More than four years have passed since his 2-year-old granddaughter was murdered, yet never a day goes by without Tsuneo Matsumura mournfully remembering little Haruna, or having images of her flash through his mind whenever he sees a girl about the same age as she would be.

But there is someone else he will never forget -- Mitsuko Yamada, the killer.

Yamada was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment in 2002. But Matsumura was not satisfied. From the beginning, he had called for the maximum penalty -- the death sentence.

"The death penalty is the only way for a murderer to compensate for taking a person's life," he said. "I wanted her to atone for Haruna's murder with her own life."

The killing in November 1999 happened when Haruna's mother took her to pick up her older son at a kindergarten in Tokyo's Bunkyo Ward. While her mother chatted with other parents, Haruna went missing. Four days later, her body was found buried in Shizuoka Prefecture. She had been strangled by Yamada, a friend of her mother, whose son went to the same kindergarten.

"When I say I want capital punishment for her, it's not that I don't feel sorry for her children, because I do," said Matsumura. "But I want her to know the seriousness of the crime she committed. And to tell you the truth, knowing that the murderer is still alive is extremely stressful to victims."

But Yamada killed only one person, and in Japan the murder of one person does not usually bring a death sentence.

"She may have killed only one person physically," said Matsumura. "But she killed seven people emotionally -- Haruna's parents, her older brother and us four grandparents. We have to live with this for the rest of our lives."

Yamada has never said why she killed Haruna, though in court she said she felt alienated when Haruna's mother made other friends. The media then began to point the finger at Haruna's mother.

"People began to suggest that my daughter must have done something horrible for Yamada to kill Haruna," said Matsumura. "My daughter suffered terribly. She used to be outgoing, but she had turned into an introvert, staying at home. She couldn't trust anybody anymore."

Despite the nightmarish period after the murder, Matsumura said he and his family have been greatly assisted by the nonprofit National Association of Crime Victims and Surviving Families, commonly called Asu no Kai, which was founded in 2000 and has around 300 members.

"Before that was established, victims were isolated," he said. "People had a biased view of victims, saying we must have done something to provoke the incident. We had to hide our pain and suffering because no one wanted to listen to us or understand what we were going through."

Also in 2000, the Crime Victims' Protection Law came into effect, ensuring that victims and immediate family members were allocated courtroom seats instead of having to line up with the general public as they had to before.

"It is surprising that such a normal system was denied for so long," said Hidemichi Morosawa, an adviser to Asu no Kai. "But what we have achieved so far is only 10 percent of what is necessary."

A professor at Tokiwa University, and the founder of the Tokiwa International Victimology Institute, Morosawa recalls that back when he was a law major, he was shocked that the study of criminal law made no mention of the victims. In fact, he said, until the nation was thrown into shock in 1997 when a 14-year-old boy murdered two children in Kobe, decapitating one of them, the pleas for information from the families of the victims were almost always ignored by the government.

"For years after that the Justice Ministry just said 'no comment' to victims' families," Morosawa said. "Then last year, for the first time, it held meetings with them about the boy's imminent release after six years in a medical reformatory. They also held a news conference when he was released."

Those are steps in the right direction, but Asu no Kai wants the legal system to go further. Its next goal is for victims and their families to have a role in court. Matsumura welcomes this, telling of his "pain and anger" as he watched his granddaughter's killer telling only her side of the story, as he could only sit back and watch.

But is that possible?

"You have to look to the origin of the system," said Morosawa. "Modern government took away victims' rights to vengeance," he said, referring to the Edo Period system called kataki-uchi (attacking the enemy). This sanctioned revenge against the killer of a master or relative, if the shogunate granted permission. In 1873, the Meiji government made it illegal.

"What we need to do is to reconsider how we regard the victims' right to vengeance," said Morosawa. In Germany, for example, he said that victims have almost the same power as prosecutors in requesting a sentence. There, too, victims and close family can appear in court not just as witnesses, but to cross-examine defendants. To help them do this, the state pays for a lawyer to advise and/or represent them.

In contrast, only defendants get court-appointed lawyers in Japan. In 2002, these attorneys cost the state 7.2 billion yen; while compensation to victims totaled E.1 billion.

Last July, Asu no Kai handed a 400,000-signature petition to the then Justice Minister Mayumi Moriyama calling for victims to be able to participate in court proceedings, aided by court-appointed lawyers.

Morosawa said that despite growing support worldwide for the abolition of the death penalty, it will likely be a long time before Japan follows suit, as most victims strongly support it.

"Ultimately, I would like to aim for a world without the death penalty," Morosawa said. "But unfortunately, Japan is not ready yet."