Photo/Illutration Hirohide Mori, far left, from the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office, and Tetsuro Kamata, deputy superintendent-general of the Metropolitan Police Department, apologize to Masaaki Okawara, second from right, and other Ohkawara Kakohki Co. officials on June 20. (Tetsuro Takehana)

High-ranking law enforcement officials in Tokyo apologized to past and current executives of a company that manufactures spray dryers for dragging them through an investigation that a high court concluded was illegal.

Tetsuro Kamata, deputy superintendent-general of the Metropolitan Police Department, was joined by Hirohide Mori, head of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office’s public security division, in the June 20 mission to set matters straight.

The first part of the June 20 meeting at the Yokohama headquarters of Ohkawara Kakohki Co. was open to the media.

Kamata apologized for the psychological burden placed on Masaaki Okawara, the company president, and Junji Shimada, a former executive, by the investigation, while Mori begged forgiveness for acting on the request by prosecutors to hand down indictments and detain the pair.

A third individual who was indicted died before his name was cleared.

Okawara said the apology should have been made much earlier and added, “I want your organization to become one where such things never happen again.”

But the meeting did not go smoothly.

Kamata at one point referred to Shimada as “Yamamoto” and Mori also mixed up the name of the company.

Bereaved family members of the late Shizuo Aishima, a company adviser, refused to attend the June 20 meeting on grounds they could not accept an apology unless the root cause of the miscarriage of justice was made clear.

Tsuyoshi Takada, a lawyer representing the company officials, briefed reporters about what transpired during the part of the meeting closed to the media.

Takada said an apology was offered on behalf of Takako Tsukabe, the prosecutor who was in charge of the case that led to the indictments. In her apology, Tsukabe said more care should have been taken before deciding to hand down indictments.

But in her testimony during the lawsuit brought by Okawara and his fellow plaintiffs, Tsukabe said she would have made the same decision and felt no mistake had been made.

In 2020, Okawara and his two colleagues were arrested and indicted on suspicion of violating the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Law for exporting spray-drying machines that could be used for military purposes without a license. They were accused of exporting spray dryers without obtaining government permission.

But before the case went to trial in 2021, prosecutors dropped the charges, having come to the realization that the plaintiffs were probably correct in their claim that the equipment was not subject to export restrictions.

In May, the Tokyo High Court increased the compensation police and prosecutors were ordered to pay and ruled that the investigation was illegal because there was no rational basis for making the arrests and indictments.

(This article was written by Koichi Fujimaki and Hiraku Higa.)

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