Seems like it's not pleasant, and the author says in theory it could be as low of a bar as getting into a heated argument; but the author never discloses his actual charge, which I think is critical context.
If he stabbed someone and got this treatment, it would be very different than if he had a loud but normal argument you might see in any big box store in the US.
That he doesn't go on to protest why he got locked up makes me think it was something more serious.
Some time ago (can't easily find it anymore) there was a expose on UK prisons, which was interesting without even knowing what crime the prisoner was convicted of, but turns out it was abuse of a relative.
But essentially, somebody else sent her a package with something illegal in it that she didn't ask for. The police took her passport for a few months and searched her house. After a few months, she got her passport returned to her, she left Japan temporarily, but when she came back, they arrested her "to ensure [she] wouldn't flee while they finished the investigation".
She also mentioned it was "the most normal type of thing you can think of"; it might have been something like pseudoephedrine/Sudafed. That's a common over-the-counter drug in other countries but it's very illegal here in Japan (unless it's under 10%, or you buy it from Japan)!
Edit: Importing pseudoephedrine above 10% concentrations is illegal, but you can legally buy some higher concentrations over-the-counter while in Japan.
> somebody else sent her a package with something illegal in it that she didn't ask for.
> She also mentioned it was "the most normal type of thing you can think of";
This doesn't really answer the question, though. It's frustrating to try to interpret these stories with a lot of writing and video describing everything except the crucial detail about what the charges were for.
I don't think she's trying to withhold information to avoid contaminating the case because she's spilling other details all over the place that could be used to influence the case. Yet the key piece of information that is supposedly "the most normal" isn't revealed
> It's frustrating to try to interpret these stories with a lot of writing and video describing everything except the crucial detail about what the charges were for.
Is it really a crucial detail though? As someone having lived in Japan for a long time, I see no reason why we can not discuss the fact that civil rights and detention treatment in Japan are lacking without resorting to "Do they deserve it in light of what they were suspected for?". I personally see no reason why suspects can not deserve decent sleep, meal, bedding, etc. even if they may be Shoko Asahara himself.
For the record, I have not watched any video or read anything else about this individual. Nor do I intend to.
It is? Because the whole ‘is it awful’ thing hinges pretty strongly on how many options you were given to avoid it before going there.
If I had the police over, was an ass, had them come back, was an ass again. Then at some point they’re going to just think I’m the person that’d run away while they conduct their investigation.
I’m sure bad policemen exist in Japan, but all the ones I’ve met have been very friendly and reasonable.
> Literally the central trigger point of the story
The fact that you and other insist on this really gets at the crux of this whole problem. There are two notable positions on criminality and punishment: yours, which is broadly that the justice system exists, at least in part, to deliver righteous punishment on the deserving, and the position of those appalled by the treatment here, which is that the purpose of the justice system is primarily to protect people, and then to deliver predictable, proportionate punishment of those found guilty to disincentivize criminal behavior. If you think that torture of someone detained but not found guilty might be justifiable if they're accused of a sufficiently heinous crime then you have an illiberal position that can and will be used to enable abuse of the criminal justice system to inflict extralegal punishment on anyone for any reason.
I think this is even getting ahead of itself, since the story is writing that you can be treated this way without yet being charged. Not knowing if the author "deserves" it puts you in the shoes of the detainee in either case, since the detention comes before assigning guilt.
For most people, the critique of Japan is because their own countries used to operate jails in this way.
So rationalizations of why it’s appropriate because the person was suspected of XYZ isn’t going to land with them and is largely irrelevant.
But I don’t mind playing devils advocate.
Should the justice system force confessions out of murderers? No, because they are only potential murderers and we have historically been able to get innocent parties to confess. People with vulnerability such as mental health problems are even more likely to give false confessions. The goal of requesting testimony should be honesty not compliance.
This logic applies as well the drug dealer, drug users, and jay walkers. It’s a moral principle disconnected from any specific geography so even if we are not Japanese and have no intention to interact with Japan, we can say they have not lived up to that principle.
I think there is a happy path though and she stuffed it up by not responding for a request for information while she went overseas as they were investigating the matter. When she returned they put her in detention as they deemed her a flight risk. I don't know what information they asked, but it would seem prudent to provide it or say you don't have it or you are overseas and cannot get it at the moment, rather than simply ignore it.
reasonable suspicion is a pretty well established concept. importing controlled substances would get an arrest warrant easily anywhere if law enforcement decides to pursue the case.
the administive pretrial detention is also pretty common, especially nowadays with the ICE craze.
nobody should be treated like this, agreed, but that doesn't mean that the process has no correlation to the level of guilt established and the certainty of it.
(the real problem is that it's way too many bullshit laws.)
I watched a little bit. She went overseas and the police asked for some information and she didn't respond. When she returned they deemed her a flight risk because she hadn't responded to the things they were asking.
Fair I suppose. I guess one can treat this either as a personal story (although frustratingly scattered across multiple places and incomplete) or as a description of a single instance of an arrest in Japan.
It’s not and the reason you can’t have that conversation is that the people you are replying to are emotionally and cognitively in many respects children.
You can love Japanese culture and still call them out when they are clearly uncivilized. We're talking about a culture largely defined by the same people that did Nanjing. It's quite ironic that the same culture that claims to be pacifist has no problem inflicting psychological torture on prisoners. Asia in general has this problem.
Makes me think of TNG (Season 1, Episode 8). Death for walking on the grass.
The punishment should be harsher than the crime. Stealing an apple might not be a "big problem", but it sets a precedent that taking someone else's property is acceptable under some circumstances -- say, the relative value of said object.
But… it doesn’t matter? Even if it was some very illegal drug, that doesn’t change the fact that this detention system (and Japans justice system in general) is quite inhumane.
Likely some sort of stimulant as you point out. It is hardly the first time either as there have been public cases like this numerous times over the last two decades. Some cases even ending with deportation. The one I remember most vividly was someone carrying an unlabeled bottle of ADHD medication that had been sent to them while they were in South Korea by their pharmacist mum in the US; that they then ran afoul of when entering Japan. Similarly, there was a case at the University of Tokyo in the 00s, where an overseas student got sent an (allegedly) unprompted package with cannabis (not a stimulant though) from friends abroad. Allegedly, they were expelled and we got university-wide, anti-drug campaigns with memorable slogans like: "Illicit drugs are illegal".
Due to their history, laws regarding stimulants are harsher in Japan than in many other places in the world [1] and this frequently takes people by surprise. Not that Japanese laws related to illegal drugs are lenient to begin with.
Skimming the video there's also important unstated context that the person was non-white foreigner, had tattoos, and on visa. It's possible that the combination made an ambiguous grey-area situation much worse.
You can still easily buy it here, but the over-the-counter pills are always mixed with other ingredients to make it more difficult to convert them into amphetamines.
E.g. Contac 600 Plus can be found in basically all drug stores and it has 120mg of Pseudoephedrine, 100mg Caffeine, 8mg Chlorpheniramine, and 0.4mg of Belladonna Extract. It sounds like it'll actually be illegal to import into Japan, since 120/(120 + 100 + 8 + 0.4) is over 10%, but I've previously just walked into a drug store and bought a packet.
Not for the ones you buy in Japan, since those are legal.
But, it's not unheard of to get randomly stopped by the police and searched, especially in touristy areas like train stations. Unless you're a Japanese citizen, you have to show ID, and although the searches are optional, most people agree to them.
For customs, usually a few people from each plane are searched.
Anecdotally, if you're a tourist, they're usually looking for medicine that was legal outside of Japan, but illegal within Japan, with small amounts leading to being detained for 23 days (like in this blog post). And if they decide to prosecute you, you'd probably get a suspended sentence (so no prison time), but you'd get deported and a temporary ban from coming back to Japan.
> with small amounts leading to being detained for 23 days (like in this blog post)
This seems ultimately like a very bad sales pitch for the tourism industry in Japan. I had thought I wanted to go to Japan but if I can accidentally, without malice, be thrown in a prison for 20 days that seems like a bad system.
I can't imagine the international relations of the ruling classes of various countries to the UAE would be trending in a positive direction if they arrested and punished people for walking off a plane with airplane bottles of alcohol.
Probably the same thing you do in the states if you have high blood pressure: make do with lesser medications, pain killers, lots of liquids, and push through it.
Warning: This is not medical advice, I am a nerd on the internet not a doctor
For what it is worth different countries have vastly different recommendations for HBP and these drugs. I recommend discussing with the pharmacists in your country.
In the US I have been told it's a strict "never", in Ireland I was told that it wouldn't have a measurable effect on blood pressure. I've also measured my personal blood pressure (pre-hypertension to stage 1) and have not been able to measure a difference in blood pressure.
It doesn't matter what her charge was. Even (alleged/suspected) serial murderers and rapists should be treated humanely and not experience psychological torture.
And also remember this treatment is at the point where they haven't been charged with anything, haven't been tried in court, and haven't been convicted.
The US's justice system is certainly lacking in many, many ways, but wow, this is barbaric. And it's designed for one thing: high conviction rates, regardless of guilt or innocence.
> The US's justice system is certainly lacking in many, many ways, but wow, this is barbaric.
I am lucky enough to have a lot of middle aged middle class white male privilege.
I wonder how many minority people in the US have much worse opinions and life experience of the justice system than you're implying?
I wonder how many people consider typical ICE arrests and detention to be at least as "barbaric" and "psychological torture" as what's described in the article?
I wonder how many young African American males (and their families) look at the private for-profit prison system and conclude the US justice system and policing are designed for "high conviction rates, regardless of guilt or innocence.
Yes it does. You need to go out of your way to attract the attention of the authorities in Japan. I can already guess what she did--received illegal drugs in the mail or brought them into the country. And based on all the references to mental health, etc. in the article, I'm sure it's claimed to be for some condition that Japanese people consider to be bullshit. The reason Japan is clean and orderly is because they apply a very sharp edge to anything rule breaking. You don't get to tell them how to run their society. It's not your place. And if you come to Japan, you play by their rules. If you don't like it, stay home.
Going by the article the authorities in Japan decided that she didn't need an official punishment, so in this case they don't seem to think it matters what her charge was since there wasn't enough evidence to make a case against her. And if someone has done something so terrible they can't be allowed to eat well or get a good nights sleep then the case shouldn't be dropped lightly.
You clearly have a different view of “innocent until proven guilty” than most US citizens, which is fine, maybe you aren’t one, but that line of rhetoric is going to be anathema to most people on this website.
Not that the US criminal system isn’t its own complete mess, but thank God for the concept of bail (going about your life outside of jail until trial or dismissal, within certain parameters) and right to see a judge within 24 hours, to avoid any kafkaesque nightmares like this.
According to her video it appears she was deemed a flight risk because she didn't respond to an email requesting information on the matter being investigated while she was overseas. She didn't have the information on hand or at the time or at all and instead of saying that she didn't respond to the email. When she returned from her trip they deemed her a flight risk.
In the US if you're a flight risk you wouldn't get bail either.
> You clearly have a different view of “innocent until proven guilty”
Most people don't really understand it, and even the ones who do often have personal exceptions driven by emotion. The idea that you need to defend the guilty to protect the innocent is alien to a lot of people. Japan takes the lack of that assumption a step further though, since it's a society based on strict compliance to cultural norms... for better and for worse.
Having said all of that, most of these systems do a credible job of distinguishing the innocent from the guilty, although there's always more to do on that front. If you've ever worked anywhere near the court system you start to notice that people who make it through the system all of the way to a trial are frequently guilty and even more frequently recidivist.
Most people aren't criminals and never commit a serious offense, but speaking for myself I don't think the "sorting" the system does has to be anywhere close to as brutal and impersonal as it often is in many countries including Japan.
Primarily the US’s approach is: “we know our system will never be perfect [and the system we have is actually a hell of its own making], so we will ensure an escape hatch for BOTH innocent/guilty from the shortcomings of the system until a definitive verdict has been reached”
While Japan’s/many other countries approach is:
“We intend our court system to be a perfect representation of our culture, history, and policy objectives. Therefore it should apply in every case, regardless of individual circumstance, so there is no escape hatch, because why deviate from a perfect process.”
The former is how you get the wildly inconsistent US approach to the criminal system, while the latter is how you get a kafkaesque nightmare (or worse, a system weaponized to intentionally target innocent undesirables, like El Salvador’s CECOT)
Both are simplified, none are perfect, of course. But I know which system I’d rather be accused under.
The charges were dropped. Regardless of your opinions on how an orderly government or justice system should run or how criminals should be treated, in this situation what happened was an innocent person was tortured by the state.
That's not how it works. Especially for foreigners, where it's often easier to just make them someone else's problem, assuming the charges are relatively minor.
If the only way that Japan can be clean and orderly is by abusing people for months at a time only to drop charges, you have to ask if maybe that's a problem. The conviction rate and reliance on often questionably obtained confessions is also a problem that's hardly only noticed by outsiders.
The short version of the Japanese justice system is "Guilty until proved innocent", instead of (as in most modern countries) "Innocent until proved guilty". In addition to that, focus is much more on confessions instead of investigation - the latter exists of course, and is used for finding the culprit (as happened when we had a burglary at our house. They got the guy one year later). When someone is in custody though.. then it's about getting a confession.
This can definitely be problematic, particularly when considering the conditions during custody. No lawyer.. or much of anything, except massive psychological pressure.
They _do_ specifically protest, and it's crazy that they're able to detain you like this from an accusation while they build a case, even if you're innocent. In the US, barring flight risks and past history or cases of real malice or violence or an ongoing threat, you can at least typically make bail, AND the conditions in a jail are generally far better and less strict than this:
>Both cases were ultimately dropped and the second arrest was essentially tied to the first and shouldn’t have even been possible. But because of how the system works weather it’s a viable reason or not, they can still trap you in there for a time while the case is being reviewed. I met others who where there for shorter and much longer periods of time. The worst part was knowing i was innocent. After it’s all said and done you walk out and they act as if nothing happened. Not only was this was all extremely traumatizing but it cost me a HUGE of money that I really did not have and caused irreversible damage to my life.
> In the US, barring flight risks and past history or cases of real malice or violence or an ongoing threat, you can at least typically make bail
The literal majority of people in US jails are there not because they have been convicted of anything but because they were given a bail amount they couldn’t afford to pay, which is a deliberate strategy by the courts when there is no justification to refuse bail. This can look like a $500 cash bail set on a homeless guy charged with resisting arrest (aka being arrested). Many of them are innocent and are trapped and have their lives ruined in exactly the way this guy describes. (We assume that many of them are innocent because when someone pays their bail, more than 50% of cases are simply dismissed as soon as they leave jail. The expectation is that they will just plead guilty because otherwise they are stuck in jail for months waiting for a trial).
> We assume that many of them are innocent because when someone pays their bail, more than 50% of cases are simply dismissed as soon as they leave jail.
The legal system doesn't have the resources to move forward with the case and decides it isn't a priority. I've seen this happen many times with people I know committing violent felonies.
Even for smaller examples it happens all the time. Half the time you can completely get out of traffic tickets by showing up to court to plead not guilty. They dismiss the case because it's not worth the time.
> They dismiss the case because it's not worth the time.
I don't know what this means in the context of the US justice system. They're not paid on commission. They're being paid to be there no matter what happens.
They dismiss the case because the cop didn't bother to show up, or they didn't have any evidence against your defense. The reason you (as the person who got ticketed) don't show up to court is because you know you have nothing to say, or because it's not worth it to you when getting out of the ticket isn't enough pay for 3-4 hours of your time. The only reason you do show up is because you think you have a defense.
If you can't make bail, you're showing up no matter how stupid the charge is.
edit: I have personal experience (from a few decades ago) of being forced to face stupid charges. It was a game. They inflated the potential sentence to 3-5 years through silly charges designed for just that, and offered me a plea bargain of no time, no fine, and expungement from my record in 6 months. I pled guilty. If I hadn't been bailed out, I would have had to wait two weeks in jail for that moronic, depressing event. I pled guilty because it was easy to do, even if I hadn't done anything. If I had sat in jail for two weeks, I might have pled guilty even if it involved a week of jail time and a fine, just to get out.
Kalief Browder spent almost 3 years in Riker's Island awaiting trial just to have the charges dropped. People on here told me that showed that the justice system worked. I said that his life was destroyed by this, and he would probably end up dead soon. I got downvoted furiously. He'd killed himself 2 years later.
Large Criminal Justice systems like NYC have a large population and it's easy to end up being thrown in a cell and forgotten. Having a lawyer or not is the biggest difference in outcomes. I sat in on a lot of court cases in Philly when dealing with a case. Saw 17 year olds locked up with no lawyer over a simple drug case while a guy caught dealing pounds hired a lawyer and got off with nothing after completing a "rehab" program. Guy didn't even use.
Dropping legitimate cases due to priorities and resources doesn't mean that they don't also still often pursue illegitimate cases beyond the point of reason.
Completely normal. Happens all the time. My plane was delayed this week because of an unruly passenger on the plane before mine at the gate. My plane had to be diverted into another state while they sorted him out. The day after I landed, I was walking to get something to eat, and there was a bum fight at the road entrance of a Target. They had a disagreement about who could panhandle there. On the way home, some guy climbed the fence and got on the runway. They don't know who he is though, he was sucked through the engine of a plane.
> If he stabbed someone and got this treatment, it would be very different
I dont think so. I think innocent until proven guilty is the right way to go. Because all the police know is that he is accused of stabbing someone. Whether he actually did it or not, a court of law will decide that while he is present to be tried. Until then You cant punish someone like this over an accusation. You can deny bail if the person might be dangerous, but you cant punish them
This is bullshit and the japanese should be ashamed of having such a system while being considered a part of the civilized world. If this was china people would be rightfully losing their mind
Innocent until proven guilty doesn't mean someone gets to go free until their court date. It depends on the crime, the flight risk, and the supporting evidence that police are able to collect.
There are many examples of police letting suspects go due to lack of evidence and then later discovering they let the wrong person go. These stories generate a lot of outrage in cases where there's public interest or a news story, but this is the reality of crime: You don't always have enough evidence to justify detaining someone, but the police's job is to quickly try to find enough evidence to find the right perpetrator
The thing is, this is pretty standard treatment over in Japan. As the blog poster says, the charge against them was ultimately dropped, but not before they were held for over 30 days. The 23 day timer on charges is, as they said, something that is often exploited by the police; they can add charges later to reset the clock. While this is going on, you're often pressured to sign a confession. You may get offered a comparatively short or lenient punishment for confessing, as compared to potentially months of detention while the police perform their investigation and decide what to charge you with. It's a big part of why the conviction rate over there is so high; not confessing to a crime, even when innocent, can carry a punishment worse than conviction. Of course, then you have to consider that you now have a criminal record, so someone who lives in Japan may feel pressured to confess to avoid prolonged detention, but that can have other effects on them in the future.
Same in the USA. This is what “prosecutor deals” are for: plead guilty and we’ll let you off with a year in jail, make us hold a trial and the judge will give you ten years.
It is not in fact the same in the USA. You cannot be held indefinitely without a judicial hearing and without access to a lawyer in the US. You can in Japan, and in fact that's the norm.
Right, but I intentionally avoided making that comparison because of the way the US justice system works. There are more escape hatches for someone who has been charged to be released while awaiting trial: bail, release on recognizance, habeas petitions, etc. These don't really exist in the same way in Japan.
In the US, it's seen as a God-given truth that no innocent person should ever be punished. Partly because it was founded (in part) by oppressed minorities fleeing states where the were constantly harassed by authorities. (Irony - the US's approach hardly fixed the issue).
But is it OK to risk punishing a few innocent people if it greatly reduces the amount of suffering caused by crime?
> Partly because it was founded (in part) by oppressed minorities fleeing states where the were constantly harassed by authorities
Nah, it's a principle that was brought in from English common law. E.g Blackstone's Ratio[0] was published at roughly the same time as the American revolution was playing out, and cited plenty of earlier formulations of the same principle. Habeas Corpus was codified in the Magna Carta, but predated it as a concept.
Now I'm entertaining myself by reframing the rebel barons (magna carta) as an oppressed minority, fleeing into their castles where they get harassed by siege engines.
> In the US, it's seen as a God-given truth that no innocent person should ever be punished.
That's a rather rose-tinted view of criminal justice here... I do hear that sentiment a lot here, but it's just words, and as you sort of hint at, the reality doesn't match the words.
> But is it OK to risk punishing a few innocent people if it greatly reduces the amount of suffering caused by crime?
That's a big philosophical question. I argue that no, that's not ok, and I'd rather guilty people go free (and possibly hurt others) than put an innocent person behind bars.
My wife was traveling in Central America last year, and befriended another traveler from a nearby country. This woman told my wife that her country used to be fairly dangerous (both for locals and tourists) due to the proliferation of criminal gangs, but that the current president had mobilized the police/military and aggressively cleaned things up. She mentioned that a large number of innocent people got caught in the crossfire and and were now rotting in jail, but if that was the price of safety for everyone else, she was ok with it.
I had a very visceral negative reaction to this story, and found it disappointing that someone would hold that opinion. But I suppose it's a lot easier to take that stance when it's not you or someone you care about being falsely accused and sent to prison.
So I think that's another way to look at your question: would you be ok going to prison as an innocent person, as a known, understood, and societally-accepted side-effect of a safer society? If the answer is no, then you can't expect anyone else to do it. And even if the answer is yes, that's still a personal decision/opinion, and still can't expect anyone else to do it.
(For the record: hell no, I would not be ok with that.)
> I had a very visceral negative reaction to this story, and found it disappointing that someone would hold that opinion. But I suppose it's a lot easier to take that stance when it's not you or someone you care about being falsely accused and sent to prison.
I have to imagine that from her point of view, it's a lot easier to take the stance that you'd rather see guilty people go free than put an innocent person behind bars when it's not your neighborhood with the dangerous criminal gangs....
Basically you’re talking about implementing The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Many innocent people have been sentenced to death in the US. The idea that jail or punishment solves crime also has no basis in fact.
> In the US, it's seen as a God-given truth that no innocent person should ever be punished.
In the US, just as in Japan, as soon as you are arrested they begin punishing you. If there were a real assumption of innocence, jail would be pleasant and comfortable, and if you were WFH you wouldn't miss a day. There is a material presumption of guilt, even if there's some sort of ethereal theoretical presumption of innocence.
Instead, you're in a horrible cell, eating horrible food, dressed in a humiliating way, treated in a humiliating way, and exposed to dangerous people. Unless you can pay a bond which you will never get back (because you are too poor to pay bail.) You haven't been convicted of anything. The fine you're facing might be lower than your bond, and the time you're facing might be shorter than the time you'd have to wait in jail to go to court.
Back in the 19th century. De Tocqueville talks about American justice favouring the rich since they could post bail and the poor could not. I have seen documentaries about US bail hostels and some of them seem like horrific places as bad as prisons in some other countries and this is before you've been found guilty of anything.
The US only requires a jury to believe someone is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It is accepted that there will be false positives where an innocent person will falsely get convicted due to this, but the hope is that the trade off is worth it.
Arrested is not the same as convicted. I lived in Japan for a few years, and I have heard of similar situations to what the article describes.
In Japan you can be arrested while an investigation is in process, only afterwards you will be indicted. Additionally, Japan does not permit defendants to post bail prior to an indictment.
Yes Japan has a really high conviction rate, but that is because they indict only cases were a conviction is likely.
Arrests don't need to lead to the person being indicted.
It's actually not. You can be arrested and then released without charges, which is not a conviction but does not factor into the conviction rate statistic.
I was going to say the same thing. OP in this case would not count toward either percentage, what you have to wonder is how many people get charges dropped who get put through the ringer.
It also makes the act of accusing incredibly powerful, and you have to wonder what threshold there is and whose accusations matter, because this severe punishment for dropped charges feels extremely powerful.
Not sure why you were downvoted. From the last paragraph:
"I spent a total of 35 days here. The first arrest was 3 days of processing, the initial 10 days followed by the 10 days extension for a total of 23 days before my case was dropped. But the same time my case was dropped my accusers found a another reason to issue a second arrest keeping me there for an additional 12 days!
Both cases were ultimately dropped and the second arrest was essentially tied to the first and shouldn’t have even been possible."
Jack Henry Abbott was an American prisoner who corresponded with the author Norman Mailer, who successfully got a collection of his letters published as In the Belly of the Beast, which contain scathing critiques of the American justice and prison systems based on his own experiences therewith.
Mailer also successfully advocated for Abbott's parole. Six weeks later, Abbott stabbed to death the manager of a restaurant he was eating at after an argument.
The charges could be very serious but I’m not sure what that has to do with anything, because being charged (or even just arrested) is not the same as being convicted. The author of this post claims both of their charges were dropped.
So, what, let’s torture anyone that _might_ have done something “serious?” No judge, no jury, just if a cop thinks you might have done something, straight into a psychological torture cell for weeks and months while they think about your case? wtf
Also, your description of their experience as “not pleasant” just kind of blows my mind. Like it was a long line at the DMV or something.
For those interested, here is the YouTube channel of the author. She has several videos about her experience. I used to watch her channel, and after reading this article (although she never mentions her name), I clicked through a few more of her posts, and saw her photo and immediately recognized the name. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=175yRhSaNfU
Before that timestamp she says there was an email that was asking for more information about the matter but she didn't have the information at hand or couldn't give it so she disregarded the email. That appears to be the impetus for deeming her a flight risk. I'm indifferent to whether or not that makes sense.
Japanese, living here. I'd heard 人質司法 (hostage justice) used
in news commentary but never really pictured what it looked like
inside. 5-day showers, food slid through a slot, sleeping on the
floor with lights on. None of that is what most people here
imagine when they hear "detention."
A lot of us live with this background feeling that "if you get
arrested here, you're done" even if you didn't do anything. Part
of it is the system. But part of it is also a cultural thing
where being suspected at all is somehow seen as your fault. The
people around you start treating you differently before any verdict.
Whatever the underlying charge actually was, none of this should
follow from an arrest before any conviction. You were innocent
and they still put you through 35 days. As a Japanese person
reading this, I'm just sorry. That shouldn't have happened.
However, fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately), you can't bribe officials. Japan is a society where it's difficult to get special treatment by giving money, not just to officials. If you try to use bribes, you'll only be looked down upon and put in a worse position.
I had to deal with the Japanese for the first time last week. My girlfriends bag was stolen with her passport.
It happened in a Round1 (near Umeda in Osaka), we knew exactly when since we sat down to play Mario Kart and after one race it was gone. First the police tried to convince us that we just forgot it somewhere. Eventually we convinced them to check cameras, and they said it was a blind spot. They refused to check entrance and exit cameras.
She had her airpods in there, and we could track the location, they refused to look at any cameras in the area (we tried searching the area ourselves but couldn't locate them, we figure the thief chucked it somewhere hard to find). We had the serial numbers of USD that was in the bag, they wouldn't even write it down.
Currently still waiting for an official report so that we can try and deal with their immigration to move her visa to another passport.
Having spoken to her embassy, it's the second time they've heard the story (same exact Round1, same Mario kart section). And if it's happened twice to citizens from her country, it probably happens more.
The whole thing made me completely disillusioned with Japan. Yes, statistically it's extremely safe, but if something does happen, don't expect any help. Reading this story just makes me think I should avoid any interactions with police if at all possible, and I've stopped carrying my passport with me. I rather get fined than having it stolen.
As a South Korean I'm lowkey surprised that most reactions posted here is describing the detention experience to be some kind of human rights abuse. Most Koreans debating on Internet demand severe punishment so criminals be afraid of getting jailed. I know this is a very questionable strategy, but afaik this is the most dominant public sentiment over this topic.
This sounds bad enough that it makes me wonder what the punishment for breaking the rules in jail is. If you can't sleep in a certain direction, what are they going to do if you refuse to obey? Or even can't obey because you don't speak Japanese?
Breaking rules in US prisons leads to solitary confinement. I'm assuming there's something similar in Japanese prisons, although the conditions sound like they can't get much worse...
I can't logically think of any other lawfully worse punishment than what was described in the article. I don't know what they'd do for breaking rules in these situations, to be honest.
I love how this starts out by listing “innocent” laws that you can break. Its your job to know the laws of the country and if you break them you should be punished. US people love visiting Japan and talking about how safe it is. Why exactly do you think its so safe?
I live in the US and while most of us know about the more serious crimes that often get prosecuted, there is a long tail of crimes that no single person could memorize. Over 60,000 pages of federal laws alone.
The Ministry for State Security in former East Germany had cells they'd dissappear people into. If you ignore the physical torture they employed in the earlier years, the actual cells themselves were somewhat more comfortable than what the Japanese got.
The Stasi had beds, some sense of privacy through proper doors, and an hour a day one might spend outside in a small courtyard to get some sunlight.
However the level of psychological torture (sleep deprivation, hours of standing/sitting in a prescribed posture, hourly checks, ...) appears to be milder in Japan. The Stasi could take that pretty far once they weren't allowed to use physical torture anymore.
That's the advice I give to anyone traveling internationally. You get treated a lot differently when you wear khaki slacks and an Oxford shirt (more professional rather than stylish) - even if you're wearing sneakers.
The more bland the colors, the more you blend in and easier it is to flow through places.
The Japanese like Africans, placing them only slightly lower than Europeans. Basically if you're not dressed like a thug and don't have certain tattoos, and aren't Brazilian, Korean or Chinese, you'll usually be treated pretty nicely.
IN 1990, Japan allowed entry of Brazilians of Japanese descent up to the 3rd generation, and many Brazilians went to Japan to work as cheap labor since Brazil's economic situation was pretty bad.
Like all "migrant workers", they're considered low class and are treated that way, similar to how Turkish people are treated in Germany.
Or dont go to an authoritarian state where something like this is accepted. Im astounded at people defending this. If it was china people would see this is messed up
Holy shit this is horrible. It really shows the true cost of having a disciplined public society. People love to hate on SF, and the homelessness. But I think it’s a society that prioritizes individual freedom which allows for both this outcome and the entrepreneurial environment we see.
None of this post seemed like necessary costs. You can arrest criminals while allowing more than one shower per 5 days, along with all the other absurd rules and restrictions here.
Japan absolutely does not stop being Japan just because they change their prison policy. Just like Sweden doesn't stop having a very well run society just because they don't have the same prison policies as the Japanese.
You can have western values while also having Japanese peacefulness.
Hard disagree. Prison is the one you're not supposed to enjoy, jail is the place you use to keep people BEFORE they are judged.
A jail should limit the people held only as much as needed for the safety of the public and the handlers, but no punishment should be inflicted because no one's a convicted criminal (yet).
And in any case, prison should have a strong component of making the guilty person fit to live among others. A person that's been made to sit still staring at the wall for all their waking life for years is a person I definitely don't want as a neighbour, because there's no way they come out of that sane.
Society can be optimized for the law-abiding without being needlessly cruel.
Jail's job is to keep you around during your legal process. You're not supposed to enjoy jail but it's not supposed to be torture, either. Torture does not belong in a civilized society and especially should not be used against those who have not even been formally charged. much less convicted, of a crime.
Sorry, I think you mean abiding*. But laws are not some moral edicts handed down by god. They can and often are wrong or seriously misguided. Laws can and should be broken if and only if the agent at hand has a thorough understanding of why they are violating the law. Breaking a law and antisocial behavior are not necessarily equivalent.
This is not about enjoying or not enjoying jail. If you happen to live and work in Japan in a typical job, getting arrested and held within this process for 23 days almost certainly means you're getting fired because you essentially have no contact with the outside world and even if you manage to sneak a word out through your lawyer, most of the employment contracts have clauses to extent of automatic termination for both missing enough days and breaking moral character.
So even if the prosecution decides to drop your case, you're already fucked -- this is not how proper justice system should work.
While I agree jail doesn't need to be enjoyable, it should at least be humane and free from torture (psychological or physical).
Also remember that this article is about an experience before any charges were filed, before she'd seen a court room, before she even had the opportunity to prove her innocence or be convicted. "You are not supposed to be in jail" is a laughably naive way of looking at this type of situation.
Right, but there's a core conceit we use in the US (mostly) that you are innocent until you are proven guilty, and if you are wrongfully accused (as was evidently the case from the author), you should perhaps NOT be put into such a grim set of living conditions with essentially no rights.
In this case, the author evidently _was_ a law abiding person, so the optimization failed, senselessly, likely out of a systemic effort to strike enough fear in the populace to over-index towards avoiding the possibility of this sort of situation. (Much like Singapore caning people for minor offenses.)
Whether or not you agree that such draconian punishments or processes are effective or fair is a different discussion, but this person was LITERALLY not supposed to be in jail, so how fair is it that they were removed from polite society for over a month in such poor conditions and at considerable expense?
If someone was arrested and their charges dropped, then what the government did was torture to a law abiding citizen and they should have a duty to compensate them appropriately.
Wait until you will be thrown in jail and tortured for nothing. I have seen frw individuals like you who think "oh I obey the lay so this wouldn't happen to me".
I don't mind criminals being punished. This person wasn't convicted of anything, yet was still punished. This isn't criminal punishment, this is just injustice. It's also the norm, pretty much everywhere.
It's an obvious deficit in civilization itself that we can't have, or even seem to come up with, a principled justice system. We just intermittently ban specific atrocities and hope that eventually adds up to justice.
And what do you have to say to teenage girls or even little kid girls getting raped?
Being laxist towards criminals is not just being cruel to the victims to me: to me it is downright complicity with the criminals.
BTW: Japan happens to be one of the safest country on earth. A friend who's a pilot told me: "Tokyo is the only city in the world where I've women from my team (mostly air hostesses but also female pilot or co-pilot) go for a run at 3am". Now he didn't fly to every city in the world but I can name a great many cities where a fit woman won't go joking in yoga pants at 3am. And so can he.
Funny you say that because if you go to shinjuku right now there will be a bunch of scouts harassing high school girls to get into prostitution to the point of even running after them, and the police doesn’t seem to care. This has been going for years.
Japan's judicial system has something like a 99% conviction rate. It's "safe" because they swipe up every single criminal they can, plus a bunch of random people in the process. So everyone is naturally going to be on their best behavior.
The claim that Japan is "safe" because it has a high conviction rate is a junk meme. The United States federal conviction rate is essentially identical to the Japanese judicial conviction rate when measured by the same methodology. It's roughly 99.6-99.8% depending on the year.
Japan is safe because of other factors, not their conviction rate.
> they swipe up every single criminal they can, plus a bunch of random people
It comes from a cursory understanding of the world outside of western countries. People watch a few videos on youtube about other countries, or visit on vacation for a week, and assume they understand the mentality of people who live there. It's hubris. Then they apply western moralities to other cultures, implicitly assuming their own western ideals are superior.
For example, pretty much everything kulahan wrote about Japan in the grandparent comment is completely made up. Good narrative, emotionally aligned, feels true, stated with complete confidence, but absolutely fictitious.
Both of these jurisdictions have low prosecution and high conviction rates, because the conviction rate is an artifact of prosecutors only going to trial if they now they'll win. In the US this is heavily confounded by plea bargains, since prosecutors can get punishments without even having to go to trial.
another thing in Japan is that you can get arrested for self defence. Say if someone starts attacking you on the street, and eg. you punch back causing an injury, when you could have simply ran away and escaped, then you can get arrested and held for 23 days as a suspect.
So say if someone shoves you on a subway in Tokyo, do not ever shove back or do anything worse. Move away, get witnesses / evidence if you can, then report. (I've also witnessed an attacker try to exploit this rule, where they would intentionally injure themselves during the conflict and then claim that the defendant did it, so be aware of that)
Oh, and other things that can get you arrested:
- Not promptly returning someone's lost property such as a wallet. There was a case here in the newspapers recently.
- A review about a business that damaged their reputation, even if it was true (but you don't have 100% evidence). eg. "I got food poisoning from here". Be very careful what you post and say online as defamation laws are very different.
oh, and maybe not arrested, but get in trouble for: if you place your household rubbish into not your designated collection point, even though the point is the closest to your home. (Also don't get me started on the topic of sorting trash...)
The Yakuza seems to have a similar story as the American Mafia. Both have long histories, are favourite subjects of films and media, and both had a decline that sharpened in the 90s. A large part of that has been increasingly tight anti-Yakuza laws and ordinances. The whole "Law enforcement and indirect enforcement" section on Wikipedia is an interesting read, I linked part of it:
Something as small as getting into a heated argument in public, accidentally taking an item you didn’t pay for, overstaying a visa, or even grabbing someone else’s umbrella or bike thinking it was yours can escalate further than you could imagine and have you arrested before you’ve even had a chance to explain.
Is this actually true or just fearmongering? I mean really, no chance to explain? Sounds as dumb as being forced into a psychiatric ward for wearing a pink shirt.
Absolutely hilarious if you have any knowledge of Japan. Your umbrella is the one thing that is absolutely not safe if you leave it unattended. Japanese will joke about this.
This really calls the whole article into question.
The article is vastly overstating some of that stuff. I used to live there.
It’s also amusing to me that anything Japan related winds up on the front page of HN, but a similar article for a different country would probably go un-voted.
There is nothing about Japan that suggests otherwise. One example being whether you agree with capital punishment or not, their method of never giving you advance notice is torture, for both the prisoner and their family.
The surprise isn't about the arrest. The surprise is about the extremely harsh conditions people are placed in after being arrested--without any proportionality of what they were arrested for, before it is known whether or not they are guilty of the crime that was accused.
Rule 34 of internet conversations about justice is that someone will always say "just obey the law" even if the law is the death penalty for walking on the grass.
Far too many HN “Japan understanders” receive all their opinions about Japan from US activists who get paid to write hate pieces about Japanese culture.
Just look at this thread. Yakuza? Taking umbrellas = go to jail? These people are morons. Worse, they think they are informed.
Maybe the BoJ didn’t burn enough money on US bonds this week or something. I can never understand the timing of these things or who is funding them.
I dunno, I think maybe that is a big part of why these countries are so safe? It is a form of meritocratic classism if you will. You are expected to be a certain kind of (law-abiding among other things) person. If you behave like you might not be the kind of person you get an implicit "social credit" downgrade and are treated like crap end to end. Sure, they might be "overreacting" all things considered, but in the US on the other hand there are examples of clearly dangerous people being catch and released because rights and dignity, until they actually murdered someone. There's a tradeoff, but the Japanese approach appears to be closer to the optimal point.
For those somehow actually considering this: make sure to check local laws, might be super illegal or at least inadmissible, (im)morality nonwithstanding. Although just because it's illegal, inadmissible, or immoral, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it of course.
Also maybe don't use the Meta glasses for this, even if you do decide to go for it. Not so sous anymore if you do.
You can try looking at this manga posted by a Japanese person that was detained for marijuana possession https://xcancel.com/kime_neko/status/1634511023167381504. It's in Japanese, but you can use a machine translator and/or look at the drawings.
The facilities and food look slightly better (maybe because it's a detention centre in Tokyo), but it mostly matches. Although the mangaka seemed to have a much more positive outlook on it, probably because they could read all the Japanese books they wanted and speak to their cellmates in Japanese.
> Language barrier: Forced to communicate only in Japanese
To be clear, what the author said is that communicating in any language besides Japanese is prohibited with anyone. So if you share a cell with an inmate who speaks your native language, you're not allowed to speak with them in that language. I think that expected to be allowed to speak with inmates is not a sign of arrogance, and I don't know any other country that has a similar restriction.
Another issue is whether the author is allowed to communicate about her case in her native language. If she's asked to sign forms, make statements, or expected to understand her legal procedure, one would expect that the police would provide a translator to ensure that she's treated fairly. Certainly, that would be the norm in the West.
> The arrogance of American tourists is truly boundless. How dare Japanese people not speak English! Who do they think they are?
That's not the issue. At least in the US it is unconstitutional to bar inmates from speaking or communicating in non-English languages.
Likewise the US legal system is required to provide you an interpreter who can speak in a language you are proficient in.
Whether these rights are properly upheld in the US is another question but they are rights you are entitled to.
That's the main issue. These are rights that Americans are accustomed to and it's not always obvious to them when they leave the country that these rights aren't universal among developed countries.
> The arrogance of American tourists is truly boundless. How dare Japanese people not speak English! Who do they think they are?
This attitude is so unbelievably prevalent among native English speakers. "Obviously everyone should speak *my* language -- why should I ever have to learn another one?"
One would think "not being able to speak anything but Japanese" would be a problem for anyone not speaking Japanese, not just English speakers specifically, so this framing is more than a bit ironic, don't you think?
Seriously, what is so baffling about expecting an interpreter to be provided? Even if you do "speak" the language, this is not some everyday environment, and evidently not a good-faith one either. If I got into a similar situation in the US or similar, you can be sure as shit I'd ask for one too, even though I do believe I have a reasonable command over the English language in general.
An interpreter is in fact provided for important communications, but it's a given that there's not going to be interpreters on-hand for every foreign prisoner 24/7. I think most people would simply accept that a language barrier is a normal fact of life of being arrested in a foreign country. The expectation of not needing to speak a foreign language in a foreign country seems to be a uniquely English one, and it manifests in other ways. There are many people who come to Japan to teach English without understanding a word of Japanese, and then complain about the difficulty of life, how restaraunt staff won't speak English or provide an English menu for them, how this and that are not provided for in English. They don't attempt to learn Japanese even after teaching for 5+ years, and yet criticise Japan for not catering to their needs. The sense of entitlement gets nauseating after you've witnessed it enough.
You are legally entitled to an interpreter when being questioned by police or while in court. I believe the claims in the article are exaggerated, I would speculate intentionally so as the author is an engagement-farming content creator who has made several videos about the subject garnering hundreds of thousands of views. Of course, it is possible their experience was worse than what they are legally entitled to -- the real world often doesn't live up to ideals and legal rights can be violated -- but they speak in broad generalizations about the system as a whole that are not representative.
Seems like it's not pleasant, and the author says in theory it could be as low of a bar as getting into a heated argument; but the author never discloses his actual charge, which I think is critical context.
If he stabbed someone and got this treatment, it would be very different than if he had a loud but normal argument you might see in any big box store in the US.
That he doesn't go on to protest why he got locked up makes me think it was something more serious.
Some time ago (can't easily find it anymore) there was a expose on UK prisons, which was interesting without even knowing what crime the prisoner was convicted of, but turns out it was abuse of a relative.
The author mentions it in a YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2epTf2IW1g (at the 2:20 mark).
But essentially, somebody else sent her a package with something illegal in it that she didn't ask for. The police took her passport for a few months and searched her house. After a few months, she got her passport returned to her, she left Japan temporarily, but when she came back, they arrested her "to ensure [she] wouldn't flee while they finished the investigation".
She also mentioned it was "the most normal type of thing you can think of"; it might have been something like pseudoephedrine/Sudafed. That's a common over-the-counter drug in other countries but it's very illegal here in Japan (unless it's under 10%, or you buy it from Japan)!
Edit: Importing pseudoephedrine above 10% concentrations is illegal, but you can legally buy some higher concentrations over-the-counter while in Japan.
> somebody else sent her a package with something illegal in it that she didn't ask for.
> She also mentioned it was "the most normal type of thing you can think of";
This doesn't really answer the question, though. It's frustrating to try to interpret these stories with a lot of writing and video describing everything except the crucial detail about what the charges were for.
I don't think she's trying to withhold information to avoid contaminating the case because she's spilling other details all over the place that could be used to influence the case. Yet the key piece of information that is supposedly "the most normal" isn't revealed
> It's frustrating to try to interpret these stories with a lot of writing and video describing everything except the crucial detail about what the charges were for.
Is it really a crucial detail though? As someone having lived in Japan for a long time, I see no reason why we can not discuss the fact that civil rights and detention treatment in Japan are lacking without resorting to "Do they deserve it in light of what they were suspected for?". I personally see no reason why suspects can not deserve decent sleep, meal, bedding, etc. even if they may be Shoko Asahara himself.
For the record, I have not watched any video or read anything else about this individual. Nor do I intend to.
It is? Because the whole ‘is it awful’ thing hinges pretty strongly on how many options you were given to avoid it before going there.
If I had the police over, was an ass, had them come back, was an ass again. Then at some point they’re going to just think I’m the person that’d run away while they conduct their investigation.
I’m sure bad policemen exist in Japan, but all the ones I’ve met have been very friendly and reasonable.
Being a jerk to the police does not seem like it warrants them denying you of your rights.
> Is it really a crucial detail though?
Literally the central trigger point of the story.
> For the record, I have not watched any video or read anything else about this individual. Nor do I intend to.
Then I can see why you're not interested in the details
> Literally the central trigger point of the story
The fact that you and other insist on this really gets at the crux of this whole problem. There are two notable positions on criminality and punishment: yours, which is broadly that the justice system exists, at least in part, to deliver righteous punishment on the deserving, and the position of those appalled by the treatment here, which is that the purpose of the justice system is primarily to protect people, and then to deliver predictable, proportionate punishment of those found guilty to disincentivize criminal behavior. If you think that torture of someone detained but not found guilty might be justifiable if they're accused of a sufficiently heinous crime then you have an illiberal position that can and will be used to enable abuse of the criminal justice system to inflict extralegal punishment on anyone for any reason.
I think this is even getting ahead of itself, since the story is writing that you can be treated this way without yet being charged. Not knowing if the author "deserves" it puts you in the shoes of the detainee in either case, since the detention comes before assigning guilt.
For most people, the critique of Japan is because their own countries used to operate jails in this way.
So rationalizations of why it’s appropriate because the person was suspected of XYZ isn’t going to land with them and is largely irrelevant.
But I don’t mind playing devils advocate.
Should the justice system force confessions out of murderers? No, because they are only potential murderers and we have historically been able to get innocent parties to confess. People with vulnerability such as mental health problems are even more likely to give false confessions. The goal of requesting testimony should be honesty not compliance.
This logic applies as well the drug dealer, drug users, and jay walkers. It’s a moral principle disconnected from any specific geography so even if we are not Japanese and have no intention to interact with Japan, we can say they have not lived up to that principle.
It doesn't matter though. Nobody should be treated like this, especially not before their guilt has been proven.
I think there is a happy path though and she stuffed it up by not responding for a request for information while she went overseas as they were investigating the matter. When she returned they put her in detention as they deemed her a flight risk. I don't know what information they asked, but it would seem prudent to provide it or say you don't have it or you are overseas and cannot get it at the moment, rather than simply ignore it.
reasonable suspicion is a pretty well established concept. importing controlled substances would get an arrest warrant easily anywhere if law enforcement decides to pursue the case.
the administive pretrial detention is also pretty common, especially nowadays with the ICE craze.
nobody should be treated like this, agreed, but that doesn't mean that the process has no correlation to the level of guilt established and the certainty of it.
(the real problem is that it's way too many bullshit laws.)
Nor do I intend to.
I watched a little bit. She went overseas and the police asked for some information and she didn't respond. When she returned they deemed her a flight risk because she hadn't responded to the things they were asking.
Fair I suppose. I guess one can treat this either as a personal story (although frustratingly scattered across multiple places and incomplete) or as a description of a single instance of an arrest in Japan.
Is it a crucial detail? Can you explain why you need to know what she was arrested for, given that she says the charges were dropped?
Suppose it was CSAM in the mail, do you think a delicate touch is still warranted? The context matters.
It doesn't matter what the charges were , she was cleared from it. Doesn't Japan have innocent until proven guilty laws?
All this story does it makes me want to avoid traveling to Japan. I don't fancy getting picked up for jay walking and tortured.
What an awful system..
It’s not and the reason you can’t have that conversation is that the people you are replying to are emotionally and cognitively in many respects children.
You can love Japanese culture and still call them out when they are clearly uncivilized. We're talking about a culture largely defined by the same people that did Nanjing. It's quite ironic that the same culture that claims to be pacifist has no problem inflicting psychological torture on prisoners. Asia in general has this problem.
Makes me think of TNG (Season 1, Episode 8). Death for walking on the grass.
What is Justice anyway?
«Uncivilised»
Compared to what? European and other western countries with significantly higher crime rates?
Safety comes at a cost.
North Korea has a crime rate of approximately 0%. That doesn't make it more civilised than western europe.
Prisoner conditions have nothing to do with crime rates. What is the connection?
Avoiding being a criminal due to fear of being subjected to those conditions?
When the punishment for a crime is morally worse than the crime itself I think there is a problem.
The punishment should be harsher than the crime. Stealing an apple might not be a "big problem", but it sets a precedent that taking someone else's property is acceptable under some circumstances -- say, the relative value of said object.
I'm not talking about the severity of the punishment I am talking about the moral wrongness of the punishment itself.
Torturing someone for a month for maybe stealing an apple, keep in mind you haven't even been charged with a crime yet, is a morally bankrupt system.
At the end of the blog post, it says the charges were eventually dropped.
23 days of her life gone over dropped charges.
But… it doesn’t matter? Even if it was some very illegal drug, that doesn’t change the fact that this detention system (and Japans justice system in general) is quite inhumane.
Likely some sort of stimulant as you point out. It is hardly the first time either as there have been public cases like this numerous times over the last two decades. Some cases even ending with deportation. The one I remember most vividly was someone carrying an unlabeled bottle of ADHD medication that had been sent to them while they were in South Korea by their pharmacist mum in the US; that they then ran afoul of when entering Japan. Similarly, there was a case at the University of Tokyo in the 00s, where an overseas student got sent an (allegedly) unprompted package with cannabis (not a stimulant though) from friends abroad. Allegedly, they were expelled and we got university-wide, anti-drug campaigns with memorable slogans like: "Illicit drugs are illegal".
Due to their history, laws regarding stimulants are harsher in Japan than in many other places in the world [1] and this frequently takes people by surprise. Not that Japanese laws related to illegal drugs are lenient to begin with.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade_in_Japan
Skimming the video there's also important unstated context that the person was non-white foreigner, had tattoos, and on visa. It's possible that the combination made an ambiguous grey-area situation much worse.
I am always amazed at details like this. Who would voluntarily go back to this kind of situation?
What do you do when you have a bad flu or cold if you don't have pseudoephedrine?
You can still easily buy it here, but the over-the-counter pills are always mixed with other ingredients to make it more difficult to convert them into amphetamines.
E.g. Contac 600 Plus can be found in basically all drug stores and it has 120mg of Pseudoephedrine, 100mg Caffeine, 8mg Chlorpheniramine, and 0.4mg of Belladonna Extract. It sounds like it'll actually be illegal to import into Japan, since 120/(120 + 100 + 8 + 0.4) is over 10%, but I've previously just walked into a drug store and bought a packet.
Ok, that makes sense. I am assuming it is not common to be arrested for possessing this kind of over the counter remedy?
Not for the ones you buy in Japan, since those are legal.
But, it's not unheard of to get randomly stopped by the police and searched, especially in touristy areas like train stations. Unless you're a Japanese citizen, you have to show ID, and although the searches are optional, most people agree to them.
For customs, usually a few people from each plane are searched.
Anecdotally, if you're a tourist, they're usually looking for medicine that was legal outside of Japan, but illegal within Japan, with small amounts leading to being detained for 23 days (like in this blog post). And if they decide to prosecute you, you'd probably get a suspended sentence (so no prison time), but you'd get deported and a temporary ban from coming back to Japan.
> with small amounts leading to being detained for 23 days (like in this blog post)
This seems ultimately like a very bad sales pitch for the tourism industry in Japan. I had thought I wanted to go to Japan but if I can accidentally, without malice, be thrown in a prison for 20 days that seems like a bad system.
I can't imagine the international relations of the ruling classes of various countries to the UAE would be trending in a positive direction if they arrested and punished people for walking off a plane with airplane bottles of alcohol.
You wait it out. You can also take some alternatives (e.g. Sinupret) that may or may not have any effect, while waiting it out.
Probably the same thing you do in the states if you have high blood pressure: make do with lesser medications, pain killers, lots of liquids, and push through it.
Warning: This is not medical advice, I am a nerd on the internet not a doctor
For what it is worth different countries have vastly different recommendations for HBP and these drugs. I recommend discussing with the pharmacists in your country.
In the US I have been told it's a strict "never", in Ireland I was told that it wouldn't have a measurable effect on blood pressure. I've also measured my personal blood pressure (pre-hypertension to stage 1) and have not been able to measure a difference in blood pressure.
Blow your nose?
It doesn't matter what her charge was. Even (alleged/suspected) serial murderers and rapists should be treated humanely and not experience psychological torture.
And also remember this treatment is at the point where they haven't been charged with anything, haven't been tried in court, and haven't been convicted.
The US's justice system is certainly lacking in many, many ways, but wow, this is barbaric. And it's designed for one thing: high conviction rates, regardless of guilt or innocence.
> The US's justice system is certainly lacking in many, many ways, but wow, this is barbaric.
I am lucky enough to have a lot of middle aged middle class white male privilege.
I wonder how many minority people in the US have much worse opinions and life experience of the justice system than you're implying?
I wonder how many people consider typical ICE arrests and detention to be at least as "barbaric" and "psychological torture" as what's described in the article?
I wonder how many young African American males (and their families) look at the private for-profit prison system and conclude the US justice system and policing are designed for "high conviction rates, regardless of guilt or innocence.
No one is disagreeing with you, but we're not talking about that just now.
"It doesn't matter what her charge was."
Yes it does. You need to go out of your way to attract the attention of the authorities in Japan. I can already guess what she did--received illegal drugs in the mail or brought them into the country. And based on all the references to mental health, etc. in the article, I'm sure it's claimed to be for some condition that Japanese people consider to be bullshit. The reason Japan is clean and orderly is because they apply a very sharp edge to anything rule breaking. You don't get to tell them how to run their society. It's not your place. And if you come to Japan, you play by their rules. If you don't like it, stay home.
Going by the article the authorities in Japan decided that she didn't need an official punishment, so in this case they don't seem to think it matters what her charge was since there wasn't enough evidence to make a case against her. And if someone has done something so terrible they can't be allowed to eat well or get a good nights sleep then the case shouldn't be dropped lightly.
You're not really doing a great job selling the country, that's for sure.
You clearly have a different view of “innocent until proven guilty” than most US citizens, which is fine, maybe you aren’t one, but that line of rhetoric is going to be anathema to most people on this website.
Not that the US criminal system isn’t its own complete mess, but thank God for the concept of bail (going about your life outside of jail until trial or dismissal, within certain parameters) and right to see a judge within 24 hours, to avoid any kafkaesque nightmares like this.
According to her video it appears she was deemed a flight risk because she didn't respond to an email requesting information on the matter being investigated while she was overseas. She didn't have the information on hand or at the time or at all and instead of saying that she didn't respond to the email. When she returned from her trip they deemed her a flight risk.
In the US if you're a flight risk you wouldn't get bail either.
> You clearly have a different view of “innocent until proven guilty”
Most people don't really understand it, and even the ones who do often have personal exceptions driven by emotion. The idea that you need to defend the guilty to protect the innocent is alien to a lot of people. Japan takes the lack of that assumption a step further though, since it's a society based on strict compliance to cultural norms... for better and for worse.
Having said all of that, most of these systems do a credible job of distinguishing the innocent from the guilty, although there's always more to do on that front. If you've ever worked anywhere near the court system you start to notice that people who make it through the system all of the way to a trial are frequently guilty and even more frequently recidivist.
Most people aren't criminals and never commit a serious offense, but speaking for myself I don't think the "sorting" the system does has to be anywhere close to as brutal and impersonal as it often is in many countries including Japan.
Primarily the US’s approach is: “we know our system will never be perfect [and the system we have is actually a hell of its own making], so we will ensure an escape hatch for BOTH innocent/guilty from the shortcomings of the system until a definitive verdict has been reached”
While Japan’s/many other countries approach is: “We intend our court system to be a perfect representation of our culture, history, and policy objectives. Therefore it should apply in every case, regardless of individual circumstance, so there is no escape hatch, because why deviate from a perfect process.”
The former is how you get the wildly inconsistent US approach to the criminal system, while the latter is how you get a kafkaesque nightmare (or worse, a system weaponized to intentionally target innocent undesirables, like El Salvador’s CECOT)
Both are simplified, none are perfect, of course. But I know which system I’d rather be accused under.
The charges were dropped. Regardless of your opinions on how an orderly government or justice system should run or how criminals should be treated, in this situation what happened was an innocent person was tortured by the state.
She was released; that means the charge was a mistake, and it caused damage to an innocent person.
That's not how it works. Especially for foreigners, where it's often easier to just make them someone else's problem, assuming the charges are relatively minor.
That is not necessarily what it means.
If the only way that Japan can be clean and orderly is by abusing people for months at a time only to drop charges, you have to ask if maybe that's a problem. The conviction rate and reliance on often questionably obtained confessions is also a problem that's hardly only noticed by outsiders.
The short version of the Japanese justice system is "Guilty until proved innocent", instead of (as in most modern countries) "Innocent until proved guilty". In addition to that, focus is much more on confessions instead of investigation - the latter exists of course, and is used for finding the culprit (as happened when we had a burglary at our house. They got the guy one year later). When someone is in custody though.. then it's about getting a confession.
This can definitely be problematic, particularly when considering the conditions during custody. No lawyer.. or much of anything, except massive psychological pressure.
They _do_ specifically protest, and it's crazy that they're able to detain you like this from an accusation while they build a case, even if you're innocent. In the US, barring flight risks and past history or cases of real malice or violence or an ongoing threat, you can at least typically make bail, AND the conditions in a jail are generally far better and less strict than this:
>Both cases were ultimately dropped and the second arrest was essentially tied to the first and shouldn’t have even been possible. But because of how the system works weather it’s a viable reason or not, they can still trap you in there for a time while the case is being reviewed. I met others who where there for shorter and much longer periods of time. The worst part was knowing i was innocent. After it’s all said and done you walk out and they act as if nothing happened. Not only was this was all extremely traumatizing but it cost me a HUGE of money that I really did not have and caused irreversible damage to my life.
> In the US, barring flight risks and past history or cases of real malice or violence or an ongoing threat, you can at least typically make bail
The literal majority of people in US jails are there not because they have been convicted of anything but because they were given a bail amount they couldn’t afford to pay, which is a deliberate strategy by the courts when there is no justification to refuse bail. This can look like a $500 cash bail set on a homeless guy charged with resisting arrest (aka being arrested). Many of them are innocent and are trapped and have their lives ruined in exactly the way this guy describes. (We assume that many of them are innocent because when someone pays their bail, more than 50% of cases are simply dismissed as soon as they leave jail. The expectation is that they will just plead guilty because otherwise they are stuck in jail for months waiting for a trial).
https://bailproject.org/data/unlocking-the-truth/
> We assume that many of them are innocent because when someone pays their bail, more than 50% of cases are simply dismissed as soon as they leave jail.
This sounds like a very dubious assumption.
Perhaps it is, but it explains the data. What is your alternative explanation?
The legal system doesn't have the resources to move forward with the case and decides it isn't a priority. I've seen this happen many times with people I know committing violent felonies.
Even for smaller examples it happens all the time. Half the time you can completely get out of traffic tickets by showing up to court to plead not guilty. They dismiss the case because it's not worth the time.
> They dismiss the case because it's not worth the time.
I don't know what this means in the context of the US justice system. They're not paid on commission. They're being paid to be there no matter what happens.
They dismiss the case because the cop didn't bother to show up, or they didn't have any evidence against your defense. The reason you (as the person who got ticketed) don't show up to court is because you know you have nothing to say, or because it's not worth it to you when getting out of the ticket isn't enough pay for 3-4 hours of your time. The only reason you do show up is because you think you have a defense.
If you can't make bail, you're showing up no matter how stupid the charge is.
edit: I have personal experience (from a few decades ago) of being forced to face stupid charges. It was a game. They inflated the potential sentence to 3-5 years through silly charges designed for just that, and offered me a plea bargain of no time, no fine, and expungement from my record in 6 months. I pled guilty. If I hadn't been bailed out, I would have had to wait two weeks in jail for that moronic, depressing event. I pled guilty because it was easy to do, even if I hadn't done anything. If I had sat in jail for two weeks, I might have pled guilty even if it involved a week of jail time and a fine, just to get out.
Kalief Browder spent almost 3 years in Riker's Island awaiting trial just to have the charges dropped. People on here told me that showed that the justice system worked. I said that his life was destroyed by this, and he would probably end up dead soon. I got downvoted furiously. He'd killed himself 2 years later.
Large Criminal Justice systems like NYC have a large population and it's easy to end up being thrown in a cell and forgotten. Having a lawyer or not is the biggest difference in outcomes. I sat in on a lot of court cases in Philly when dealing with a case. Saw 17 year olds locked up with no lawyer over a simple drug case while a guy caught dealing pounds hired a lawyer and got off with nothing after completing a "rehab" program. Guy didn't even use.
Dropping legitimate cases due to priorities and resources doesn't mean that they don't also still often pursue illegitimate cases beyond the point of reason.
I strongly suspect that the author's legal counsel advised them not to discuss their actual charge in explicit detail
> loud but normal argument you might see in any big box store in the US.
I always assumed this kind of behaviour was cherry picked on social media. How “normal” is it actually?!
In most of the US -- completely unheard of.
In particularly bad neighborhoods in the US -- it happens sometimes.
Depending on what kind of life you live in the US, it could be completely foreign to you, or it could be normal.
Completely normal. Happens all the time. My plane was delayed this week because of an unruly passenger on the plane before mine at the gate. My plane had to be diverted into another state while they sorted him out. The day after I landed, I was walking to get something to eat, and there was a bum fight at the road entrance of a Target. They had a disagreement about who could panhandle there. On the way home, some guy climbed the fence and got on the runway. They don't know who he is though, he was sucked through the engine of a plane.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/09/frontier-air...
Anyone who says this stuff isn't normal in America doesn't get out much apparently. Living in the US is nuts.
People do not normally run out onto the tarmac and get sucked into the engine of a plane. This made the news because of how rare it is.
It's quite rare.
Except at Waffle House.
And at Walmart. And at McDonalds. And at Burger King. And at...
Bacically, it is not rare at all. Especially among certain American demographic.
> If he stabbed someone and got this treatment, it would be very different
I dont think so. I think innocent until proven guilty is the right way to go. Because all the police know is that he is accused of stabbing someone. Whether he actually did it or not, a court of law will decide that while he is present to be tried. Until then You cant punish someone like this over an accusation. You can deny bail if the person might be dangerous, but you cant punish them
This is bullshit and the japanese should be ashamed of having such a system while being considered a part of the civilized world. If this was china people would be rightfully losing their mind
Innocent until proven guilty doesn't mean someone gets to go free until their court date. It depends on the crime, the flight risk, and the supporting evidence that police are able to collect.
There are many examples of police letting suspects go due to lack of evidence and then later discovering they let the wrong person go. These stories generate a lot of outrage in cases where there's public interest or a news story, but this is the reality of crime: You don't always have enough evidence to justify detaining someone, but the police's job is to quickly try to find enough evidence to find the right perpetrator
Okay, but maybe we can feed them actual food, let them shower daily, and give them bedding? Are you opposed to this?
> That he doesn't go on to protest why he got locked up makes me think it was something more serious
Most of the post explains how she wasn’t allowed to do the things you’re suggesting she do, and at the end it explains how her charges were dropped.
It surprises me how many people are responding to an article that includes:
> You can not bring or keep anything including a bra or even your own underwear.
presuming the author is male.
I assume a female wouldn't distinguish bra and underwear? I also don't know why it matters either way, whether the author is presumed male or female
> I assume a female wouldn't distinguish bra and underwear?
Perhaps this is a regional thing, but in my experience, they absolutely do.
In what country is getting arrested pleasant?
Japan is probably worse than Northern Europe, but it's still pretty high on "if I had to be arrested, I'd rather it was here" list.
I think there's an enormous difference between an "unpleasant experience" and "active torture."
The thing is, this is pretty standard treatment over in Japan. As the blog poster says, the charge against them was ultimately dropped, but not before they were held for over 30 days. The 23 day timer on charges is, as they said, something that is often exploited by the police; they can add charges later to reset the clock. While this is going on, you're often pressured to sign a confession. You may get offered a comparatively short or lenient punishment for confessing, as compared to potentially months of detention while the police perform their investigation and decide what to charge you with. It's a big part of why the conviction rate over there is so high; not confessing to a crime, even when innocent, can carry a punishment worse than conviction. Of course, then you have to consider that you now have a criminal record, so someone who lives in Japan may feel pressured to confess to avoid prolonged detention, but that can have other effects on them in the future.
Same in the USA. This is what “prosecutor deals” are for: plead guilty and we’ll let you off with a year in jail, make us hold a trial and the judge will give you ten years.
It is not in fact the same in the USA. You cannot be held indefinitely without a judicial hearing and without access to a lawyer in the US. You can in Japan, and in fact that's the norm.
Right, but I intentionally avoided making that comparison because of the way the US justice system works. There are more escape hatches for someone who has been charged to be released while awaiting trial: bail, release on recognizance, habeas petitions, etc. These don't really exist in the same way in Japan.
Arrested not convicted.
In the US, it's seen as a God-given truth that no innocent person should ever be punished. Partly because it was founded (in part) by oppressed minorities fleeing states where the were constantly harassed by authorities. (Irony - the US's approach hardly fixed the issue).
But is it OK to risk punishing a few innocent people if it greatly reduces the amount of suffering caused by crime?
> Partly because it was founded (in part) by oppressed minorities fleeing states where the were constantly harassed by authorities
Nah, it's a principle that was brought in from English common law. E.g Blackstone's Ratio[0] was published at roughly the same time as the American revolution was playing out, and cited plenty of earlier formulations of the same principle. Habeas Corpus was codified in the Magna Carta, but predated it as a concept.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
This was on the tail of sectarian conflicts (e.g. Cromwell) in the UK, and people fleeing them to the US.
You're right than I'm oversimplifying it, and being very US centric.
Now I'm entertaining myself by reframing the rebel barons (magna carta) as an oppressed minority, fleeing into their castles where they get harassed by siege engines.
It is not seen that way in the US except during high school civics classes. There have been multiple people executed by the state who were publicly known to be innocent at the time. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/04/30/texas-james-broadnax...
> In the US, it's seen as a God-given truth that no innocent person should ever be punished.
That's a rather rose-tinted view of criminal justice here... I do hear that sentiment a lot here, but it's just words, and as you sort of hint at, the reality doesn't match the words.
> But is it OK to risk punishing a few innocent people if it greatly reduces the amount of suffering caused by crime?
That's a big philosophical question. I argue that no, that's not ok, and I'd rather guilty people go free (and possibly hurt others) than put an innocent person behind bars.
My wife was traveling in Central America last year, and befriended another traveler from a nearby country. This woman told my wife that her country used to be fairly dangerous (both for locals and tourists) due to the proliferation of criminal gangs, but that the current president had mobilized the police/military and aggressively cleaned things up. She mentioned that a large number of innocent people got caught in the crossfire and and were now rotting in jail, but if that was the price of safety for everyone else, she was ok with it.
I had a very visceral negative reaction to this story, and found it disappointing that someone would hold that opinion. But I suppose it's a lot easier to take that stance when it's not you or someone you care about being falsely accused and sent to prison.
So I think that's another way to look at your question: would you be ok going to prison as an innocent person, as a known, understood, and societally-accepted side-effect of a safer society? If the answer is no, then you can't expect anyone else to do it. And even if the answer is yes, that's still a personal decision/opinion, and still can't expect anyone else to do it.
(For the record: hell no, I would not be ok with that.)
> I had a very visceral negative reaction to this story, and found it disappointing that someone would hold that opinion. But I suppose it's a lot easier to take that stance when it's not you or someone you care about being falsely accused and sent to prison.
I have to imagine that from her point of view, it's a lot easier to take the stance that you'd rather see guilty people go free than put an innocent person behind bars when it's not your neighborhood with the dangerous criminal gangs....
Basically you’re talking about implementing The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Many innocent people have been sentenced to death in the US. The idea that jail or punishment solves crime also has no basis in fact.
> In the US, it's seen as a God-given truth that no innocent person should ever be punished.
In the US, just as in Japan, as soon as you are arrested they begin punishing you. If there were a real assumption of innocence, jail would be pleasant and comfortable, and if you were WFH you wouldn't miss a day. There is a material presumption of guilt, even if there's some sort of ethereal theoretical presumption of innocence.
Instead, you're in a horrible cell, eating horrible food, dressed in a humiliating way, treated in a humiliating way, and exposed to dangerous people. Unless you can pay a bond which you will never get back (because you are too poor to pay bail.) You haven't been convicted of anything. The fine you're facing might be lower than your bond, and the time you're facing might be shorter than the time you'd have to wait in jail to go to court.
Back in the 19th century. De Tocqueville talks about American justice favouring the rich since they could post bail and the poor could not. I have seen documentaries about US bail hostels and some of them seem like horrific places as bad as prisons in some other countries and this is before you've been found guilty of anything.
> I have seen documentaries about US bail hostels
I’m not familiar with this term. Is that an old thing?
It's a British term for halfway houses specifically for people out on bail.
No, I'm not meaning this here. I'm meaning people who cannot afford bail so are kept imprisoned, before even going to trial.
The US only requires a jury to believe someone is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It is accepted that there will be false positives where an innocent person will falsely get convicted due to this, but the hope is that the trade off is worth it.
I don’t believe in the premise.
Japan has a conviction rate of 99.8%. arrested and convicted is pretty much the same thing over there
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_Jap...
Arrested is not the same as convicted. I lived in Japan for a few years, and I have heard of similar situations to what the article describes.
In Japan you can be arrested while an investigation is in process, only afterwards you will be indicted. Additionally, Japan does not permit defendants to post bail prior to an indictment.
Yes Japan has a really high conviction rate, but that is because they indict only cases were a conviction is likely.
Arrests don't need to lead to the person being indicted.
It's actually not. You can be arrested and then released without charges, which is not a conviction but does not factor into the conviction rate statistic.
I was going to say the same thing. OP in this case would not count toward either percentage, what you have to wonder is how many people get charges dropped who get put through the ringer.
It also makes the act of accusing incredibly powerful, and you have to wonder what threshold there is and whose accusations matter, because this severe punishment for dropped charges feels extremely powerful.
Not surprising if you can detain people for long periods under harsh conditions without charging them.
If they confess, it counts as a win. If they don’t, you release them but it’s not a loss (as they were not charged).
> Japan has a conviction rate of 99.8%
So does the US.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/11/only-2-of...
The author doesn't seem to have been charged with anything, so her release doesn't affect the 'conviction rate' - but she was arrested.
By comparison, you might consider https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/14/fewer-tha... :
> In fiscal year 2022, only 290 of 71,954 defendants in federal criminal cases – about 0.4% – went to trial and were acquitted
Of charges, not arrests.
And your point is?
Not sure why you were downvoted. From the last paragraph:
"I spent a total of 35 days here. The first arrest was 3 days of processing, the initial 10 days followed by the 10 days extension for a total of 23 days before my case was dropped. But the same time my case was dropped my accusers found a another reason to issue a second arrest keeping me there for an additional 12 days!
Both cases were ultimately dropped and the second arrest was essentially tied to the first and shouldn’t have even been possible."
The author acknowledges that it still ruins people's lives and is completely unfair.
Jack Henry Abbott was an American prisoner who corresponded with the author Norman Mailer, who successfully got a collection of his letters published as In the Belly of the Beast, which contain scathing critiques of the American justice and prison systems based on his own experiences therewith.
Mailer also successfully advocated for Abbott's parole. Six weeks later, Abbott stabbed to death the manager of a restaurant he was eating at after an argument.
This take is insane.
The charges could be very serious but I’m not sure what that has to do with anything, because being charged (or even just arrested) is not the same as being convicted. The author of this post claims both of their charges were dropped.
So, what, let’s torture anyone that _might_ have done something “serious?” No judge, no jury, just if a cop thinks you might have done something, straight into a psychological torture cell for weeks and months while they think about your case? wtf
Also, your description of their experience as “not pleasant” just kind of blows my mind. Like it was a long line at the DMV or something.
For those interested, here is the YouTube channel of the author. She has several videos about her experience. I used to watch her channel, and after reading this article (although she never mentions her name), I clicked through a few more of her posts, and saw her photo and immediately recognized the name. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=175yRhSaNfU
The reasons for her detection appear really unfair and specious to put it nicely: https://youtu.be/Q2epTf2IW1g?si=ipy4m3rgFDw3b3cD
Before that timestamp she says there was an email that was asking for more information about the matter but she didn't have the information at hand or couldn't give it so she disregarded the email. That appears to be the impetus for deeming her a flight risk. I'm indifferent to whether or not that makes sense.
Japanese, living here. I'd heard 人質司法 (hostage justice) used in news commentary but never really pictured what it looked like inside. 5-day showers, food slid through a slot, sleeping on the floor with lights on. None of that is what most people here imagine when they hear "detention."
A lot of us live with this background feeling that "if you get arrested here, you're done" even if you didn't do anything. Part of it is the system. But part of it is also a cultural thing where being suspected at all is somehow seen as your fault. The people around you start treating you differently before any verdict.
Whatever the underlying charge actually was, none of this should follow from an arrest before any conviction. You were innocent and they still put you through 35 days. As a Japanese person reading this, I'm just sorry. That shouldn't have happened.
You might find her explanation of why she was detained interesting:
https://youtu.be/Q2epTf2IW1g?si=ipy4m3rgFDw3b3cD
For those visiting Japan, I'd like to add one important point. It's true that parts of Japan's judicial system are truly "middle age". https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hideaki-ueda-japan-shut-up-vi...
However, fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately), you can't bribe officials. Japan is a society where it's difficult to get special treatment by giving money, not just to officials. If you try to use bribes, you'll only be looked down upon and put in a worse position.
I had to deal with the Japanese for the first time last week. My girlfriends bag was stolen with her passport.
It happened in a Round1 (near Umeda in Osaka), we knew exactly when since we sat down to play Mario Kart and after one race it was gone. First the police tried to convince us that we just forgot it somewhere. Eventually we convinced them to check cameras, and they said it was a blind spot. They refused to check entrance and exit cameras.
She had her airpods in there, and we could track the location, they refused to look at any cameras in the area (we tried searching the area ourselves but couldn't locate them, we figure the thief chucked it somewhere hard to find). We had the serial numbers of USD that was in the bag, they wouldn't even write it down.
Currently still waiting for an official report so that we can try and deal with their immigration to move her visa to another passport.
Having spoken to her embassy, it's the second time they've heard the story (same exact Round1, same Mario kart section). And if it's happened twice to citizens from her country, it probably happens more.
The whole thing made me completely disillusioned with Japan. Yes, statistically it's extremely safe, but if something does happen, don't expect any help. Reading this story just makes me think I should avoid any interactions with police if at all possible, and I've stopped carrying my passport with me. I rather get fined than having it stolen.
How is it fortunate that you can't avoid medieval treatment using mediaeval remedies?
I guess this is strongly tied to the culture of not wanting to "lose face".
Not only relevant to Japanese prosecutors, but the system there makes it very easy for people to just confess (legitimate or false) and pay a fine.
As a South Korean I'm lowkey surprised that most reactions posted here is describing the detention experience to be some kind of human rights abuse. Most Koreans debating on Internet demand severe punishment so criminals be afraid of getting jailed. I know this is a very questionable strategy, but afaik this is the most dominant public sentiment over this topic.
That's noble until an innocent person gets jailed.
I enjoyed learning from this video years ago, which introduces the topic of how you are treated when arrested in Japan:
* Paolo fromTOKYO - "Why Japan Arrests Foreigners" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1ZLGqL1FMo (14m23s) [2019-08-16]
This sounds bad enough that it makes me wonder what the punishment for breaking the rules in jail is. If you can't sleep in a certain direction, what are they going to do if you refuse to obey? Or even can't obey because you don't speak Japanese?
Well, the not sleeping thing is easy: they can simply scream at you, on end, for as long as they want. You're not going to get much sleep that way.
Breaking rules in US prisons leads to solitary confinement. I'm assuming there's something similar in Japanese prisons, although the conditions sound like they can't get much worse...
I can't logically think of any other lawfully worse punishment than what was described in the article. I don't know what they'd do for breaking rules in these situations, to be honest.
I love how this starts out by listing “innocent” laws that you can break. Its your job to know the laws of the country and if you break them you should be punished. US people love visiting Japan and talking about how safe it is. Why exactly do you think its so safe?
I live in the US and while most of us know about the more serious crimes that often get prosecuted, there is a long tail of crimes that no single person could memorize. Over 60,000 pages of federal laws alone.
And probably 20,000 of those are carve-outs for big contributors.
The Ministry for State Security in former East Germany had cells they'd dissappear people into. If you ignore the physical torture they employed in the earlier years, the actual cells themselves were somewhat more comfortable than what the Japanese got.
The Stasi had beds, some sense of privacy through proper doors, and an hour a day one might spend outside in a small courtyard to get some sunlight.
However the level of psychological torture (sleep deprivation, hours of standing/sitting in a prescribed posture, hourly checks, ...) appears to be milder in Japan. The Stasi could take that pretty far once they weren't allowed to use physical torture anymore.
Pro Tip: When visiting Japan, dress and comport yourself so you don't look like you should be thrown in jail, and it will happen a lot less often.
As a Mexican friend puts it for Mexico: Dress as the police should believe you.
That's the advice I give to anyone traveling internationally. You get treated a lot differently when you wear khaki slacks and an Oxford shirt (more professional rather than stylish) - even if you're wearing sneakers.
The more bland the colors, the more you blend in and easier it is to flow through places.
I wonder if that's possible in Japan for a black person
The author of the article is a black woman, so... maybe not.
I'd assume so, though I'm not aware of any statistics that'd catalogue police action there by skin color / ethnicity, not official, not third party.
I'd think a formal or business casual attire, with proper grooming, is a rather international signal that you're vaguely alright in your ways.
Anything specific you reckon otherwise for?
The Japanese like Africans, placing them only slightly lower than Europeans. Basically if you're not dressed like a thug and don't have certain tattoos, and aren't Brazilian, Korean or Chinese, you'll usually be treated pretty nicely.
I can understand the historical reasons related to China and Korea, but Brazil? What did they do to them?
IN 1990, Japan allowed entry of Brazilians of Japanese descent up to the 3rd generation, and many Brazilians went to Japan to work as cheap labor since Brazil's economic situation was pretty bad.
Like all "migrant workers", they're considered low class and are treated that way, similar to how Turkish people are treated in Germany.
Second/third generation children of Japanese immigrants to Brazil were historically given special visa access.
I assume the OP is actually referring to these returned second generation Japanese.
Or dont go to an authoritarian state where something like this is accepted. Im astounded at people defending this. If it was china people would see this is messed up
Holy shit this is horrible. It really shows the true cost of having a disciplined public society. People love to hate on SF, and the homelessness. But I think it’s a society that prioritizes individual freedom which allows for both this outcome and the entrepreneurial environment we see.
None of this post seemed like necessary costs. You can arrest criminals while allowing more than one shower per 5 days, along with all the other absurd rules and restrictions here.
Japan absolutely does not stop being Japan just because they change their prison policy. Just like Sweden doesn't stop having a very well run society just because they don't have the same prison policies as the Japanese.
You can have western values while also having Japanese peacefulness.
You think our prison system is much better? I mean hell, we're currently shipping people off to prison camps in other countries without due process.
You are not supposed to be in jail, and you are not supposed to enjoy it if you are. It makes sense to optimize society for law obiding people.
>and you are not supposed to enjoy it if you are.
Hard disagree. Prison is the one you're not supposed to enjoy, jail is the place you use to keep people BEFORE they are judged.
A jail should limit the people held only as much as needed for the safety of the public and the handlers, but no punishment should be inflicted because no one's a convicted criminal (yet).
And in any case, prison should have a strong component of making the guilty person fit to live among others. A person that's been made to sit still staring at the wall for all their waking life for years is a person I definitely don't want as a neighbour, because there's no way they come out of that sane.
Society can be optimized for the law-abiding without being needlessly cruel.
Jail's job is to keep you around during your legal process. You're not supposed to enjoy jail but it's not supposed to be torture, either. Torture does not belong in a civilized society and especially should not be used against those who have not even been formally charged. much less convicted, of a crime.
Sorry, I think you mean abiding*. But laws are not some moral edicts handed down by god. They can and often are wrong or seriously misguided. Laws can and should be broken if and only if the agent at hand has a thorough understanding of why they are violating the law. Breaking a law and antisocial behavior are not necessarily equivalent.
This is not about enjoying or not enjoying jail. If you happen to live and work in Japan in a typical job, getting arrested and held within this process for 23 days almost certainly means you're getting fired because you essentially have no contact with the outside world and even if you manage to sneak a word out through your lawyer, most of the employment contracts have clauses to extent of automatic termination for both missing enough days and breaking moral character.
So even if the prosecution decides to drop your case, you're already fucked -- this is not how proper justice system should work.
> You are not supposed to be in jail
Especially If you’re wrongfully arrested. “Optimizing society for law abiding people” means the opposite of what you think it means.
While I agree jail doesn't need to be enjoyable, it should at least be humane and free from torture (psychological or physical).
Also remember that this article is about an experience before any charges were filed, before she'd seen a court room, before she even had the opportunity to prove her innocence or be convicted. "You are not supposed to be in jail" is a laughably naive way of looking at this type of situation.
> It makes sense to optimize society for law obiding people.
I agree, and this system is meant to hold people before they have evidence meaning it can hurt law abiding people.
Right, but there's a core conceit we use in the US (mostly) that you are innocent until you are proven guilty, and if you are wrongfully accused (as was evidently the case from the author), you should perhaps NOT be put into such a grim set of living conditions with essentially no rights.
In this case, the author evidently _was_ a law abiding person, so the optimization failed, senselessly, likely out of a systemic effort to strike enough fear in the populace to over-index towards avoiding the possibility of this sort of situation. (Much like Singapore caning people for minor offenses.)
Whether or not you agree that such draconian punishments or processes are effective or fair is a different discussion, but this person was LITERALLY not supposed to be in jail, so how fair is it that they were removed from polite society for over a month in such poor conditions and at considerable expense?
If someone was arrested and their charges dropped, then what the government did was torture to a law abiding citizen and they should have a duty to compensate them appropriately.
Wait until you will be thrown in jail and tortured for nothing. I have seen frw individuals like you who think "oh I obey the lay so this wouldn't happen to me".
They change their mind oh so quickly after
Absolutely horrifying. I've come to believe that criminal punishment is simply unethical. I wish someone would come up with a better option.
I don't mind criminals being punished. This person wasn't convicted of anything, yet was still punished. This isn't criminal punishment, this is just injustice. It's also the norm, pretty much everywhere.
It's an obvious deficit in civilization itself that we can't have, or even seem to come up with, a principled justice system. We just intermittently ban specific atrocities and hope that eventually adds up to justice.
Conceptually that seems fine.
But too often the system makes criminals into worse humans. That’s unhelpful.
And what do you have to say to teenage girls or even little kid girls getting raped?
Being laxist towards criminals is not just being cruel to the victims to me: to me it is downright complicity with the criminals.
BTW: Japan happens to be one of the safest country on earth. A friend who's a pilot told me: "Tokyo is the only city in the world where I've women from my team (mostly air hostesses but also female pilot or co-pilot) go for a run at 3am". Now he didn't fly to every city in the world but I can name a great many cities where a fit woman won't go joking in yoga pants at 3am. And so can he.
Funny you say that because if you go to shinjuku right now there will be a bunch of scouts harassing high school girls to get into prostitution to the point of even running after them, and the police doesn’t seem to care. This has been going for years.
Japan's judicial system has something like a 99% conviction rate. It's "safe" because they swipe up every single criminal they can, plus a bunch of random people in the process. So everyone is naturally going to be on their best behavior.
The claim that Japan is "safe" because it has a high conviction rate is a junk meme. The United States federal conviction rate is essentially identical to the Japanese judicial conviction rate when measured by the same methodology. It's roughly 99.6-99.8% depending on the year.
Japan is safe because of other factors, not their conviction rate.
> they swipe up every single criminal they can, plus a bunch of random people
And this is completely baseless.
Exactly. What is it with the weird attacks on Japan here? Chinese sockpuppet accounts maybe?
It comes from a cursory understanding of the world outside of western countries. People watch a few videos on youtube about other countries, or visit on vacation for a week, and assume they understand the mentality of people who live there. It's hubris. Then they apply western moralities to other cultures, implicitly assuming their own western ideals are superior.
For example, pretty much everything kulahan wrote about Japan in the grandparent comment is completely made up. Good narrative, emotionally aligned, feels true, stated with complete confidence, but absolutely fictitious.
Or the common HN crowd of liberals conditioned to side with criminals.
Both of these jurisdictions have low prosecution and high conviction rates, because the conviction rate is an artifact of prosecutors only going to trial if they now they'll win. In the US this is heavily confounded by plea bargains, since prosecutors can get punishments without even having to go to trial.
Japan appears to be safest country on earth.
There are many places women can run at 3am - Singapore, Bangkok, jut from top of my head.
And living in Tokyo, I woudn't advise any women to do jogging at 3am.
Safety is easy to achieve if you don't care about justice.
Seems like the system is heavily stacked against detainees, regardless of whether they are actually innocent or guilty.
The description of the detention center reminds me of Room 101 in 1984.
Whole new level of respect for the Yakuza, no wonder they end up running everything there.
another thing in Japan is that you can get arrested for self defence. Say if someone starts attacking you on the street, and eg. you punch back causing an injury, when you could have simply ran away and escaped, then you can get arrested and held for 23 days as a suspect.
So say if someone shoves you on a subway in Tokyo, do not ever shove back or do anything worse. Move away, get witnesses / evidence if you can, then report. (I've also witnessed an attacker try to exploit this rule, where they would intentionally injure themselves during the conflict and then claim that the defendant did it, so be aware of that)
Oh, and other things that can get you arrested:
- Not promptly returning someone's lost property such as a wallet. There was a case here in the newspapers recently.
- A review about a business that damaged their reputation, even if it was true (but you don't have 100% evidence). eg. "I got food poisoning from here". Be very careful what you post and say online as defamation laws are very different.
oh, and maybe not arrested, but get in trouble for: if you place your household rubbish into not your designated collection point, even though the point is the closest to your home. (Also don't get me started on the topic of sorting trash...)
That’s a thing as well in some US states called duty to retreat.
Similar, but not the same. Japan is more strict. There is also no Castle Doctrine, so you have to retreat even if you are in your home.
I mostly love Japan, but this is it, I can't risk something like this.
The conviction rate was already terrifying, but this probably nails the coffin.
And this in a country where the yakuza is a sanctioned part of the society?
The Yakuza seems to have a similar story as the American Mafia. Both have long histories, are favourite subjects of films and media, and both had a decline that sharpened in the 90s. A large part of that has been increasingly tight anti-Yakuza laws and ordinances. The whole "Law enforcement and indirect enforcement" section on Wikipedia is an interesting read, I linked part of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza#Current_situation
I do agree with the justice/prison system being incredibly scary, though!
Something as small as getting into a heated argument in public, accidentally taking an item you didn’t pay for, overstaying a visa, or even grabbing someone else’s umbrella or bike thinking it was yours can escalate further than you could imagine and have you arrested before you’ve even had a chance to explain.
Is this actually true or just fearmongering? I mean really, no chance to explain? Sounds as dumb as being forced into a psychiatric ward for wearing a pink shirt.
> grabbing someone else’s umbrella
Absolutely hilarious if you have any knowledge of Japan. Your umbrella is the one thing that is absolutely not safe if you leave it unattended. Japanese will joke about this.
This really calls the whole article into question.
The article is vastly overstating some of that stuff. I used to live there.
It’s also amusing to me that anything Japan related winds up on the front page of HN, but a similar article for a different country would probably go un-voted.
The picture in section "THE CELL" does not match the description.
There is nothing about Japan that suggests otherwise. One example being whether you agree with capital punishment or not, their method of never giving you advance notice is torture, for both the prisoner and their family.
stealing or overstaying visa is crime everywhere. why surprised about arrest? other countries ignore this?
from japan.
The surprise isn't about the arrest. The surprise is about the extremely harsh conditions people are placed in after being arrested--without any proportionality of what they were arrested for, before it is known whether or not they are guilty of the crime that was accused.
Rule 34 of internet conversations about justice is that someone will always say "just obey the law" even if the law is the death penalty for walking on the grass.
Far too many HN “Japan understanders” receive all their opinions about Japan from US activists who get paid to write hate pieces about Japanese culture.
Just look at this thread. Yakuza? Taking umbrellas = go to jail? These people are morons. Worse, they think they are informed.
Maybe the BoJ didn’t burn enough money on US bonds this week or something. I can never understand the timing of these things or who is funding them.
China would be a good guess.
Torturing prisoners not even convicted of a crime is something we don't do in America.
Well, not as official policy anyway.
I dunno, I think maybe that is a big part of why these countries are so safe? It is a form of meritocratic classism if you will. You are expected to be a certain kind of (law-abiding among other things) person. If you behave like you might not be the kind of person you get an implicit "social credit" downgrade and are treated like crap end to end. Sure, they might be "overreacting" all things considered, but in the US on the other hand there are examples of clearly dangerous people being catch and released because rights and dignity, until they actually murdered someone. There's a tradeoff, but the Japanese approach appears to be closer to the optimal point.
Wear a body camera while in public, one that is always recording. It won't save you from absurd prescription drug charges though.
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
For those somehow actually considering this: make sure to check local laws, might be super illegal or at least inadmissible, (im)morality nonwithstanding. Although just because it's illegal, inadmissible, or immoral, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it of course.
Also maybe don't use the Meta glasses for this, even if you do decide to go for it. Not so sous anymore if you do.
Tl;dr: you are in effectively the hole (but stricter) for anything between 1 day and months, without charges. It is torture. As in actual torture.
Fact check... anyone can confirm this treatment is standard in Japan?
You can try looking at this manga posted by a Japanese person that was detained for marijuana possession https://xcancel.com/kime_neko/status/1634511023167381504. It's in Japanese, but you can use a machine translator and/or look at the drawings.
The facilities and food look slightly better (maybe because it's a detention centre in Tokyo), but it mostly matches. Although the mangaka seemed to have a much more positive outlook on it, probably because they could read all the Japanese books they wanted and speak to their cellmates in Japanese.
Pretty standard.
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Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar hell. It doesn't help.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Language barrier: Forced to communicate only in Japanese
To be clear, what the author said is that communicating in any language besides Japanese is prohibited with anyone. So if you share a cell with an inmate who speaks your native language, you're not allowed to speak with them in that language. I think that expected to be allowed to speak with inmates is not a sign of arrogance, and I don't know any other country that has a similar restriction.
Another issue is whether the author is allowed to communicate about her case in her native language. If she's asked to sign forms, make statements, or expected to understand her legal procedure, one would expect that the police would provide a translator to ensure that she's treated fairly. Certainly, that would be the norm in the West.
> The arrogance of American tourists is truly boundless. How dare Japanese people not speak English! Who do they think they are?
That's not the issue. At least in the US it is unconstitutional to bar inmates from speaking or communicating in non-English languages.
Likewise the US legal system is required to provide you an interpreter who can speak in a language you are proficient in.
Whether these rights are properly upheld in the US is another question but they are rights you are entitled to.
That's the main issue. These are rights that Americans are accustomed to and it's not always obvious to them when they leave the country that these rights aren't universal among developed countries.
> The arrogance of American tourists is truly boundless. How dare Japanese people not speak English! Who do they think they are?
This attitude is so unbelievably prevalent among native English speakers. "Obviously everyone should speak *my* language -- why should I ever have to learn another one?"
One would think "not being able to speak anything but Japanese" would be a problem for anyone not speaking Japanese, not just English speakers specifically, so this framing is more than a bit ironic, don't you think?
Seriously, what is so baffling about expecting an interpreter to be provided? Even if you do "speak" the language, this is not some everyday environment, and evidently not a good-faith one either. If I got into a similar situation in the US or similar, you can be sure as shit I'd ask for one too, even though I do believe I have a reasonable command over the English language in general.
An interpreter is in fact provided for important communications, but it's a given that there's not going to be interpreters on-hand for every foreign prisoner 24/7. I think most people would simply accept that a language barrier is a normal fact of life of being arrested in a foreign country. The expectation of not needing to speak a foreign language in a foreign country seems to be a uniquely English one, and it manifests in other ways. There are many people who come to Japan to teach English without understanding a word of Japanese, and then complain about the difficulty of life, how restaraunt staff won't speak English or provide an English menu for them, how this and that are not provided for in English. They don't attempt to learn Japanese even after teaching for 5+ years, and yet criticise Japan for not catering to their needs. The sense of entitlement gets nauseating after you've witnessed it enough.
So the claim was misleading, and they do in fact provide the interpreters that are entitled to wish for?
I guess I see what you mean, but I feel there would have been a way to express this all better.
You are legally entitled to an interpreter when being questioned by police or while in court. I believe the claims in the article are exaggerated, I would speculate intentionally so as the author is an engagement-farming content creator who has made several videos about the subject garnering hundreds of thousands of views. Of course, it is possible their experience was worse than what they are legally entitled to -- the real world often doesn't live up to ideals and legal rights can be violated -- but they speak in broad generalizations about the system as a whole that are not representative.
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Please don't respond by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This sounds like a monk-styled meditation retreat where one just get fed and can just keep doing meditation all day alone.
Sounds a heaven for someone who is ready for it but hell for those whose thoughts run amok.
You getting one hour of sleep is meditating and no going outside?
This guy has a way rosier view of the US justice system than either I or anybody I know who has been arrested or sent to jail has.