Atimid man, Toshikazu Sugaya visibly trembles when he recalls the day the police came calling. From the minute they arrived at his door on a wintry morning 18 years ago, they were convinced of his guilt.
'They barged in and told me to sit down. Then they kept saying, 'You killed that child, didn't you?' I said 'no, no', but they didn't believe me.'
At the police station in Ashikaga, a small city just over an hour north of Tokyo, detectives pulled his hair, kicked him and shouted in his face, he recalls. They waved around a photo of four-year-old Mami Matsuda. They accused him of raping and killing her.
After a 13-hour interrogation in which he was denied food, water or a lawyer, he confessed. Then he burst into tears: 'I was just so scared.'
That false confession cost Sugaya dearly. He spent more than 17 years in jail for Mami Matsuda's 1990 murder before being freed in June in a rare judicial reversal that has sent shock waves through the justice system. Now aged 62, as he waits for the state officially to declare him innocent, reformers are rallying around his case, which they think might finally force change on Japan's much-criticised police and courts.
'I believe his release could do for Japan what the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six cases did for the UK,' says Sugaya's lawyer Hiroshi Sato. Those wrongful convictions led to a major overhaul of police methods and the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
