Ryōichi Hishiya

Ryōichi Hishiya was born on 14 November 1921 in Asahikawa, Hokkaido, the eldest son of Sadakichi Hishiya and his wife Naka. He had three younger brothers and a much younger sister. He liked drawing from primary school and was delighted when his pictures were pinned up in class. He remembered seeing Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush when he was three or four, and films remained a lifelong love. He attended Asahikawa Nissho Primary School.

In 1936, at 15, Hishiya entered Asahikawa Normal School (now Hokkaido University of Education, Asahikawa), a teacher-training college, hoping to become an art teacher. On the advice of an older schoolmate he joined the art club, whose adviser was Masago Kumada. Kumada taught students to sharpen their powers of observation and to look at reality, telling them that by looking at the real world they could understand it. Hishiya also took his history classes. He slipped out of the dormitory to see films, spent his part-time wages on Iwanami paperbacks, read Russian literature, and held record concerts with friends. In April 1941 the philosopher Sueharu Kan joined the school and encouraged the students who had been held back.

Kumada's life drawing (seikatsu zuga) method asked pupils to paint their own lives and the society around them realistically. On 10 January 1941, after teachers in the Hokkaido Tsuzurikata Education League had been arrested, the Special Higher Police arrested Kumada under the Peace Preservation Law. Hishiya and four art club classmates were given zero marks in military drill and held back a year, and another student was expelled.

On 20 September 1941 detectives arrested Hishiya in his dormitory. Held at Pippu police station, he was questioned by an inspector who told him from the start that he had believed in communism. Police focused on his drawing of two students discussing a book, which they said showed communist reading. Shown his own books piled against the wall, threatened, slapped and promised release if he confessed, he signed a statement saying he had embraced communism. Police played his statements and those of Goro Matsumoto off against each other to build the case.

At the end of 1941 he was moved to Asahikawa Prison, inmate number 140, in an unheated solitary cell where winter temperatures fell to minus 30 degrees Celsius. He was released with Matsumoto on 26 December 1942 after about 15 months in custody. In November 1943 he was sentenced to one year and six months, suspended for three years, and expelled from the school. Kumada, teacher Shigeyuki Ueno and senior student Katsushiro Honma received prison terms.

Barred from teaching, Hishiya joined Asahikawa Gas, where his father worked. In February 1944 he was conscripted as an army reservist and served as an orderly and cipher clerk at an air division headquarters in Obihiro. He heard the surrender broadcast on 15 August 1945 at the airfield and returned home at the end of September. He went back to Asahikawa Gas after the war and stayed until his retirement in 1979, by then a director of a subsidiary, according to Nippon.com. For decades he set painting aside, though he took up photography.

Hishiya's best-known work is the self-portrait he painted on 11 February 1943, weeks after his release, wearing his younger sister's red hat as a bitter joke about the communist label the police had pinned on him. After retiring he returned to painting when his wife invited him to a community centre painting class, saying the old fire was rekindled. He set up a studio on the upper floor of his home and painted decaying boats and abandoned houses, saying he felt an attachment to things that were passing away, as well as European townscapes from his travels. About 80 works were shown in a 100th-birthday exhibition at the Asahikawa Civic Culture Hall in November 2021. He called painting the saving grace of his life.

Hishiya lived in Asahikawa for almost his whole life. He married and raised a family. His wife's name has not been made public. His eldest son, Shin'ichi, was chief mourner at his funeral. In later life he took in his elderly parents. His younger sister later married into the family of Sueharu Kan's mother, a connection he called a strange bond. His closest friend was fellow defendant Goro Matsumoto, with whom he shared a cell block and a release day. In his final years he lived in an elderly care facility in Asahikawa, where he still read the newspaper every day.

Hishiya always denied having been a communist or ever joining any movement, saying he had never read Das Kapital or handed out a leaflet. He described the Peace Preservation Law as a law that could be used against anyone at the will of those in power, even though it was first presented as having nothing to do with ordinary people. In 2014 he voiced anxiety about the state secrets law passed the previous year, and in 2017 he joined citizens opposing the new conspiracy offence, both of which he saw as echoes of that law. His final message, he told Nippon.com in 2025, was simply to protect freedom and peace.

After 2006 Hishiya became one of the main public witnesses to wartime thought control in Japan. With Goro Matsumoto he spoke at schools, lectures and rallies across Hokkaido and beyond, and after Matsumoto's death in 2020 he was widely described as the last living witness of the Peace Preservation Law. The human rights group that campaigns for state compensation for the law's victims said it knew of no other surviving person arrested under it. He went to the National Diet each year to petition for an apology and compensation. His story was told in books, documentaries, the photo project A RED HAT by Kentaro Takahashi, and the HBC film about him.

His self-published autobiography Hyakunen no Tankyu: Shin no Jiyu to Heiwa o Shiko shi Tsuzukete (A Hundred Years of Searching: Still Thinking About True Freedom and Peace, 2023) received the newly created Silver Special Prize (personal publications category) at the 27th Japan Self-Publishing Culture Awards, announced in September 2024.

Writings: a five-part prison memoir serialised in the Hokkaido Shimbun in 1989; Seikatsu Zuga Jiken: Gokuchuki (2006); Hyakunen no Tankyu (2023).

Film and television: HBC Hokkaido Broadcasting news features from 2020 onward; the HBC documentary film 102-sai no Kotoba: Seikatsu Zuga Jiken Saigo no Ikishonin, directed by Yu Nagasawa and featuring actor Kanji Furutachi, shown at the TBS Documentary Film Festival 2024 and screened in Hokkaido; a TBS Hodo Tokushu report for the law's centenary in August 2025.

Other: the photo book A RED HAT by Kentaro Takahashi (2020); a 2020 lecture streamed by the Miura Ayako Literature Museum; interviews with Nippon.com, the Mainichi Shimbun, the Asahi Shimbun and Nishinippon Shimbun.

Ryōichi Hishiya died at 10:25 a.m. on Tuesday 10 November 2026 at an elderly care facility in Asahikawa, Hokkaido, aged 104. Kyodo News reported the cause as bladder cancer. His funeral and farewell ceremony was scheduled for 10 a.m. on 14 November 2026, which would have been his 105th birthday, at Yawaragi Saijo Asahikawa (5-jo-dori 15-chome), with his eldest son Shin'ichi as chief mourner. NHK, HBC, the Hokkaido Shimbun and Kyodo News reported his death, and local politicians, journalists and supporters posted tributes.