Many years ago, when I worked as a Columban missionary in Japan, there was a man I would have liked to have met. His name was Shoda Akira. I came to hear about him through a chance meeting with his mother. One Sunday morning when I was instructing a class of adults, a woman whom I did not know approached and asked to sit in on our class. Later I learned that she was Shoda San (Mrs.), a parishioner of the adjoining parish, who came to Mass in our parish. I was told that her son, Akira, was a prisoner in the Tokyo Detention Center awaiting execution. Gradually I began to learn more about Shoda Akira.
He was born in Osaka in 1929. He graduated from the prestigious Tokyo Keio University in 1953. Japan at that time was slowly recovering from World War II. It was a time when the occupation forces had not yet left, and when the young generation of Japanese was deeply disillusioned. In this milieu, Akira began working as a trainee with a stockbroker firm in Tokyo. He was intelligent and a quick learner.
He also proved to be a young man burdened with emotional issues and insecurities. Within a relatively short time he had to resign his job to avoid dismissal. Within a month, aided by two others, he formed a plan to kill and rob a business man of a large amount of cash. They brutally murdered the man. However, the plan failed. The two accomplices were quickly arrested, Akira escaped with the money and it was three months before he was arrested. Tried and found guilty of murder, he was sentenced to death by hanging.
The practice in Japan, even up to the present time, is to wait until the condemned man shows signs of remorse before carrying out the execution. Akira showed no signs of remorse as he began his sentence. He came into contact with Fr Candeau, a French missionary, chaplain to the prison. Later on he asked for instruction in the faith and was eventually baptized.
Gradually his whole life changed as he embraced his new faith. He had always loved literature, and he discovered that he had a gift for writing. He began to publish essays and a novel, and co-edited a colloquial translation of the New Testament. His publications were well received by Tokyo’s literary community. Over the years it was assumed by his readers that his sentence would be commuted to life imprisonment.
At this point the focus of the story returns to his mother. Down through the years she had visited him each week. Then, one day she received a telegram from the prison requesting her presence on the following day. On arrival, she was informed that her son was to be executed the next day.
That was to be her last meeting with her son Akira. Later she was told that he had spent the remaining part of that day writing letters of thanks to those who had helped him down through the years. Akira was hanged on December 12, 1969. He was no saint. Neither was he an evil man. He was a man who found Jesus, the hidden treasure. His life underlines an important truth which Sr. Helen Prejean, in her ministry in the United States against the death penalty, has expressed in few words, “Every human being is worth more than the worst act of his life.”
Columban Fr Paddy Clarke has spent more than 30 years on mission in Japan. He is now retired in Dalgan Park, Navan, Ireland.