SNA (Tokyo) — News Headline: “Prosecutors drop case over death of detained Sri Lankan woman.”

In August 2020, a Sri Lanka national named Ratnayake Liyanage Wishma Sandamali was arrested for overstaying her visa, and detained in a Nagoya Immigration Detention Center. She had arrived in Japan in 2017, but her student visa was cancelled in 2019 because she couldn’t afford tuition fees. While in detention, she opted not to return to Sri Lanka, reportedly due to reduced flights during Covid and an abusive boyfriend back home.

During her seven months in custody, however, Sandamali’s health steadily declined due to a stress-induced stomach condition. According to the Straits Times, Sandamali “was vomiting blood in her final days, and was so weak that she had no control of her arms and legs. The immigration authorities allegedly turned a blind eye to medical expert advice to put her on an intravenous drip or to grant her provisional release to ease her stress. A report by public broadcaster NHK suggested that officials tend to suspect malingering for minor illnesses in their reluctance to grant provisional release.”

That’s a questionable decision, since she had lost 20 kilograms from her small frame over seven months—hard to dismiss as mere “malingering” or “minor illness.” And her decline was not sudden: According to the Asahi Shinbun, she had notified her jailers from mid-January about nausea and lack of appetite. Nineteen days before her death, a urine test indicated she was in a state of starvation. The New York Times noted that in her final days she could ingest little more than water, sugar, or morsels of bread, and could barely make a fist or speak. Yet she was again refused provisional release for hospital treatment.

On March 6, 2021, Sandamali died in her cell, aged 33. An August 2021 postmortem probe by Japan’s Immigration Services Agency ruled that Sandamali had been “mistreated” by the Nagoya Regional Immigration Services Bureau, formally reprimanding the bureau’s director and three other supervisors for not reporting her requests for examination and treatment to an outside doctor.

But overlooked was cruelty of her captors. According to Nikkei Asia, “one immigration officer allegedly mocked Wishma when she was unable to swallow her drink,” and the Mainichi Shinbun reported that other Immigration officers misled a doctor about her condition two days before her death, dismissing her illness as merely “psychosomatic.”

By the time Sandamali’s family received her body, “her skin was wrinkled like an old person, and it was stuck firmly to her bones.” In November 2021, Sandamali’s family lodged a criminal complaint against officials at the Nagoya facility, accusing them of murder through willful negligence.

Unfortunately, as noted above, last week the Nagoya District Public Prosecutor’s Office dropped the Sandamali case, citing an inability to establish criminal liability or even a cause of death, blaming it on “multiple factors.”

Multiple factors indeed. Sandamali’s case is not unprecedented. According to CNN, since 1997 at least 27 foreign detainees have died in Japan’s Immigration detention centers (aka “Gaijin Tanks,” because they detain foreigners only).

The main factor here is the cruel and unusual punishment by public officers, expressly forbidden under Article 36 of the Constitution.

Yet nobody has ever been held criminally liable for foreigner deaths in detention. That’s what makes Japan’s Gaijin Tanks so cruel and unusual.

Let’s consider a few more cases, then talk about the system that killed them.

Niculas Fernando

On November 21, 2014, Niculas Fernando, detained at a Tokyo Immigration Detention Center, was moved to an observation cell with video monitoring after complaining of chest pains. He received no medical treatment, reportedly because there was no doctor on duty. He died the next morning. However, despite his motionlessness on video, his death was not noticed by officials until that afternoon.

It turns out that he was the fourth foreigner to die in the past thirteen months due to medical issues occurring when no doctor was on duty during evenings and weekends. This is standard for Gaijin Tanks. As far back as 2006, the Yomiuri Shinbun reported that the Omura Detention Center had no full-time doctor on call for years, and no concrete plans to employ one.

Reuters noted that a watchdog agency monitoring Japan’s seventeen Gaijin Tanks (whose reports are edited by the Justice Ministry before being made public) still managed to boldly conclude that officials had “misjudged the seriousness” of Fernando’s condition, and by not sending him to a hospital, they had “missed opportunities to avoid his death.”

Yet Justice Minister Mitsuhide Iwaki afterwards declared that, in all four deaths, “appropriate medical steps had been taken,” further stating, “I do not acknowledge there were problems in the responses or the medical care provided.”

A year later, the same detention center saw fourteen other detainees trying to kill or otherwise harm themselves, in protest of the lack of medical care and other harsh conditions—including overcrowding and lack of exercise, food tainted by caterpillars and cockroaches, and overdrugging detainees.

In 2019, a similar hunger strike involved 198 detainees, prompting Tokyo NGO Human Rights Now to issue a report for the prohibition of arbitrary detention in Gaijin Tanks.

Gerald “Sunny” Okafor

On June 24, 2019, Gerald “Sunny” Okafor, a detainee in Nagasaki married to a Japanese woman with one child, starved himself to death after a four-week hunger strike. Investigations published by Japan Today last February noted how the Ministry of Justice, which had again cleared officials at the detention center of any wrongdoing, erroneously portrayed Okafor as a “hardened criminal” and “deadbeat father.” Officials had even pressured his wife to divorce him, deceptively claiming that it would expedite his release.

What made it worse was that Japanese media played along, parroting official boilerplate pandering to the regular presumption in Japan that anyone in jail must have done something wrong, and, in the words of the Japan Today article, “responding to that propaganda with opinion essays instead of investigations.”

There are many other cases, such as Relindis Mai Ekei, a refugee who was denied timely medical care for months in detention, only to be released and die in hospital in January 2021 of untreated breast cancer about three hours before receiving her residency card.

And, of course, there is the particularly brutal death of Abubakar Awudu Suraj, who died on March 22, 2010, from asphyxiation while being restrained and bundled onto an airplane for a forced deportation. Despite a civil suit later finding fault with the government, Suraj’s criminal case, like Sandamali’s, was dismissed by the Chiba Prosecutor’s Office as finding “no causal relationship between the action and the death, and the action was legitimate.” That’s the standard refrain from the authorities.

No Accountability

What this all points to is how Japanese officials, when not held to account for their actions, have a shocking record of abuse.

We have already written at Shingetsu News Agency about Japan’s “hostage justice” system, where under normal conditions people of any nationality detained by the police must prove their innocence to the prosecution, and are incarcerated for extended periods until they crack and confess to a crime under the stress. Suspects are held “hostage” to the system, detained unless they pay their release “ransom” by confessing, even if that requires detention and interrogations for weeks, months, occasionally more than a year.

The Japan Federation of Bar Associations and the UN Committee Against Torture have both called this system “a breeding ground for false charges” and “tantamount to torture.”

But foreigners in Japan have an extra layer of incarceration–the Immigration Agency. Because noncitizen detainees cannot renew their visas while in detention, any incarceration by regular police forces increases the likelihood of detention later in separate Immigration Gaijin Tanks.

Gaijin Tanks are different from Japanese prisons. In terms of procedure, inmates convicted of a specific crime and sentenced to a Japanese prison have a legally defined release date, often with the possibility of parole. Foreigners in a Gaijin Tank, however, have no specific limit to their detention period, resulting in indefinite incarceration. According to the Mainichi Shinbun, as of the end of July 2018, out of the 1,309 detainees nationwide, 54% had been detained for six months or longer. Human Rights Now notes that as of June 2019, 88% of detainees at the Higashi Nihon Detention Center have even detained for more than a year.

Gaijin Tanks are also a separate entity in terms of living conditions. The rights of detainees to adequate food, exercise, and living space are more regulated in Japanese prisons, and subject to international oversight regarding standards of favorable treatment. Gaijin Tanks are exempt from that oversight, so Gaijin Tanks cannot truly be compared to Japanese prisons.

The lack of oversight matters. As any criminologist studying Stanley Milgram’s and Philip Zimbardo’s research will tell you, a closed punitive environment with unmonitored authority necessarily produces abuse. And that’s precisely what happens to foreigners consigned to Gaijin Tanks. It’s the natural outcome.

Specialists are aware of this situation. In 1998, the United Nations noted that “there is no independent authority to which complaints of ill-treatment by the police and immigration officials can be addressed for investigation and redress.”

Yet nearly a quarter century later, nothing has been done. Japan’s Immigration Agency remains, according to Sanae Fujita at the University of Essex, a “black box” with no judicial review. That is one reason why inhospitable, unsanitary, and generally unmonitored conditions in these detention centers continue unabated. More foreigners will have to die before the outside world takes action.

Fortunately, the Sandamali case brought national attention and protest against the government’s treatment of visa overstayers and asylum applicants—and it caused the withdrawal of proposed legislation that would have only strengthened the ability for bureaucrats “to keep any foreign national in custody without the approval of a judge,” thus violating constitutional guarantees of due process.

But it still has not resulted in criminal prosecutions of those directly responsible for their deaths.

Presumed Guilty

Finally, let’s address a common misperception: people being held in a Japanese jail are guilty of something, i.e., “they must have done something wrong to be have been detained in the first place.” If you overstay your visa, you get what’s coming to you, runs the argument.

It’s important to bear in mind that many people in Japan’s Gaijin Tanks are not all visa overstayers–and many of those “overstayers” have Japanese spouses and families that would qualify them for visas in other countries. Many detainees have broken no laws whatsoever—they are just being held because they claimed asylum and are ostensibly being detained while their cases are being processed.

In reality, they are being put in a place so horrible they’ll give up on their cases and choose to be deported. For many, deportation would mean returning to a place with certain death anyway. That’s that’s why many claim refugee status in the first place, and why they choose to stay even on pain of death. If you need more detail, watch Ian Thomas Ash’s 2021 award-winning documentary Ushiku.

It’s important to be careful not to absorb government propaganda and reflexively blame the victim. The problem is less the “illegal foreigners” you hear so much about from Japan’s media and law enforcement. The larger crime is inherent in the system they are being subjected to.

Japan’s Gaijin Tanks are inhumane, cruel, and unconstitutional, not to mention deadly. And Japan’s justice system’s bottomless tolerance for the death of people in Gaijin Tanks insulates those conditions from the rule of law.

What to do instead? If a person, regardless of nationality, has committed a criminal act under the Penal Code, then convict them and put them in an actual prison, one with proper oversight and a sentence with a time limit.

The current system, of segregating foreigners into the limbo of a Gaijin Tank until they “go home” or die is, quite simply, long-term torture of foreigners sanctioned by the state.

For breaking news, follow on Twitter @ShingetsuNews