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Comment by y-c-o-m-b | Hacker News Reader

> in a country which has a 99.4% conviction rate.

Brutal. Either they're really good at building the necessary evidence or they're just ruthless when it comes to criminal justice. Based on the other comments in this thread, it seems the latter. It's interesting to me how a society that prides itself on honor can act so dishonorably when it comes to human rights. This applies to their work ethics as well. They have the most fascinating culture in my opinion, but the warts are really ugly

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What disappoints me is that people make these claims without taking a few seconds to Google…

Academic work I’ve seen suggests it’s basically down to case selection:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/468111

But what also fascinates me is that people can so easily come up with strong opinions about a culture based on limited information I.e saying “a society that prides itself on honor can act so dishonorably”…

It’s weird, people talk about Japan like it’s an alien planet. Klingons may have been based upon the Japanese but I assure you Japanese life is not very much like Star Trek.

We watch anime so we know what we're talking about.

Most popular ideas about what Japan is like by people who have never been there are probably wrong, but also Japan is massively from the US in all sorts of interesting ways that are worth talking about.

On this note, the Ace Attorney series is one long parody of the Japanese criminal law system, which is why it's such a running theme that every defendant is automatically guilty until you incontrovertibly prove them otherwise and why the defense attorneys get treated like dirt throughout.

The series may have taken things a little far: https://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/guilty-until-proven-guil...

> This is a comic that Norrin wrote. It is about the Ace Attorney system of law, in which your client is not only guilty until proven innocent, but also guilty until someone else is proven guilty. If you want to get away with murder in this universe, all you need to do is not wander into the courtroom after the system has inevitably arrested the wrong person.

Yeah that just sounds like something you made up. I suppose Perry Mason is a parody of the American legal system too?

Muraki's case is most notorious one.

https://www.nippon.com/en/people/e00156/railroaded-one-woman...

"a society that prides itself on honor"

Are there any society that does not? This seems a meaningless, often parotted phrase about Japanese culture by people who do not understand it.

That exact same sentence could be applied to the treatment of black and brown people in the United States. Do you remember stop-and-frisk in New York City? What percentage was black and brown people? It was an appalling programme and gross miscarriage of justice. And that happened (figuratively) in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

>Either they're really good at building the necessary evidence or they're just ruthless when it comes to criminal justice. Based on the other comments in this thread, it seems the latter.

That isn't actually quite the case. Part of that amazing conviction rate comes from simply not prosecuting cases that they have a chance of losing. So they have an abysmal prosecution rate for crimes like rape.

Rape has abysmal prosecution and conviction rates in the US. A few years ago, I was told 3% of cases end in conviction. Thus it was no surprise that the local prosecutor declined to take my case, despite my providing the glass that contained the drug residue.

> It's interesting to me how a society that prides itself on honor can act so dishonorably when it comes to human rights.

Honor has different definitions for different cultures.

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