Reviewed by: Robert Whitehouse
Author: Hirosama Ezoe
Publisher: Kodansha International
ISBN: 978 4 7700 3147 1
Price: £16.99

On 4 March 2003, Hiromasa Ezoe, Chairman of Japanese conglomerate Recruit, was sentenced to three years imprisonment, suspended for five years, having been found guilty of bribery. His epic trial began in October 1989 and ended in December 2001. Over the course of these 12 years, Ezoe was subjected to continued periods of detention and unrecorded interrogation without benefit of legal counsel. The proceedings involved three different presiding judges, 70 prosecutors, 30 defence lawyers and four defendants answering six indictments. No jury heard the evidence, the luxury of such an institution having been abolished during the war and only re-introduced in embryonic form last year.

Ezoe (or rather his company, Recruit) had indulged routinely in the money politics that saturates the conduct of Japanese government. Recruit had offered shares at $20 each to favoured politicians prior to public issue. Perhaps surprisingly, there is nothing illegal in such a method of bolstering share values. Ezoe’s account naturally exonerates himself from blame by advocating that Recruit’s lavish spending on politicians and bureaucrats was not a corruption of the system - it was the system.

Perhaps. But it is an admission hardly designed to elicit the reader’s sympathy. Ezoe does not spare the details of what this involved, but it is delivered in such unrepentant terms that the reader cannot help doubt Ezoe’s conviction that he was an unwitting victim of opportunist politicians and a vindictive media. It is not difficult to appreciate that a line drawn between Recruit’s activity and commonplace bribery must be a very thin one indeed. Even so, a conviction for bribery in Japan has traditionally been a very rare event. Prime Minister Tanaka’s was acquitted in a case concerning $3m in bribes from Lockheed Corporation in 1983. It is unsurprising to learn that Ezoe hired Tanaka’s team for his own defence six years later.

It is an unfortunate weakness of this book that Ezoe’s legal advisers are barely apparent. This is a shame as Ezoe’s lawyers are obviously of central importance to the whole story. Some account of their background, outlook and personalities would have not only made this account infinitely more arresting, but illuminated the methods of a profession that is staffed by less than 30,000 practicing lawyers.

However, Ezoe’s account of his trial does contain valuable insights into the conduct of litigation in Japanese courts. Trials are notoriously ritualised and bereft of the heat typically generated by the Anglo-American adversarial trial (although the determined struggle between the banking giants of Sumitomo and Mitsubishi in 2004 is an exception). As one prosecutor says to Ezoe in his prolonged effort to extract a confession: ‘In America, court trials are like battlefields. In Japan, courts are places where apologies are made.’

Another prosecutor notes: ‘In Japan, confession is king.’ Ezoe himself felt no compunction in apologising wholeheartedly to the Japanese people on the very first day of his trial. In the Japanese system, the distinction between such contrition and guilt appears to be little more than a vanishing point. It is small wonder that the conviction rate at trial is an astonishing 99.8%. Whether the re-introduction of the jury system to Japan will reverse this trend remains to be seen.

Robert Whitehouse, is a solicitor at Rippon Patel & French LLP

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