The Murderer Who Met Grace on Death Row

In 1918, Tokichi Ishii sat in a Tokyo prison cell awaiting execution. He had killed multiple people without remorse, and guards called him the most dangerous man in Japan. Two Canadian missionaries, unable to reach him through conversation, simply left a New Testament in his cell.

Ishii ignored it for weeks. Then boredom drove him to its pages. He read without interest until he reached Luke's account of the crucifixion. When his eyes landed on Jesus's words from the cross — "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing" — something shattered inside him.

Here was an innocent man, tortured and nailed to wood by His own creation, and His first impulse was not rage but intercession. Ishii had spent his life demanding that the world pay for its offenses against him. Yet this Jesus, who had every right to condemn, chose instead to plead for mercy on behalf of His killers.

Ishii wept for the first time anyone could remember. He confessed his crimes openly, wrote letters of repentance to the families of his victims, and walked to the gallows a transformed man. He composed a final poem: "My sinful self, standing now on the scaffold of death, finds in this the direct direct road to the grace of God."

Like the criminal hanging beside Christ who received the promise of paradise, Tokichi Ishii discovered that the reach of the cross extends even to the last breath — and that no darkness is too deep for the forgiveness Jesus offers from the place of His own suffering.