Throughout the 1990s, in only one year -- 1995 -- did the number of capital sentences handed down in trials of first instance in Japan exceed 10 a year. But in this decade, despite a drop in heinous crimes, death sentences have regularly exceeded 10 per year, and last year saw a record high since the 1980s of 15. Since the inauguration of the Yasuo Fukuda administration in September last year, 10 have died on the gallows on three occasions. The preceding Shinzo Abe administration executed a total of 10 convicts in a period of one year.

The principles and taboos Japan has maintained with regard to capital punishment are being broken in succession. In December 2007, when the Fukuda government carried out its first executions, it broke with the tradition of not publicizing them and announced the names and crimes of the three convicts being executed. When executions were carried out in February, Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama, who ordered the executions, expressed his views on the death sentences in person at a press conference. The tradition of not carrying out executions while the Diet, Japan's legislature, is in session in an attempt to avoid unnecessary controversies was also broken. Each of the three execution sessions overseen by the current government were done while the legislature was in session.

The policy of capital punishment for juveniles also shifted from "exceptional" to "in principle," with the same criteria for death sentences that are applied to adults also being applied to minors. This was evinced last Wednesday when the Hiroshima High Court upheld the death sentence of a man convicted of the 1999 murder of a mother and her infant child in Hikari, Yagaguchi Prefecture. The defendant was a minor at the time of the crime. The trial took place following an order by the Supreme Court in 2006 that the high court revisit the case.

Japan's shift to this severe punishment policy reflects the move of public opinion toward the rights of victims and away from those of the assailant. About 80 percent of Japanese people have supported capital punishment since the start of the decade, according to government and media polls. Strong demands for stern punishment by the families of victims since the Hikari murders have played a major role in shaping public opinion. Justice Minister Hatoyama declared that executions would not be carried out if public opinion opposes them, underlining a strong will to conduct them so long as the people support them.

Some link Japan's trend toward severe punishment with changes in the nation's judicial system. In May next year, Japan is set to adopt the lay judge system, in which citizens will serve as de facto judges in trials involving serious cases. Unlike the U.S. jury system in which jurors decide only guilt or innocence, or South Korea's public participatory trials, in this new Japanese system a panel of six made up of ordinary citizens and conventional judges weighs the offenses. The Asahi Shumbin recently commented, "The recent moves toward severe punishment are aimed at reducing a sense of rejection of capital punishment on the part of citizens, who will now participate in trials thus demonstrating that executions are proper steps taken under the law."

Whether capital punishment is good or bad is a matter of individual judgment. Whether to maintain or abolish capital punishment is also a problem to be decided by public sentiment and culture. Some note that Japan may have less cultural antipathy toward capital punishment because of the strong Japanese tradition of suicide, in which one accounts for one's crimes by death. But I would support Japan's severe punishment policy from this standpoint alone: that the state does not avert its eyes from a consensus formed by demands for redressing grievances made by victims of those who have been killed unfairly, bereaved families' indignation and the exclamations and anguish that result at the thought of such crimes happening to one's own family.

The column was contributed by Son-U Jong, the Chosun Ilbo's correspondent in Tokyo.