At 10 o’clock this morning, with glorious sunshine forecast for the final day of Golden Week holidays, a nation will pause for perhaps the darkest five minutes ever broadcast on Japanese radio: an execution by hanging.

From the mechanical thump of the opening trapdoor to the high-pitched creak of a rope strained by the dead man’s weight, it is a soundtrack destined to send shockwaves through the Japanese justice system.

The hanging itself may have taken place more than 53 years ago and the subject’s name and crime will remain a secret under Japanese law but the programme’s producers are sure that the recording will provoke controversy.

Japan has hanged about five people annually since resuming executions in 1993 after a three-year hiatus. Every time the Japanese are polled on the subject a vast majority approve of capital punishment for murder, and the margin continues to rise. All but a few have never seen or heard a hanging and the official cloak of secrecy shrouding executions – even the family of the subject are not informed until after it has happened – has left the Japanese media unwilling to dwell on the issue. Thebroadcast will shatter that taboo. Snippets of the condemned man’s final conversations with his executioner and the murmur of a Buddhist sutra will be a fierce reminder that it is a human being who, moments later, is heard being silenced for ever.

The radio station, Nippon Cultural Broadcasting, says that it obtained the rare “educational” tape from the Osaka Detention Centre many years ago but believes that Japan can wait no longer for it to be aired. Japan has executed ten death-row inmates since December and the far-above-average pace has raised eyebrows.

At the moment, Japanese justice is conducted by professionals – cases are tried and punished by panels of judges. From next year Japan will introduce a form of jury service that will force members of the public to sit in judgment on serious criminal trials for the first time.

Tatsuya Mori, one of Japan’s few authors to address the subject of capital punishment, applauded the macabre broadcast. “The jury system is to start but the public has no idea how a real execution works and has never engaged in a proper debate on the subject. If the Ministry of Justice is trying to hide the reality of it, it is up to the media to expose it.”

The broadcast is likely to highlight many other issues within the Japanese justice system, which relies heavily on the confessions of those in the dock and has a conviction rate above 90 per cent for many crimes.

Over the 40 years Iwao Hakamada has been on death row he has insisted that his confession to murder was coerced. Norimichi Kumamoto, one of the three judges who handed down the death penalty, stunned Japan recently when he said that he also believed Hakamada to be innocent.

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