Last week the Tokyo Shimbun ran an article about Keiko Aoki and Tatsuhiro Boku, the couple convicted of murdering Aoki's 11-year-old daughter in 1995 and sentenced to life in prison. The upcoming retrial, which will likely reverse the guilty verdict, may reveal that the Osaka pair were coerced into making bogus confessions because the prosecution had no solid evidence showing they had deliberately started the fire that killed the girl. All they had was a hunch based on the fact that the couple had taken out a life insurance policy on her. Tokyo Shimbun says the retrial will "point out the responsibilities of the police, the prosecutors, the court and the mass media" in this miscarriage of justice.
There have been several high-profile enzai (false accusation) stories in recent years, but this may be the first time a press outlet has damned its own profession for being complicit in one. As the defense lawyer in the case told the paper, as soon as Aoki and Boku were arrested, the media assumed they were guilty, and didn't hesitate to shape their coverage around that assumption based on statements from the police and the prosecutor, who knew reporters would take whatever they gave them and run with it. This is the norm for a lot of criminal cases, but when false convictions based on investigative misconduct come to light, the press shrugs it off, oblivious to its own role in the travesty.
But there is one media outlet that has made a point of reporting on enzai over the years. TV Asahi's occasional in-depth news show "The Scoop" has covered all the well-known false conviction cases and a few that are not so well-known. The show reviewed the Aoki-Boku case almost 10 years ago and even recreated the fire the couple was accused of setting in order to demonstrate how it was probably an accident — well before the defense team did its own re-enactment as evidence to move for a retrial. In addition, the show explained in detail why the couple had taken out an insurance policy on a pre-adolescent, something that turned out to be unexceptional and which no other media bothered to look into.