How Japanese Police Turned Cyber Prank into Arresting Cases
b.shujisado.com
b.shujisado.com
The second is that the justice system is structured so that the state is always right and the criminal system famously has a conviction rate that exceeds 99%. Couple this with the vaguely defined laws (as cited in the article) and the desire by police to find some criminals, somewhere, and the results can be ugly. Dangerous to the bystanders at best, enabling local dictatorial powers at worst. My 2c.
This Wikipedia entry seems to flagrantly defy wiki rules but seems more informative for it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_J...
Because suspects are put through continuous interrogation which could last up to 23 days as well as isolation from the outside world, including access to lawyers, both the Japanese judiciary and the public are well aware that confession of guilt can easily be forced.
People without good lawyers and a strong grasp of the law would be far more liable to just give in.
Consequently, the court (and the public) take the view that mere confession of guilt alone is never any sufficient ground for conviction.
Instead, for confession to be a valid evidence for conviction, the Japanese court requires confession to include revelation of verifiable factual matter which only the perpetrator of the crime could have known such as the location of an undiscovered body or the time and place the murder weapon was purchased, a fact about the crime scene, etc. Furthermore, to safeguard against the possibility that the interrogator implanting such knowledge into confession, the prosecutor must prove that such revelation of secret was unknown to the police until the point of confession.
I find this fascinating. Specifically, this part:
While it is impossible for an innocent suspect to reveal relevant information about a crime even under severe torture, a guilty suspect is likely to crack under prolonged interrogation in isolation and make a damning confession. Activists claim that the Japanese justice system (and Japanese public to some extent) consider that prolonged interrogation of suspect in isolation without access to lawyers is justified to solve the criminal cases without risking the miscarriage of justice.
This is so completely unlike any western approach to justice that is familiar to me that I cannot pass any judgment on it without knowing its efficacy relative to percentage of false confessions.
The argument of this technique's validity is somewhat undermined in the next paragraph where the authors notes that false confessions still happen, so I'll definitely give you that!
As an aside, as someone upthread alluded to, this is a fascinating example of an article that breaks almost all of the Wikipedia editing rules but is surprisingly informative.. probably more informative than it would have been if it omitted the synthesis and OR
This is, of course, untrue; desperate, babbling can be accurate by coincidence; if you do enough torturing of innocent people, you'll get a measurably-different-from-zero rate of accurate, previously unknown information.
> This is so completely unlike any western approach to justice that is familiar to me
The desire for sufficient proof of guilt before passing criminal sentence is very similar to the theory of proof underlying the utterly pervasive use of torture in some Western systems in the early modern period (which for serious offenses tended to require clear proof like the two-witnesses-to-the-same-overt-act rule still enshrined in the US Constitution for treason, but allowed weaker indications to be validated by a confession extracted under torture, so long as “freely” confirmed thereafter.)
Your second point is spot on, though.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-nov-09-fg-autop...
https://www.tokyoreview.net/2017/08/myth-japans-bored-police...
(Sure, there's also the perfect case, no crime, and the police sitting idly, but in the real world we rarely have the "perfect" case, and "no crime/police fishing for people stealing a beer case left as a thief trap" is close enough to perfect).
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Lieu
[1] https://hurd.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/we-asked-eve...
Edit: just to clarify, Yakuza is not a single group. There are big differences between the various units. Many of them don’t touch drug trade, some are involved in human trafficking, and others seem to be mainly symbolic.
Afaik they are pretty much to most "corporate" like crime syndicate out there. Complete with charity drives for good PR [0]
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yakuza/yakuza-among-first...
And they're apparently all over the video game industry in Japan, the way the Mafia was all over construction and sanitation in New York during the 1970s. I just kind of assume they made Konami an offer they couldn't refuse when that company recently decided to leave non-mobile games and pivot into pachinko and slot machines.
I was sadly not surprised when I heard from a friend that she had been groped as a preteen in a department store. Worse yet, none of the rest of us were surprised to hear it. It’s normal and unreported.
Likewise, there are some claims I’ve read that the suicide rate is high because of murders treated as suicide by police (who have their own quotas) and age inflation due to relatives who don’t report the death of relatives in order to collect pension funds.
TLDR: Statistics are based on reported crime. It’s safe but not as safe as statistics show.
There is no question that victims of sexual crimes needs to be heard out more. However, your statement is an exaggeration to say the least. Groping is a frequent and well-documented topic on Japanese news. But as is often the case with sensational topics like crime, it is not as commonplace as you make it sound like.
I also doubt that the people around you were "unsurprised" to hear such things happening to your friend. It's just easy to imagine Japanese people displaying seeming indifference because of the sensitivity of the topic. At times, Japanese people can be reluctant to clearly express their opinions.
> As for sexual assault, groping and molestation on crowded trains and elsewhere is so widespread (and so unlikely to be reported to the police) that NGOs such as the Osaka-based Chikan Deterrence Activity Centre suggest that almost every young woman experiences it at some point.
https://www.tokyoreview.net/2017/08/myth-japans-bored-police...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/tel...
Better let good-intended actors do that before ill-intended actors do the same.
I wrote that as a way to counter the assumed image of him being incompetent because he himself doesn’t use computers. Perhaps it was unclear.
She's terrible at using any technology in general as a result. It's mildly fascinating.
She often gets me to help her out with very, very, very basic things on the computer. She's relatively smart outside of that, speaks fluent English and graduated uni both in Japan and overseas. But it's as if the basic foundation for working out new abstractions on a computer just aren't there. Which is how the discussion came up. I was curious why such a level of computer illiteracy would be present in someone who grew up in the 90s/00s.
People are shocked at hearing about that minister who says he never touched a computer. I was equally shocked when my wife casually told me she never touched a computer until entering University. I wouldn't have thought that to be possible given how much technology I grew up around in the West. I assumed it would have been the same in Japan, but it can't have been.
I guess in a way it doesn't surprise me. On the outside Japan looks like this super technologically advanced country and in reality they still send faxes. It's half stuck decades in the past and halfway planted in the future.
I remember growing up in school we always had computers in the classroom and computer literacy programs. It must have meant that at all the schools she attended in Japan growing up they didn't have that. Else there's no way that'd be possible.
Just mildly fascinating. Totally not what I expected. So when the minister in charge of the stuff says he hasn't touched a computer, I can believe it.
This makes most software I use punishable by Japanese law.
They should arrest every second mobile app developer. They collect data from the phone without permission. And then please arrest Google Analytics developers as well.
The law doesn't make code which causes harm illegal, it makes code which does not operate in accordance with the user's intention illegal.
Think about that for a second. Think about every program ever written which did not operate in accordance with the user's intention. Literally every bug is punishable by three years in prison.
This is a classic example of legislators saying "We don't understand the problem, so lets just make everything illegal and rely on the police and prosecutors using their discretion to only put the real criminals in prison," followed by the police and prosecutors not using their discretion and putting a non-criminal in prison.
javascript:for(;;){alert("am%20I%20bloc%20yet?");}
Just copy that into the URL field of your browser (In a new tab, because it will block whatever site you do this from (duh))
The most famous case of the police being a bunch of bumbling idiots (or at least the one that haunts my mind the most) is that of Junko Furuta (which happened right after I first went to Japan in 1989). She was kidnapped, raped by over 100 men, held captive in the house of her abductor, and tortured to death over a period of 44 days. Around the two-week mark of her ordeal, someone told the police they thought a girl was being held against her will in the house. When the police showed up, the perpetrator told them, there's nobody in our house, and the police said that was good enough for them and left. Fuckers! Those two officers were fired, but that isn't an isolated case. Police not doing anything and people being injured or losing their lives seems to happen far more than it should in Japan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta
The 30th anniversary of Junk Furuta's death is next week, on April 2nd. ALL of her perpetrators are roaming free in Japan.
I think you mean less than. The wikipedia article that you listed said that "approximately 100 people knew about Junko Furuta's captivity" and that only some of them participated in the rape.
Still, that's quite horrifying.
Maybe the police only wanted to make an example of those three people and discourage the rest of posting the URL.
Human societies can be seen as humonculus to the humans that make them up in many ways.
One such way is that societies tend to reflect the broad strokes of Freudian tendencies that the citizens tend towards. The culture reflects the society. Not hard to understand.
In the case of Japan, it is clear after consideration that the society is incredibly super-ego driven. (That correlates to "Parent" driven for you Transactional Analysis folks).
So how that translates to the society is that parental, guiding, cohesive, social, aesthetic, moral rules are favored over Id or Egotistical rules.
In contrast, The United States is a primarily ego-tistical country(Adult-dominant, in Transactional Analysis terms). That's just as fine as a Superego-leaning society, but it is DIFFERENT.
An ego-tistical society will focus on the power of the individual, and will honor rationality and purpose foremost. Group cohesion and like-mindedness will fall to the wayside unless picked up by the superego driven parts of the culture.
A problem arises when any one of the three parts (id, ego, superego) of a culture become too imbalanced in a specific direction. In this case, the parental superego is overriding the will of the individual. The society is asking too hard what they "SHOULD" be like rather than "WHY" they should be like it. "Should" is the heuristic function for superego decisions. "Why" for ego decisions. *
Notice that when a child starts figuring out that they're an individual with choice they start asking "why?" quite often. Sometimes ad nauseum. Why why why why why. The egotistical little buggers. Uncle Sam would be proud.
But that's not a problem for Japan. They have the problem of the child that learned just because they can do something, doesn't mean they should. It's a valuable lesson clearly, but not if you forget why you're doing all of this in the first place.
We create society to empower the individual, and we create the individual to empower society. Lean too hard in either direction and the cycle breaks down, eventually disempowering both the individual and society.
I'm not claiming that either the USA or Japan are leaning "too hard" in either direction, but they are leaning. Lots of apparent insanity has been cropping up in Japanese news lately. The freudian psychoanalyst might try to deduce the imbalanced parts of the patient's psyche that have given rise to such "insanities".
*If you're interested in finding an adjective for a primarily id-driven society like Brazil, you may consider how you would "LIKE" to be.
Its bloody hard. Trying to put a square inside a triangle like those children puzzles.
Do you have any problems with viewing the world through the `Parent, Adult, Child` simplified lens?
Not to say that they are 100% true, but there’s a lot of (profound) truth there.
And It’s more harmful than ads as users know explicitly whether there are ads on web sites and have a choice to not visit them anymore. But silently mining without warning users of that is worse.
I wouldn't say mining was explicitly without warning, computer fans usually spun up.