The 99% figure is a common misconception. Prosecutors in Japan are underfunded, so they only try to convict rock solid cases, among other factors.

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...

However, the above link does point out a convention ripe for abuse:

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.

The Nissan CEO wasn't allowed to see or contact his family/friends for 3 months while he was in jail. Which he spent entirely in solitary.

People without good lawyers and a strong grasp of the law would be far more liable to just give in.

The point the articles continues to make is actually the opposite of what you're implying, the very next sentence says:

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

> While it is impossible for an innocent suspect to reveal relevant information about a crime even under severe torture

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.)

isn't prosecuting a prank orthogonal to your argument of only prosecuting rock solid cases?

I think "rock solid" in this case means highly likely to result in a conviction, not necessarily "of great importance."

So far, I haven't heard that any of the 3 people in custody (補導) for these pranks have been prosecuted (起訴).

No, police looking for a crime when there is none is not something to celebrate.

Your second point is spot on, though.

I think they were saying that it's a cause to celebrate that police in Japan are bored, not the things they do to fill that boredom.

They are bored because they routinely ignore cases of domestic abuse, sexual assault and harassment, murder, they have corrupt agreements with the yakuza, and on and on it goes.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-nov-09-fg-autop...

https://www.tokyoreview.net/2017/08/myth-japans-bored-police...

Yes, that was the point I was trying to make. I could have expressed it clearer.

Well, many people would take the first case (no crime, and the police trying to find the smallest bs as crime to pass their time), over a country with lots of crime.

(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).

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and this is a clear example of injustice. It's a slippery slope to effectively say, "we sometimes punish the wrong people, but in return we get a very safe society", because how can you feel safe in a society that may, at any time, randomly select you for punishment? It might not be "crime" per se, but when you're locked up, does it really matter if it's all by the book? Doesn't that mean the book is bad?

Another thing is the lack of understanding, or almost disdain of technicality when it comes to IT among politicians and high ranked officials. The tendency is probably common among politicians everywhere, but Japan is particularly bad as the majority of these committees members have only legal backgrounds and don't even know what HTML is (and their contempt of studying them).

Give me exemple of foreign politician that know HTML please (besides Taiwan ones). We got got a lot of funding for IT related stuff here from the government.

The Singapore PM is a Haskell programmer.

I don't know about Haskell, but he did program a C++ Sudoku solver

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9419035

Off the top of my head, Ted Lieu has a CS degree, so it’s likely. There are 4 congressmen total who have CS degrees [1]. Not to say a music major can’t know this stuff, too.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Lieu

[1] https://hurd.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/we-asked-eve...

What about the Yakuza?

Yakuza are tolerated by police unless they cross certain lines. They perform an unpleasant but important function of keeping foreign gangs out.

I am curious: they never cooperated with foreign organized crime? I find it hard to believe.

Well they are reputed to be involved in drug trafficking with other groups outside Japan, but they maintain control over foreign gang activity inside Japan.

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.

so, in effect, Yakuza is not that different from other businesses.

Calling them a business describes it spot on.

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...

I've always found the relationship between Japan and the Yakuza to be fascinating. You have a country with an ostensibly lawful-good alignment, collectivists with a strong sense of social order and responsibility, where what would be minor drug crimes anywhere else carry hard prison time, and guns and knives are strictly regulated. Actors and politicians with Yakuza ties are scandalized by the media, yet the Yamaguchi-Gumi give out candy to kids for Halloween as if they were Boy Scouts, if the Boy Scouts had merit badges for child porn, human trafficking, money laundering and drugs.

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.

It’s easy to find their offices in most cities. They’re not hiding. The one in my neighborhood looks like it could be a software company or a bank office. The plaque outside identifies a gang that is centuries old. Many of the homes in the area announce the owner’s rank outside.

I don't think we can assume that "Japan is so safe that..." from these cases.

We don’t have to assume that Japan is safe. We have statistics for that.

The questionable claim is that the arrests in this article happened because Japan is so safe.

Unless you are a woman.

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.

That. If you speak with Japanese women (in Japanese) they don’t feel safe at all and they have reason for that. There is a lot of perverts here. One day my girlfriend called because someone opened the door of her appartement. Another friend had a guy pretend to be the gas guy to enter their appartement just to retract when he saw the size of his shoes in the corridor. A female friend (foreigner, well endowed)... groped at the Shibuya crossing, etc. Even male friend have bad stories about guy trying to taxi them somewhere.

> It’s normal and unreported.

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.

Sadly, those kinds of misreportings are common in other countries and places too. My own home of New York City has been hit by a number of underreporting scandals. I have no reason to believe they are less common elsewhere than Japan. So I still think national crime statistics provide the best basis for comparison.

Is the punishment for groping on trains still apologising to the victim on a train platform?

I don't know where you've got that idea, but I'm pretty sure gropers go to jail.

From an article mentioned by another poster:

> 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...