The Nagoya High Court made a U-turn Wednesday and sided with a Tokyo-based publishing house in a libel suit over the use of a pseudonym in an article about a minor charged in connection with four gang murders.
The court overturned its previous order for the publisher, Bungei Shunju Ltd., to pay compensation to the 28-year-old plaintiff after the Supreme Court returned the case to the high court.
The plaintiff in the suit, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for the slayings, had claimed the pseudonym was too similar to his real name and had demanded 1 million yen.
The high court rejected a damages suit filed by the plaintiff against Bungei Shunju, publisher of the weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun, over a July 1997 article on the murders that used a pseudonym similar to the plaintiff's real name and other data that could be used to identify him.