Japan is a land of rapid transition and nothing has changed more completely in recent years than Japanese prisons. Still there was some system, even in ancient days. The sexes were kept apart, the penalty of the log worn round the neck and fastened to the ankle was not imposed upon the aged or juvenile offender, nor upon dwarfs, invalids or pregnant women. In the sixteenth century a prison reformer arose who organised five new prisons in Yeddo for five different classes of prisoners, comprising females and persons of different conditions of life. Proper prison officers were appointed, and security was obtained without despising sanitary needs. Still there must have been much mutual contamination, owing to the indiscriminate herding together, and the maintenance of internal order was left to the prisoners who chose among themselves a _nanoushi_, or head, with eleven assistants to control the whole body. Flogging was inflicted and handcuffs were universally worn. In 1790 a house of correction was established on the island of Yshikavoy in the Bay of Yeddo, to which were committed all vagabonds or incorrigible prisoners whom it was thought unsafe to set free lest they should relapse into crime. The work on this island was chiefly the manufacture of oil. In cases of escape and recapture the fugitives were branded with a certain tattoo mark on the left arm.
Even in the middle of the nineteenth century the same brutal methods of torture prevailed as in China (from where their bloody codes were mostly borrowed), and there are preserved collections of instruments of torture as diabolical as any known to history. Crime, too, was not lacking in those “isles of the blest,” and every species of moral filth and corruption abounded, which was shown in its true colours when the liberty of the press was granted, in 1872-1874. The number of executions and deaths in the native prisons at that time was said to average three thousand per annum.
The chief prison of the empire, in Tokio, as described by Mr. William M. Griffis, who visited it in 1875, was very different in its sanitary appointments and general condition from the prisons of Tokio to-day. A curious feature was a small roofed in structure in the prison yard, with open sides, where condemned men of rank were allowed to expiate their crimes by plunging the dirk into their own bodies, after which the executioner cut off their heads. The head, laid on a tray, was then inspected by an officer of justice. There were very few of such executions after 1871. The ordinary criminal was beheaded in the blood-pit, so-called, which was a pit surrounded with a much stained and slashed wooden curb, and kept covered by a sort of trap-door. In the pit were mats, one above the other, which had been soaked with the blood of many criminals. “The faint odour that ascended,” says Mr. Griffis, “was more horrible in the awful cloud of associations which it called up than the mere stench.” It was then April and twenty-five heads had fallen there since the year began. The criminal was led to the pit blindfolded and was beheaded with an ordinary sword, sharp as a razor. Death followed frequently on the day of sentence and never later than the day after.