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Zo posted:Nah for this part it's similar america. Do not cooperate, call a lawyer, settle out of court. Police here are not out to help you in any way. This article seems to be specifically about being accused of groping though. What if I'm walking by a store when the police yell "Stop, thief!" at me or something? It seems like just booking it might imply guilt, and they're way more likely to actually pursue me if I'm running away from the scene of a theft or assault.
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Mar 27, 2014 18:47
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Samurai Sanders posted:I've only talked about it a bit with Japanese people, but they thought people caught by the police were bad guys by definition and gave them credit for Japan having so little crime. Going any more in-depth caused problems, so I gave up. This varies greatly depending on who you talk to. My wife is a pretty "Average Japanese" and she doesn't trust the cops for one single second. I thought it was almost hilarious the first time we got lost in Osaka and I suggested asking at the Koban how to get somewhere. She refused to go in with me. I have a friend who was a member of the student radical movement in the 1960s who is now a university professor in Hokkaido, and as you might imagine he too is pretty skeptical of police matters. This goes double for his friends, one of whom is a legal counsel and specifically deals with stuff like this. I think this question of people "accepting" these conditions gets at a very deep difference between the way Japan operates as a state versus a more traditionally "liberal" place such as American or Britain. Interest groups and average citizens work with the power structure very closely, which means in many ways they are co-opted into the structure as stakeholders. This means it's difficult to set up an "us-vs-them" mentality, making it hard for opposition groups that would exist here in America like the ACLU to gain political and social traction. On the one hand this system is incredibly efficient and has resulted in a ridiculously safe country. On the other, police power abuses.
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Mar 27, 2014 18:49
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ocrumsprug posted:Yeah, even right wingers in America would acknowledge that the system sometimes messes up. The justice system in Japan is "foolproof", as evidenced by the near 100% conviction rate. Ergo, no one is executed unjustly. Ipso Facto and checkmate. While I don't disagree that a conversation about Japan's death penalty is important and worth having, they do have some basis for being incredulous about an American especially being critical of their system in terms of wrongful convictions. They have executed 100 people in the last 21 years. In America during the same time period we have executed almost 1,200 people. This despite the mere double population we have over Japan. Just by sheer numbers alone it seems unlikely that there could be an equal number of innocent victims in Japan versus America.
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Mar 27, 2014 19:06
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LeftistMuslimObama posted:This article seems to be specifically about being accused of groping though. What if I'm walking by a store when the police yell "Stop, thief!" at me or something? It seems like just booking it might imply guilt, and they're way more likely to actually pursue me if I'm running away from the scene of a theft or assault. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0241146/ In this documentary (it used to be on youtube but somehow I can't find it now, the single letter title doesn't help) there's a scene where they show typical Japanese police procedure. They follow an Aum guy around - not a big shot or anything, just a guy who happened to be a member but wasnt really involved except donating money - and the police just kind of encircle him on the street, and walk in front of him and close to him until finally he accidentally touches one of them with his foot. The policeman immediately drops to the ground like a pro football player and starts pretending that the guy tackled him on purpose, and they take him away on charges of assaulting an officer. Of course they won't do this to check your bike number, but if they set their mind on arresting you, they have all sorts of ways of inventing temporary charges just to get you into a cell. Most policemen in Japan are pretty decent people and I've never been harassed by them, but as an organization they don't really seem to understand due process and that sort of thing.
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Mar 27, 2014 19:22
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Shinobo posted:Just by sheer numbers alone it seems unlikely that there could be an equal number of innocent victims in Japan versus America. One is an unacceptable number. It's the old maxim of preferring to let a thousand guilty people go free over imprisoning a single innocent man. Obviously Japan has overwhelmingly chosen the inverse.
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Mar 27, 2014 23:36
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Bloodnose posted:One is an unacceptable number. It's the old maxim of preferring to let a thousand guilty people go free over imprisoning a single innocent man. I agree with you that one is an unacceptable number. But when you have a person telling you "Hey you guys should knock it off with the executions, what if some are innocent?" and the fact of the matter is that THEIR country has likely executed way more than yours it is clear that they are not negotiating from a point of strength.
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Mar 28, 2014 01:18
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Shinobo posted:I agree with you that one is an unacceptable number. But when you have a person telling you "Hey you guys should knock it off with the executions, what if some are innocent?" and the fact of the matter is that THEIR country has likely executed way more than yours it is clear that they are not negotiating from a point of strength. I am Canadian, and we ditched it decades ago so I feel free to leture about it. We are pretty frequently releasing people that were wrongfully convicted of murder, so the only place you see it talked about anymore is comment (don't read them) sections. The weirdest part of the Japanese discussion is their answer to the "do you execute someone that is wrongly convicted?" They outright rejected the premise of wrongful conviction. Most capital punishment advocates in the states seem to at least recognize the issue, but hope it doesn't happen.
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Mar 28, 2014 01:35
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ocrumsprug posted:The weirdest part of the Japanese discussion is their answer to the "do you execute someone that is wrongly convicted?" They outright rejected the premise of wrongful conviction. Most capital punishment advocates in the states seem to at least recognize the issue, but hope it doesn't happen. What sorts of answers do people give? I've never pushed the issue too much, but I've only ever heard a rather hard headed police officer dismiss the idea of wrongful convictions being a problem. This might admittedly be due to the company I keep more than anything else but the last page or so I've found it very surprising that people evidently have these sorts of "blind justice" interactions on a regular basis. I've only had them with extreme rarity.
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Mar 28, 2014 01:44
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Oh man, I'm writing a paper about detective fiction in the 20's and before and it tackles a lot of issues like how any sort of crime fiction tended to read like propaganda of the state. Some translators used detective fiction to try and introduce concepts like 'wrongful convictions' to the public(Kuroiwa Ruiko in particular) but I see it didn't really catch on.
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Mar 28, 2014 02:17
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Shinobo posted:What sorts of answers do people give? I've never pushed the issue too much, but I've only ever heard a rather hard headed police officer dismiss the idea of wrongful convictions being a problem. IIRC a confession here is tantamount to guilt, cause after all it's right from their mouth! and if you need to torture them to get it you were just cracking their stubborn mind. Even if you get people to recognize that false confessions can and do happen, and that confessions under torture are unreliable, they're still kind of like "well, maybe Western people's minds are like that, buuuut Japanese would never..." I am reminded of that incident at the UN, I think it was? Where that diplomat literally got laughed at by a whole room of experts when he said Japan had an excellent justice system.
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Mar 28, 2014 03:00
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Shinobo posted:On the one hand this system is incredibly efficient and has resulted in a ridiculously safe country. On the other, police power abuses. We don't actually know that Japan is safer. Those numbers all come via the police who have a vested interest in making it seem like Japan is "safe." It's a pretty commonly-heard piece of propaganda that Japan is safer than all those dumb countries run by foreigners. Japan also has a huge problem with tacit acceptance of organized crime activities like human trafficking, predatory lending, and child pornography. Japan is like an entire country built on the Just World Fallacy. If a crime happens to an out-group member or someone perceived to have made a mistake then it's not considered to have counted and probably will not show up in an official tally. This goes double for anything involving sexual assault. "What do you mean 11 year old photo book girls are often abused?!? Well, did you see all the evidence of that girl wearing bikinis..." It seems like the one saving grace for foreigners is that it seems to me that if you haven't actually murdered someone then you'll probably be able to get away with paying about $10,000 and being deported. I don't have numbers on that, though. Maybe someone here knows more about it than I do. ErIog fucked around with this message at 03:18 on Mar 28, 2014 |
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Mar 28, 2014 03:11
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Reverend Cheddar posted:I am reminded of that incident at the UN, I think it was? Where that diplomat literally got laughed at by a whole room of experts when he said Japan had an excellent justice system. IIRC he was talking about human rights, not the justice system. Could be wrong though, although in either case, he deserved to be laughed at.  "Shut up!"
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Mar 28, 2014 03:26
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I was always kinda baffled by this forcing confession thing because most of the Japanese cops I'd seen were about intimidating as a butter knife. Then I had to go to the emergency room on a Sunday night, and I saw some dude with a bleeding head under police escort. The cop escorting him was a freaking thug. Dude looked like he could beat up a gorilla and was ready to do so immediately. So I guess they keep the nasty ones at the station and just put the little ones out on the street.
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Mar 28, 2014 04:17
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ErIog posted:We don't actually know that Japan is safer. Those numbers all come via the police who have a vested interest in making it seem like Japan is "safe." It's a pretty commonly-heard piece of propaganda that Japan is safer than all those dumb countries run by foreigners. I know where I'd pick to stumble home drunk at 3am, and it ain't one of those dumb countries run by foreigners.
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Mar 28, 2014 04:19
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The way I've interpreted it is basically like, they let the yakuza exist as a way out for people if you're just that determined to be a criminal--and once you're in that world you're on your own, outside of any possible support you'd ever get from the police/society. You picked your own poison, essentially. So on the flip side, in normal society, you should not have any excuse to Do Something Wrong, which is why it's so much harsher if you break that silent agreement. Just the way I see things though.
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Mar 28, 2014 04:50
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ErIog posted:We don't actually know that Japan is safer. Those numbers all come via the police who have a vested interest in making it seem like Japan is "safe." It's a pretty commonly-heard piece of propaganda that Japan is safer than all those dumb countries run by foreigners. Japan also has a huge problem with tacit acceptance of organized crime activities like human trafficking, predatory lending, and child pornography. Rape certainly is under-reported but corpses are corpses and Japan has a low-rear end murder rate. Japan is safe as poo poo.
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Mar 28, 2014 05:15
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Shinobo posted:What sorts of answers do people give? That's what I get online anyway. In person it's more like, "Japan is so safe, so our policy on execution must work" or "it's illegal for families to get revenge for their dead loved ones themselves, so the state has to do it". But like I said, I stopped opening the subject a long time ago. Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Mar 28, 2014 |
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Mar 28, 2014 05:24
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All this Japanese legal talk and no mention that their forensics/CSI (or lack thereof) operate by procedures and technology that were obsolete by the 1960s? Seriously, the entire Japanese criminal justice is nothing but expecting people to confess and only solving cases they know they can win.
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Mar 28, 2014 05:41
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Reverend Cheddar posted:I am reminded of that incident at the UN, I think it was? Where that diplomat literally got laughed at by a whole room of experts when he said Japan had an excellent justice system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkoQjIBA_3U To be fair, it is extremely unclear if he's being laughed at for his comments or for his ability at English. Either way it was super unprofessional and he deserved every ounce of ire her got, but it wasn't like the entire room just erupted into laughter at the sheer insanity at his comments about the Japanese justice system like they might be forgiven for doing if the North Korean delegate made similar comments.
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Mar 28, 2014 06:06
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pentyne posted:All this Japanese legal talk and no mention that their forensics/CSI (or lack thereof) operate by procedures and technology that were obsolete by the 1960s? Where did you hear about this? This sounds like something I should know more about.
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Mar 28, 2014 06:09
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Samurai Sanders posted:"Shut the hell up and keep your opinions to yourself, gaijin". I'm not saying that there isn't a lot of this attitude, but 2ch is in no way representative of Japan as a whole and there are definitely people aware of the issues, so don't paint with too broad of a brush. Just today in the Asahi shinbun 天声人語 they were talking about these issues, saying 「検察は面子で再審の扉を閉めに走ってはいけない」etc.
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Mar 28, 2014 07:48
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Shinobo posted:Either way it was super unprofessional and he deserved every ounce of ire her got, but it wasn't like the entire room just erupted into laughter at the sheer insanity at his comments about the Japanese justice system like they might be forgiven for doing if the North Korean delegate made similar comments. I'm pretty sure that's actually exactly what happened.
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Mar 28, 2014 07:50
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LimburgLimbo posted:I'm not saying that there isn't a lot of this attitude, but 2ch is in no way representative of Japan as a whole and there are definitely people aware of the issues, so don't paint with too broad of a brush. Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Mar 28, 2014 |
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Mar 28, 2014 08:45
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This is more of a general cultural question but from what I understand 2chan is basically like 4chan from hell, except even worse in terms of its userbase. Is this accurate? Fat bigoted anti-social nerds, except now they're in a country where the baseline is significantly more misogynistic, racist and xenophobic than the US?
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Mar 28, 2014 08:51
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icantfindaname posted:This is more of a general cultural question but from what I understand 2chan is basically like 4chan from hell, except even worse in terms of its userbase. Is this accurate? Fat bigoted anti-social nerds, except now they're in a country where the baseline is significantly more misogynistic, racist and xenophobic than the US? Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 08:57 on Mar 28, 2014 |
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Mar 28, 2014 08:52
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Samurai Sanders posted:Yes, godawful views run basically unopposed in the bigger forums there, and it poisons a huge chunk of the Japanese internet. I am still trying to find a site like that which that is not the case for, but over there it seems that any degree of anonymity (i.e. not facebook/mixi) = right-wingers take over. What actually makes this scary is the fact that voting is anonymous.
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Mar 28, 2014 09:05
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LimburgLimbo posted:I'm not saying that there isn't a lot of this attitude, but 2ch is in no way representative of Japan as a whole and there are definitely people aware of the issues, so don't paint with too broad of a brush. Is 検察 police or detectives specifically? Also were they saying that the police were unable to walk because of the crimes against their faces? My Japanese is really bad now, really embarrassing. LimburgLimbo posted:Rape certainly is under-reported but corpses are corpses and Japan has a low-rear end murder rate. Japan is safe as poo poo. Freakonomics made it sound like a super serious issue that if the police don't have a suspect in a murder case, they just mark it down as like a 'dumped body' or something and don't bother investigating it. Not to contest that Japan doesn't feel safe because it sure does. But it also has its share of horrible, psychopathic, unrepentant serial killers that I wish the police would carefully investigate.
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Mar 28, 2014 09:09
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Bloodnose posted:Is 検察 police or detectives specifically? Also were they saying that the police were unable to walk because of the crimes against their faces? My Japanese is really bad now, really embarrassing. Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Mar 28, 2014 |
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Mar 28, 2014 09:12
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Mar 28, 2014 09:12
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Bloodnose posted:Is 検察 police or detectives specifically? Also were they saying that the police were unable to walk because of the crimes against their faces? My Japanese is really bad now, really embarrassing. Yeah sorry I was going to edit in a translation but got distracted and forgot. Samurai Sanders translation is right, though considering 面子 (メンツ; mentsu, "face" or "honor") is a Chinese word I'm not sure how you didn't get that unless you were being facetious.
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Mar 28, 2014 09:24
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LimburgLimbo posted:I'm pretty sure that's actually exactly what happened. http://blog.goo.ne.jp/syouji0124/e/b84956a4fd119854ed24d10427129e93 The way a commentator who was there and reported on it is writing it's difficult to tell if it was the entire chamber or just the Japanese delegation. That's also the way it was reported in various English language news outlets. quote:もちろん、我々は大使の激怒と反論の馬鹿馬鹿しさに笑ったところ、「シャラップ！」と２度も叫んだのだ。 That 我々 is problematic. http://koike-sinichiro.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2013/05/post-99bb.html This is another commentator who talks about the simultaneous translation being somewhat at fault for this because the translators began with "Japan is the foremost leader in the world in this area...", which in the context of the tense meeting where a representative from Mauritius had just claimed that Japan's policing practices were medieval was actually pretty funny. So basically we have a complex situation involving misunderstanding that, like the first commentator says, reveals a lot about the Japanese government's stance on these issues. Less about the laughter, more about the dumbass reaction from a flustered bureaucrat in a very stressful moment. What I'm objecting to with this is the very wide brush that we seem to be painting the Japanese justice system with. I like to think of it as a complex system that has a lot of moving parts, some of which are bad while others are good. It's very strange dual nature where it has all these systematic abuses but little to no pushback from citizenry and such a low crime rate are what make it fascinating. I think a lot of us are on that same page but I'd like to try to push the conversation in that direction.
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Mar 28, 2014 10:42
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Samurai Sanders posted:I'd say "investigators (I assume both police and the prosecutor's office) shouldn't be hurrying to close the door to a retrial just to save face". mystes fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Mar 28, 2014 |
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Mar 28, 2014 13:39
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Just saw this on the wikipedia frontpage, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iwao_Hakamada shockingly applicable to the discussion you are having right now, or is this just Wikipedia being a little sensationalist ?
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Mar 28, 2014 18:57
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skipThings posted:Just saw this on the wikipedia frontpage,
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Mar 28, 2014 19:12
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Huh, shows me to read more of this thread. I just get discouraged whenever people start talking in/quoting japanese characters 
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Mar 28, 2014 19:16
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Just a reminder of the competency of the Japanese police force, the manga Kuroko no Basket had someone so incredibly pissed off they would call in bomb threats to any event featuring the manga or author, and the police's response was to ask the author to stop showing up to places and to pull the manga from events. You know, rather then doggedly investigate a serial criminal.
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Mar 28, 2014 20:10
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pentyne posted:Just a reminder of the competency of the Japanese police force, the manga Kuroko no Basket had someone so incredibly pissed off they would call in bomb threats to any event featuring the manga or author, and the police's response was to ask the author to stop showing up to places and to pull the manga from events. Don't ever speak ill of the system! The system is rock solid. The system is sound. 
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Mar 28, 2014 20:40
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pentyne posted:Just a reminder of the competency of the Japanese police force, the manga Kuroko no Basket had someone so incredibly pissed off they would call in bomb threats to any event featuring the manga or author, and the police's response was to ask the author to stop showing up to places and to pull the manga from events. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. It's not like it's an either/or proposition. The police DID investigate the criminal threats and they've made an arrest. http://web.archive.org/web/20131215143457/http://mainichi.jp/select/news/20131216k0000m040074000c.html Evidently the pulling of the merchandise from certain stores was related to the fact that one of the letters threatened the several packages of food related goods were poisoned. It's not like the police are pulling something like is being talked about in this thread either. The dude was caught with 20 other letters threatening more people in his backpack. I share your frustration with the cancellations and I don't think such a thing would happen in a Western country. It's just that from the Japanese perspective it's safer to also cancel all events related to the threat in order to give remove the threat. Protect the community over the individual. You can criticize if you want to but you have to understand that your criticism is partially based on a cultural argument. Their actions may not make sense in your country's context but are completely understandable in Japan's context. Doesn't mean it sucks any less but it's not some irrational wacky thing a bunch of lazy keystone cops are doing. The Japanese police are very rational and methodical. This is what makes their systematic abuses so scary because they are not the result of petty corruption but actual clearly thought out policy with a solid objective in mind.
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Mar 28, 2014 21:19
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quote:The Court finds that Japan's whaling programme in the Antarctic (JARPA II) is not in accordance with three provisions of the Schedule to the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling BBC CNN Asahi Interesting to see what the Japanese governments response to this will be in the long term, will they try to find another loophole, or will they give up? quote:http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/31/national/world-court-orders-japan-to-halt-whaling/#.UznNyxCeuNI They may have boxed themselves into a corner with the bolded bit.
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Mar 31, 2014 21:40
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The whole "respects the rule of law" thing kind of gives me the impression that the Japanese government (much like the population as a whole) doesn't really care about whaling, and this ICJ ruling gives them an excuse to scale back the program without enraging the nationalists too much. That part of the statement might also be a subtle jab at China and/or Korea for refusing to go to the ICJ to resolve their territorial disputes with Japan.
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