ANARCHISTS, Tax announcement that sentence of death has been passed upon twenty-four of the Japanese implicated in a plot against the! Emperor will cause no surprise. Indeed our Tokio correspondent was able to inform us the day before the sentence was officially passed what form it would take, a fact that throws into bold relief the difference between judicial methods in Japan and those of other countries. The crime for which the most severe penalty employed by civilized nations has been imposed la still shrouded, to some extent, in mystery. The first announcement that a number of prisoners, known to be Socialists, were in custody on charge of the gravest character was made in the " Hochi Shimlun" in September, but the arrests appear to have been made months before. The authorities not only preserved the greatest reticence in connexion with the matter, but commanded the newspapers in Japan, foreign and vernacalar, to refrain from comment Certain facts were, however, allowed to leak out and it became generall known, or at least believed, in October that the charge against Denjiro Kotokn, a Socialist journalist, and his associates, one of whom was a woman, was the concoction of a plot to assassinate the Emperor near the military park at Aoyama, A preliminary investigation was held, with closed doors, which concluded on November 4 and the prisoners were remitted to trial by a special tribunal in Tokio. They wore at this trial defended by eminent counsel, but the Court was not open to the public and no detailed report of the proceedings has been allowed to appear. Even the charge is a matter of assumption, as the official announcement was that the accused were alleged to have committed a breach of Article 73 of the Criminal Code, which relates to arn against the Imperial Family. No specific charge haa beau made public, and evidence for the prosecution and the nature of the defence have not been divulged.
The secrecy that has been maintained has been responsible for a
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.