[政治学] In Japan, Everyone is Guilty, Nobody is Innocent (99.9%?)

we all grow up seeing images of lawyers
and courtrooms in the movies and other forms of fiction and I think we all like to imagine that the difference between guilty and not guilty has something like a fifty-fifty chance so when you see that more than ninety nine percent of people in Japan are found guilty it's shocking you wonder is there something wrong with this statistic is there something I'm missing is there a footnote somewhere that's going to explain to me how it is possible that ninety-nine point nine percent of court cases in Japan are found guilty that almost nobody is ever not guilty in Japan or is there something I'm missing here comparisons are odious but comparisons are inevitable when you look at this chart it's obvious that Japan is much closer to Communist China in terms of the percentage of people who are found to be innocent in its courtrooms keeping things in perspective I think the vast majority of Canadians would be shocked to hear that only three percent of people who go to trial are ever found to be innocent are acquitted in court however in Canada there's a gray area shown here on this chart as a green area of cases that are suspended thrown out of court under different headings that neither conclude as guilty nor not guilty so only sixty-six percent are found guilty and only three percent are acquitted as not guilty could it be that there's something we're missing in the Japanese statistic doesn't it seem like a sort of strangely rounded number 99 percent versus point one percent mmm this is one of the reasons why I took some time to look into this another reason was that when i was living in taiwan i was actually really interested in legal system their legal culture and i was considering the long term option of going to law school in taiwan to becoming a lawyer there so when i started studying japanese as a language and looking at japan I was starting to look at the Japanese legal system a bit too what i've found is pretty dismaying taiwan is another interesting comparison because taiwan is culturally chinese although they also have strong historical links to japan and if you want to know what percentage of people are acquitted in taiwan or found not guilty it is twelve percent a much healthier number than either canada or japan can boast of so I went to the Japanese government's on websites I got the raw statistics in spreadsheet form and I made my own charts here and I was looking through all the footnotes and details and looking at how the categories were defined because I was imagining that the ninety-nine point nine percent statistic must be wrong there must be some other category like dismissal or what have you that accounts for more people being found innocent or at least kicked out of court before they found guilty and they got bad news ninety-nine point nine percent is accurate and although the statistic varies a little bit from one year to the next it varies mostly because the total number of cases brought into court is different from one unit to the next if you look at the red line the top of the screen there some years more cases go to trial than others so this chart basically just zooms in to give you the detail on how many people go to court and how many people are found not guilty but the numbers are so astoundingly low that basically almost nobody is ever innocent in Japan in 1996 only 54 people were found not guilty in the whole year in 2004 it was only a hundred and thirteen so coming back to our first chart it may be unfair to condemn the entire Japanese justice system on the basis of this statistic alone but it certainly is cause for concern and we have to ask ourselves if we're going to get into making excuses for Japan would we make any of those same excuses for the People's Republic of China when the two countries have shockingly very similar statistics in this regard since the year 2007 the Japanese government itself has acknowledged that part of the problem is that Japan's system of trials does not use juries that's correct there are no jury's in Japan there hasn't been a single trial by jury since nineteen forty-three juries were abolished during the period of fascist dictatorship and strangely they were never reinstated the country just never went back to using them so quizzically since 2009 japan has been experimenting with the system of lay judges or citizen judges involving common people as judges during the first trial but their rates of acquittal their rates of finding people not guilty are also very low and unfortunately you only have access to those lay judges this modified system during your first trial never during a court of appeal a secondary trail or what have you so even if you are found not guilty that can be overturned and you can still be convicted as you can imagine there is very little written about this subject in English and even less of it is carefully researchable informed i found one really good article from 2011 in the columbia east asian review and i'll provide a link to that below this video but at the time that article was written only a single case with this new system of mixed judges new lay judges had actually been acquitted and again the lay judge system is still not a jury system it's a sort of careful half step toward having some representation of normal public people although not quite juries the one theme you find again and again throughout the articles on this subject whether they're newspaper articles magazine articles or formally footnoted academic work is the concern that judges lawyers bureaucrats and police all assume you are guilty from the moment you are accused in Japan that there is not really a sincere system of tree people as being innocent until they're proven guilty nor even a system of evaluating proof now of course most of those arguments are anecdotal most of them rely on appeals to emotion and now in just the last few years more and more they have relied on videotape evidence just like controversies that are happening the United States videotape evidence of how the police force people to confess to crimes how police procedure actually happens in Japan and then what use is made of those police findings in court although Japan has cultural and procedural differences from other countries just like Canada does and so on it's impossible to imagine any culture in which legitimately 99.9 percent of people accused of a crime would be found guilty in Japan it looks like a problem because it is a problem and at least since 2007 the Government of Japan themselves have admitted it's a problem and are now attempting some kind of positive reform