[政治学] Crime and Punishment in Japan [日本での罪と罰]

kay koyuki spent 20 years in prison
after she confessed to having burned her own eleven-year-old daughter to death in fact her daughter died in a fire that started from leaking petrol in the family garage but so harsh was mrs. IO he's questioning that she admitted to murder after just one day she was released in October so right there in that one example you see several of the crucial factors coming together that the police are not investigating the crime in this case they're not investigating the physical reality of what started the fire they are engaging in violence immediately by default as their main method of interrogating a person and basically framing people and forcing confessions instead of taking an interest in the facts of the case from day one and as you hear in the other examples the methods of brutalizing people to force them to confess to crimes in Japan are just as terrible as any third world dictatorship growing numbers of false confessions have come to like pardon me have come to light in while hakamada for example served 46 years on death row before his release release in March of 2014 the judge who freed him found that police and prosecutors had fabricated evidence in his original trial for murder he has also said he was interrogated for 11 hours a day for 23 days beaten with nightsticks and prodded with pins if he fell asleep the Japanese government uses torture not as part of war not as part of an attempt to defeat a conquered Ayami people the Japanese government uses torture against its own citizens as a completely routine part of its criminal justice system and Japan has one of the most notorious criminal justice systems in the world what I'm saying would only be shocking or surprising to someone whose opinion of Japan is big stone cartoons video games TV shows they give a glorified view of a society that has been struggling to escape the shadow of its own fascist heritage if instead your approach Japan is primarily through political science or simply through reading reasonably respectable publications like The Economist The Magazine I'm gonna read you a little bit from in a minute here it wouldn't be surprising at all just say a little bit about how I relate to this story and how the Economist is a publication what's the story this is something the authors of the Economist The Economist is written anonymously most of the magazine does not state who the author is for any given article this is something economists seem to have had in sort of the their back pocket for many years and every year every couple of years they come back and write another article on this same story in a sense there is no story there is no news there's nothing new and exciting about this there's simply a gap between public perception and political reality and the perception is that Japan is a squeaky-clean modern highly westernized highly industrialized nation that one might blithely assume meets the highest standards for procedural justice shall we say and the reality is that Japan treats people accused of crimes with all the brutality of the world's most notorious and backward third-world dictatorships so that is a contrast worth talking about and it's worth talking about again and again and I appreciate that this magazine The Economist has returned to this issue again and again even though there's nothing in particular that's made headlines definitely nothing in particular in the Western world the situation for the process of the law in Japan although absolutely terrible is not surprising if you're familiar with Cambodia Laos Thailand communist China most of Asia has an abysmally low standard of shall we say human rights human rights a little too vague what we're really talking about here is procedural justice people say you're in so proven guilty are you actually treated as innocent do you really have the ability and the possibility to defend yourself people say you have access to your lawyer what does that really mean if you're poor you can't afford a lawyer all these questions in practice so as a procedural justice they are matters of procedure they're not matters of bare principle as standard in the constitution of a country but questions of how these things really clay have it now I wrote a couple of blogs I guess I'll give links to the the earlier blogs below this video and they are really brief and they got thousands and thousands of readers I somebody shared a link at Japan and I got a lot of readers of this but the entries in my blog they're just a couple of paragraphs long and basically what they say is look the statistics for how terrible the Japanese legal system are they seem unbelievable but using my very limited ability in the Japanese language I went to the websites of the Japanese government that provided the statistics directly I looked at the statistics in detail looked at all the footnotes so to speak and yeah the statistics are real I'm amazed I was shocked it's not what I was expecting but these unbelievable statistics are in fact real and the very deep problems in the procedural justice system in Japan are shockingly real so moving past the headlines moving past newspaper coverage to look at real social status sistex yeah this is one of the glaring problems in Japanese society in life the responses I got I mean obviously a large number people just read the articles daughter Hurley yep this is a big problem and didn't say anything to me but I got angry emails and one real kind of stalker for four months pursuing me after the internet denouncing me and refusing to believe in what I was saying about Japan and I mean psychologically and philosophically there's some of the interesting thing about here evidently there are some white Western people who have a glorified view of Japan that I think is mostly based on playing video games and watching cartoons and so on and they then feel disillusioned they feel angry at me I mean these articles I wrote I'm not even I thought they don't Steve my opinion they really just say this is the source of this claim and here's what the actual data says there is no opinion in them obviously white people who have this glorified view of Japan are not alone in the world they're not completely unique in having this sort of experience with a foreign culture I think the one thing they have to be compared to directly it would be someone who grows up in Asia with a glorified view of Los Angeles and grows up watching movies that make California look like paradise and then only later learns for example police corruption is a big problem in California police brutality is a big problem that the justice system in California is terrible and that in general a city like Los Angeles has many profound and shocking social problems uh situation though I've never met or talked to somebody with you that I've known people from so many different countries so many different cultural backgrounds I have never personally known someone who had a glorified view of the United States and then was disillusioned that way and I guess it's because the critiques the United States are also so much in the news in the mainstream press the whole legacy and shadow of the Vietnam War hang so heavily over the net States or did during my lifetime now it's the shadow of military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and so on but I guess it's true that while the United States is glorified it's also criticized in these same sorts of media sources and Japan is not with Japan you get the glorification and if you don't seek it out if you're not reading I don't know political science journals or something if you're not hunting down more skeptical sources then I guess you never hear the other side last year confessions underpinned 89 percent of criminal prosecutions in Japan and almost for that exception those who confess are found guilty the overall conviction rate is a staggering ninety-nine point eight percent so those are the type of statistics that just mentioned I found them a me when I first saw them and then I got direct reports in Japanese government with all the definitions and footnotes of you know when I look at that some ninety-nine point eight percent conviction rate I was thinking well maybe there were some other categories maybe they are including with conviction cases that end in an indecisive way maybe there were some footnotes there that we know ninety-nine point eight percent conviction rate is closely comparable to Communist China or other total dictatorships where nobody's treated as innocent than someone where process is railroaded and yeah that's a real warning for Japan now among by so-called critics the weeaboo solonian denouncing me because I dare to criticize social problems in Japan their only point was to indicate that by contrast the total number of criminals the total number of crimes that get tried is very low in Japan that's true in contrast in Japan to Los Angeles California the total number of crimes being committed and processed by the system is dramatically lower however does that make this situation better or worse I think morally you have to recognize that actually the problem profound problems we have with Japan's criminal justice system are worse precisely because the system is not overwhelmed to give a contrasting example many people complained about how poorly criminal justice system operated in New Orleans during their flood when hurricane came in and destroyed most the city Hurricane Katrina was called and you know law and order broke down and many things became very badly run um what do you expect in many cases the actual police stations were abandoned you know the system disintegrated just due to the weather and then beyond that they were overwhelmed with more cries for help and more duties than they could attend to you know police and firemen and so on obviously they were trying to help people who are actually drowning and they also had huge numbers of crimes being reported looting at that so those situations was symptom system being overwhelmed in Japan if we're looking at torture etc in the criminal justice system it is not really an excuse or a rationale to say that there are very few crimes committed in total on the contrary that indicates the extent to which the Japanese use this as their default method of ruling and governing and enforcing the law this is not something they resort to only under extreme circumstances such as New Orleans under a hurricane or such as an Army of Occupation fighting an armed resistance there is no pressure on the Japanese to resort to these brutal tactics and yet it is what they do prosecutors put pressure on the police to extract confessions and the 23 day period is plenty of time to extract one interrogators sometimes ramp tables into a suspect stamp on his feet or show in his ears interviews can last for eight hours or more suspects are deprived of sleep and forced into physically awkward positions few people can withstand such treatment not being able to sleep was the hardest for me says Kazuo Ishiguro who held on for 30 days before signing a confession he could not read he was illiterate at the time a confession to a murder he says he didn't commit he spent 32 years in prison and is still fighting to be exonerated