied that it was intentional.
In June 2025, Japan executed a man known as the “Twitter killer”, who was convicted of killing and dismembering nine people in his apartment near Tokyo in 2017.
Japan’s crime rate is relatively low, but it has seen some high-profile mass killings in recent years.
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