During the early '90s, Megumu Sato, a former Buddhist priest serving as minister of justice, refused to sign execution orders for the year he was in office, citing his religious beliefs.
Sato was one of four ministers who served during a 40-month de facto moratorium on executions that began in November 1989 and ended in March 1993. The moratorium followed a period of increasing concern about capital punishment, both inside and outside the Japanese government. The key events were the exonerations during the 1980s of four death-row prisoners, all of whom had been sentenced to hang in the chaotic period just after World War II and then spent years pursuing appeals.
The exonerations were deeply embarrassing to the powerful Ministry of Justice, which handles all criminal prosecutions in Japan. Ministry officials sincerely believe that such miscarriages of justice are all but impossible under the Japanese system, because prosecutors rarely bring charges unless the defendant confesses and only seek the death penalty in selected cases involving multiple victims, or where murder is combined with rape or robbery. But the exonerations forced the country to acknowledge that several men had been sentenced to death based on confessions squeezed out of them in prolonged custody, that the police had mishandled key evidence -- and that such practices have not disappeared. Amid the soul-searching, the anti-death penalty movement, traditionally marginal, gained strength and coalesced into an umbrella organization known as Forum 90, the first of its kind in modern Japan.