Current resident of Tokyo. Can be a little scary when getting randomly searched. I could argue, but my Japanese is intermediate and the police are always right.
A youtuber interviewed a trial lawyer [1] last year and I thought it was really good. I wasn't aware that the holding days could be extended for each crime that you "commit." There's an entire scheme to this:
3 days - initial detainment
10 days - judge determines whether you can be charged or not
10 days - possible extension.
If you commit two crimes, that could be up to 46 days in detainment.
Basically, don't come to Japan and do anything questionable and everything should be fine. In the unlikely event you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, you should know how to wield Japanese well to try to get yourself out of it.
On the other hand, I watched an interaction between a couple of foriegners and the police one day. They were drinking in the park one day (legal and common) and the police were called on them for unknown reasons. After the police arrived, they basically told the police to go away for an hour and refused to show their resident's card (both also legal). Backups and backups of backups were called and eventually they dispersed. I think this is a good example of how there is a lot of restraint with regards to police here. I believe in most other countries jail would have been imminent out of disrespect.
The thing about Japan is that once you're caught up in the system, it has no mercy.
> I believe in most other countries jail would have been imminent out of disrespect.
Is this part accurate? In the (admittedly few) countries where I have spent a lot of time and have gained any real experience dealing with the police, they have proven to have a relatively genial and pro-community outlook, aiming more to help people and prevent harm, rather than browbeating and abusing people.
My impression is that the so-called offence of "contempt of cop" (i.e. being arrested for being a smart-ass or upsetting a cop's feelings, rather than any genuine breach of the law or peace) is a bit of a North American phenomenon, but no doubt my perception is being affected by sampling bias there, having been exposed to American media etc.
In my (non-American) experience, you must push things incredibly far to get anything more than a sarcastic laugh or eye-roll or "move along, mate" from a cop.
This was one of the most shocking events I experienced when visiting China.
You read how it’s basically a “police state” but the reality is the people argue and yell at the cops all the time!
Cops in China seem to almost have no authority in regular interactions. My local coworkers would basically just ignore their commands and talk back to them.
Granted, I was in Shanghai and the people I was with were middle class locals, so perhaps that’s why the interactions were like that.
Still, if I acted that way back home, I know I would have been arrested.
It (mostly) works like that pretty much everywhere, not only in North America where probably the news system make the phenomenon more noticeable. I think it's the result of bad selection done on purpose: the effect is that it moves the blame to the police rather than those who give them orders and power, and apparently it works.
And then there's that thing about steroids abuse which if proven would explain a lot since the side effects of that shit match suspiciously close to how abusive violent cops behave.
It doesn't work like that everywhere, certainly not in Eastern Europe, which is a broad term that includes both police countries and the opposite of police countries, a wide range of policing behavior, but I don't think any of them is as brutal as the US. In Russia, for example, fear of the police is pushed from the very top, people fear it a lot, maybe not as much as in the US, but a lot and disrespecting the police is certainly going to get you in trouble. But in Ukraine it's the opposite, it's not a police country, police don't do and can't do much against disrespect and people can always just runaway from the police.
Similarly, photography during a traffic accident is enough to get you into trouble with the cops in Deutschland. There are plenty of ways to run afoul of law enforcement without actually breaching the peace.
I come from small town America and NYC, so I'm jaded. There are a lot of good cops out there who set out with good intentions, but I believe their training is inadequate. In my experience, they do not act as stewards of a community, but rather someone with power who is to be feared.
In regards to my comment of "most other countries," I believe 'most' could be changed to 'many'
American police are corrupted by a catastrophically broken justice system that, in effect, makes cops judge, jury, and executioner. I call it the "martial law bubble" that surrounds each cop. That's bad enough but what makes it galling is how they expect you to be grateful and friendly when stopped and fined, questioned, etc.
But I honestly don't think its their fault. A working justice system would mean a) getting arrested is no big deal, and b) cops are held accountable for their excesses.
(The system is broken because of capacity, complexity of law, powerful police unions, and voter apathy and ignorance)
> That's bad enough but what makes it galling is how they expect you to be grateful and friendly when stopped and fined, questioned, etc.
Wow. You are right on the money. So well put and so succinct. This isn't just a problem with cops though. It's in the culture at large. People in power not only expect to hurt others and fuck them over, but also that others should be grateful for being fucked over. Got passed up for the promotion / raise and instead got more responsibility with no increase in pay? You should be thankful you still got a job. Got wrongfully arrested, charged, and offered a plea deal to go to jail for something you didn't do? You should be grateful for the 5 year prison deal. You'll get 30 years at trial. Oh you're innocent? We don't care. Got overcharged by a company for a bill that's not even in your name? You should be thankful you can spend two hours a day every day for two weeks on the phone trying to get the charges reversed before they send you to collections. Got invaded by the US and millions of your citizens slaughtered? You should be thankful and grateful for the US bringing "freedom" to your country. The "freedom" to thank the US for killing your family. In all of these cases and so much more, the victim is expected to be thankful to their perpetrator while the perpetrator is fucking over the victim. It's a huge part of American culture and the police are just one example of it.
> I call it the "martial law bubble" that surrounds each cop.
Ironically, given the discussion about Japanese cops, I refer to it by a Japanese term: kirisute-gomen, "the privilege to cut and leave". If you were a commoner and offended a samurai, the samurai had the legal right to kill you with his sword and didn't even have to report it (hence "cut and leave".) Samurai also used live commoners as swordsmanship practice dummies, but this practice was nominally illegal (still rarely enforced though).
And that's what cops are in the USA: a special privileged warrior class with rights to use violence indiscriminately that commoners do not have.
My knowledge of this era is limited to the 80's mini-series "Shogun", based on the book by James Clavell, but wow, I never made that connection before, thanks.
It may alleviate some performance anxiety in a high pressure job with huge responsibilities, but is up against a range of management decisions like quota based policing and other systematic factors influencing policing away from stewardship in a community. Trying to reduce it to a single factor may be simplistic given the complexity of the problem.
It seems for the US it's not, there's groupthink that some citizens are the enemy and they're hungry for police blood. That's why they say "thin blue line" or "cops lives matter", and they aren't even being ironic.
People learn by example. Either you give the well thought out patterns of behaviour with training, or, they learn them in the field. So, with proper training, they would not necessarily have to have to mirror the learned bad habits of others.
Police have no such legal obligation to be stewards of the community, anymore than Google must be the champion of righteousness. From what do we assume that without incentive or structure that one day moral expectation is sufficient to bring forth the character and quality we expect?
Is this not similar to calling for more medical or legal ethics classes?
Police do have such a legal obligation. The whole point of a police force is to maintain public safety. You might argue that this has been corrupted into “arrest people” by quotas or bad culture or civil forfeiture or revenue-based policing or whatever, but their mission statement is fundamentally about keeping people safe. That’s totally different from a for-profit search engine.
Where does this legal obligation come from? State law? The constitution? Is the mission of an organization the slogan they put on cars or websites?
Expecting police to be stewards of the community is the same as expecting ICANN to be stewards of the web — it’s a lot of unchecked moral assumptions for how things are supposed to work, rather than structuring a result to happen. It’s also a failure to discuss the imperatives created by who feeds whom, and why moral presumption of police workings should matter in the face of that.
Americans believe it is the structure of their federal government which generates stressful imperatives for different bodies to behave “well”. What structure guides any faith or optimism that police will be stewards of the community?
Have American police been generating a lot of faith and optimism recently?
Are you citing the non-binding "protect and serve" motto, or something else? Enforcing the law isn't necessarily about keeping people safe - whether that's true depends on what the laws are.
You could easily get put away for "contempt of cop" here in Australia. This goes double if you are the wrong sort of person to talk back to a cop: e.g. indigenous. For a while there was a holy trinity: "disorderly conduct" (anything they wanted), "resisting arrest" (when they grab you randomly) and "obscene language" (when the person says 'fuck this').
Maybe things are better in NZ but I would not experiment with "contempt of cop" here in Sydney unless I had a nice clear schedule and didn't mind spending a bit of time behind bars.
> In my (non-American) experience, you must push things incredibly far to get anything more than a sarcastic laugh or eye-roll or "move along, mate" from a cop.
It probably depends on where you are too. I witnessed a guy beating his kids with a belt in full public view outside a Chick Fil A two blocks from Times Square - the police had no interest at all in chasing it up.
> countries where I have spent a lot of time and have gained any real experience dealing with the police, they have proven to have a relatively genial and pro-community outlook, aiming more to help people and prevent harm
>My impression is that the so-called offence of "contempt of cop" (i.e. being arrested for being a smart-ass or upsetting a cop's feelings, rather than any genuine breach of the law or peace) is a bit of a North American phenomenon
>refused to show their resident's card (both also legal)
Do you mean legal residents, or not showing their ID is legal? Because if police ask for a foreigner's resident card, they have to present it. [1, Q41]
You are required to show your card to police when they suspect there is a crime. You can refuse by asking if there is a reason to believe there was a crime and if this is a "professional inquiry"
If yes, they must provide the reason. [1] At that point, you may have to show them your card depending on the circumstances. They may leave you alone, however.
My experience: I was once taking photos in a dark alley for some cyberpunk type shots around 9 p.m. I was approached by two officers who asked, "What are you doing here?" Kind of a trick question, because then they said, "Oh, you speak Japanese. Do you have your resident's card?"
I complied here because of the optics. After complying to show my card, my bag and me were fully searched which I was not okay with. After that I experience, I became well acquainted with my rights because, at that time, I did know them well.
As a gaijin in Japan, you have exactly the rights the police officer wishes to afford you and no more.
Police have almost unlimited power in Japan, and gaijin have no rights at all. Japanese citizens have some, but in general will not exercise them due to their cultural upbringing.
> I believe in most other countries jail would have been imminent out of disrespect.
I live in a place where cops are no angels, but no, they won't kick you out of park without being able to state reason. That example is not restraint of cop, that is abuse of power by cops example.
And possibly not first attempt to prevent them what people of different race can do which is possibly why they did not cooperated at first.
It's strange how Japan gets so much attention for this. It's about the same in every country.
According to Wikipedia:
>In Canada, the national conviction rate is about 97%. This does not include cases in which the charges are dropped, which comprise about one-third of criminal cases. Absent Quebec, the province with the lowest conviction rate, the figure is 99%.
If a country has a low conviction rate, it could be because cops are arresting lots of innocent people. It could be because courts are being bribed and letting people go. High conviction rates can mean anything from police only arresting people when they know a person is guilty, to them picking up anyone off the street and throwing them away without a fair trial. Percentage alone, generally, isn't something worth looking into.
The linked audio is only 9 minutes long, and it addresses this exact point. The Wikipedia figure for Canada is wrong. The straight acquittal rate is ~3%, but the other 97% are not convictions, only about 60% are.
They also interview a professor who authored a book on the Japanese justice system who explains why the conviction rate is so high. It turns out we can answer questions like this without relying on uninformed guesses by HN commenters. Amazing.
> The Wikipedia figure for Canada is wrong. The straight acquittal rate is ~3%, but the other 97% are not convictions, only about 60% are.
I've observed what happens in Australia (wasn't me personally, but someone I know). Charged with a crime for which the evidence was rather weak/debatable. His family could afford a good barrister and expert witnesses. As soon as the defence expert witness finishes demolishing the prosecution's case from the witness stand, the prosecution move for the case to be dismissed.
It was very obvious that if he had been a poor person, whose family couldn't afford to pay many $10,000s on good lawyers and expert witnesses, the prosecution would have won the case. But I think that's their technique. Charge lots of people, some of whom are well-resourced enough to cast doubt on the prosecution's case, others are not. Fold against the former, win against the later. So long as they get enough of the later and not too much of the former, pat themselves on the back for meeting their targets.
> The Wikipedia figure for Canada is wrong. The straight acquittal rate is ~3%, but the other 97% are not convictions, only about 60% are.
The wikipedia article isn't really wrong. Only 60% of the cases go before a jury. The conviction rate for cases that get to the jury around the 95% rate.
> They also interview a professor who authored a book on the Japanese justice system who explains why the conviction rate is so high.
Yes. Pretty much prosecutors only prosecute cases they think they'll win and have leverage over defendants. The same issue you have in Canada and we have in the US.
> It turns out we can answer questions like this without relying on uninformed guesses by HN commenters.
Too bad you didn't choose bother to answer any of the questions.
> The wikipedia article isn't really wrong. Only 60% of the cases go before a jury. The conviction rate for cases that get to the jury around the 95% rate.
The Canadian criminal trial lawyer interviewed for this podcast specifically stated that if your case goes all the way to an actual trial, your chances (statistically) are 50/50.
She also stated that the rate Wikipedia reports for Canada isn't useful because the way it comes to this number is wrong and misleading.
Please actually listen to the podcast before spreading misinformation.
> The wikipedia article isn't really wrong. Only 60% of the cases go before a jury. The conviction rate for cases that get to the jury around the 95% rate.
You'd have a point if the stat about Japan was about the conviction rate of people who go before a jury, but unless I'm mistaken, the conviction rate we're talking about is that of people _charged_ overall.
That 60% figure in Canada is precisely referring to people who were charged, and whose charges were later dropped. Over 99.4% of people charged in Japan are eventually convicted.
Consider what it means to be charged. This allows for example the police to gather more information by doing what would otherwise infringe on someone's rights. So when you basically never drop charges, that means that either you infringe on people's privacy before they're charged, or you routinely disregard whatever exculpatory evidence you find. Either way, it's obviously bad.
It is certainly the case that "being charged" does not mean exactly the same thing in every country; the weight isn't the same everywhere, and the details differ too. So I suppose it's also conceivable that the japanese police can collect enough evidence without formal charges that the innocent go free there.
And of course - nobody is entirely innocent. Knowing that once charged you're almost certainly going to be convicted, perhaps suspects cooperate more in hope for leniency.
I mean, I doubt law enforcement are angels in japan, but I can imagine fairly benign factors contributing too.
Frankly - give how pervasive such high numbers are across much of the world, I'd say the argument for the efficacy of a confrontational legal system is undermined; clearly it's not working ideally.
> but unless I'm mistaken, the conviction rate we're talking about is that of people _charged_ overall.
You are mistaken.
"Nearly all criminal cases that go to trial in Japan end in a guilty verdict."
" Public prosecutors typically concentrate on suits where conviction is almost guaranteed, leading to the suspension of around 60 percent of criminal cases in Japan without an indictment."
So japanese prosecutors "drop" 60% of the cases/charges. The only cases they pursue are those they think they can win. They win 99% of those.
> That 60% figure in Canada is precisely referring to people who were charged, and whose charges were later dropped.
No. In the audio, they specifically stated that 37% ( or about a 3rd of the cases in canada ) are withdrawn, stayed or dropped. Meaning only 63% get to a jury. Of those, 3% are acquitted.
> Over 99.4% of people charged in Japan are eventually convicted.
Once again, this is not true. Only 40% of those charged ever see trial. Of those, 99.4% are convicted. In other words, 39.8% of those charged are convicted.
Edit: please disregard and listen to the audio which explains this perfectly.
Maybe the Canadian justice system is worth a look at too. I am not saying that such a conviction rate would always mean the same thing. Canada after all has a reputation for being one of the most civilized places. But it's certainly interesting to see why this might be the case. In Japan the reasons for this that are typically cited aren't very nice ones and it is those reasons that make the case against Japan on this, not necessarily the statistics themselves.
> [In 2009,] 97 percent of federal cases and 94 percent of state cases end in plea bargains, with defendants pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence.
Comparing US and German law systems, plea bargains are really undermining the law system. No proof beyond reasonable doubt is necessary, because most people cannot afford a full trial. It's back to the middle ages, into the debtors' tower (pay for your own accommodation there thank you very much), work for our companies prisoner (and never vote again). As plea bargains were introduced for "efficiency" (convenience), I am not sure if they could ever be abolished again.
As for "they did nothing wrong", in the USA people who don't have money for bail are held in jail until trial, which can be for many months, or even years in some cases. https://www.americasquarterly.org/aborn-prisons There are stories of prosecutors going to people held pending trial and offering them a deal: plead guilty, accept time served, and be out tomorrow, or maintain your innocence and carry on waiting for your trial in jail.
> people who don't have money for bail are held in jail until trial, which can be for many months, or even years
Not great, but what I'm complaining about here is people who are held in jail, released (after an acquittal or just a judgment that there was no good reason to pick them up in the first place), and then billed for having the temerity to be held against their will. This is not how commercial exchanges normally work. It also isn't how criminal punishments work, since -- and I can't emphasize this enough -- there is no pretense that these people did anything wrong.
In the US, the police can just confiscate your money without arresting you and keep it. They then have a trial where they put the money on trial. Not a person. The money itself is on trial. The absurdity is beyond comprehension. The injustice even worse. So of course they can charge you for staying in jail or prison, innocent or not. No one gives a fuck about justice here. Everyone is also used to getting fucked over and money stolen from them by unscrupulous companies. It's a universal experience to be overcharged, charged for shit you didn't buy, etc. and it's not always possible to fix it with chargebacks etc. So this is just an extension of the existing culture that doesn't value justice or doing the right thing and explicitly allows bad actors to fuck people over. This attitude extending to prisons and jails is hardly surprising especially when combined with the idea that many Americans have that if you're arrested, you are presumed guilty even before trial and deserve to get raped in jail even if your crime was minor. That's before you even get a trial and this attitude is so prevalent a lot of people are murdered by cops in jail before they even get to trial. So yeah, in light of the entire culture revolving around allowing the powerful to fuck over the weak, it's hardly surprising innocent people have to pay for their jail and prison stay. They should be thankful to their captors they're still alive (this gratefulness towards one's abuser is discussed in another comment here).
Jury trials are expensive as fuck, and you don't get a penny of it back if you win.
The most common offenses charged are less-serious things like DUI, where first offenders are likely to receive penalties like a fine, maybe a very short community service, and probation.
If you go to trial, you always might lose, and you will pay $50k of legal fees.
If the prosecutor offers you a $10k fine, what're you going to do?
Even if you could raise the $50k -- of you go to trial and lose (which is always possible), you are likely to get close to the maximum penalty for having fought.
> I wonder how many innocent plead guilty in a plea bargain
Probably a lot more than we'd like to admit.
> just because they don't have the resources to fight the charges.
It's not just that they don't have the resources. It's also a matter of risk assessment because a jury can be fickle. Lets say you have 20% chance of conviction and 80% chance of acquittal. The prosecutor offers you a plea deal for 1 year ( you get out in 6 months with good behavior ). If you choose to go to trial, the prosecutor says he is going to charge you with everything he can and if found guilty, you go to prison for 25 years. What do you do? You have 20% chance of spending quarter century in prison. Or you have 100% chance of 6 months ( 1 year at the max )? I think most people would choose the latter.
> Quite perverse incentives.
In a way. The system incentivizes plea deals because the prosecutor doesn't want to lose cases. So he only wants to try cases that are open and shut and go the plea deal route with the rest.
Consider this: Japan was a medieval society 152 years ago and then an Imperial militarist state that has modernised under US occupation. They're still quite strict and traditionalist today, like to enforce conformity.
> In 2017-2018, 3.6 % of criminal cases in adult courts led to acquittal, but 62 % led in a guilty decision, and 1/3 were withdrawn or subject to a crown stay.
To be fair in their comparison, they should have mention withdrawals in the Japanese courts. In 2016, 62.4% of the criminal charges were withdrawn[^1].
So, comparing the conviction rate on the initial charges (meaning that withdrawal of charges in taken into account):
Canada: 62% of the initial charges led to a conviction
Japan: 38%
Comparing the conviction rate excluding withdrawal:
Canada: 95% (62 out of 65.6)
Japan: 99%
As noted in the BBC audio and pointed in the article, Japan's system is unfair, but I think the rest of the comparison in the audio was biased.
The biggest problem is their coercive and brutal interrogation tactics, which result in false confessions.
There was a story a number of years ago about a cyber criminal who hacked victims computers to commit crimes, and then taunted the police about it after they forced false confessions from the hapless owners.
I find this interesting because a former coworker was in jail for about ten days. He was released due to no charges being pressed. Thing is, he’s a foreigner, and he hasn’t said anything about how he was treated.
Afaik he’s still in the country looking for work. So maybe it’s different for foreigners ( I wouldn’t he surprised if that’s the case )
The conviction rate in criminal trials should be high, perhaps 90% or higher.
A low conviction rate implies that a lot of shaky cases with poor evidence are being brought. This exposes innocent people to the inconvenience and expense of mounting a defense and to the possibility of a false conviction.
"The national conviction rate in India for offences of the Indian Penal Code is around 46%. This tends to vary state by state. The state with the highest conviction rate is Kerala, at about 84%, while the one with the lowest rate is Bihar, at around 10%."
Interesting programme. I guess the policy of a country - and it’s conviction rate - needs to balance the risk of innocent people jailed against the guilty walking free. I presume different countries legislate according to which they find more acceptable.
They only prosecute cases they think they can win, and then they beat and torture and sleep deprive a confession out of the suspect. If he doesn't confess, they keep him in jail for months of more torture and then convict him anyway. You generally only get out not-guilty if you pay a LOT of money to your lawyer, and even then it's a crap shoot. Also, you'll be unemployable regardless of the outcome, but it'll be much worse in society if you didn't confess, because now you're guilty and unpenitent.
Of course it's much more complex in reality, but that's the gist.
>and then they beat and torture and sleep deprive a confession out of the suspect
Horrible, and seemingly unconstitutional:
"No person shall be compelled to testify against himself.
Confession made under compulsion, torture or threat, or after prolonged arrest or detention shall not be admitted in evidence.
No person shall be convicted or punished in cases where the only proof against him is his own confession."[0]
Didn't listen to podcast but from other sources I've hear there is a cultural imperative to accept the police version of events because it is 'disrespectful' to doubt their word. Given Japanese deference to authority that seems plausible.
Haven't heard BBC's angle, but usually it is explained as a mix between forcing confessions from suspects and pushing reporters of hard to solve crimes to "admit" it never happened.
The 99% is not reports, only the percentage of cases brought to trial which the state won.
The common explanation is that without plee bargains the American system would have a similar conviction rate and thus one should not be too surprised. Unless one wishes their government prosecuted more people without hard evidence. TV shows may pull exonorating evidence ou of a hat but that is not real life.
tldr: a related article on the Australian ABC today claims 99.4% of all criminal cases that go to trail result in a conviction. Japanese prosecutors rely heavily on confessions, which are extracted after extended isolation and sleep deprivation.
wikipedia's take:
'Many Western human rights organizations alleged that the high conviction rate is due to rampant use of conviction solely based on confession. Confessions are often obtained after long periods of questioning by police as those arrested may be held for up to 23 days.'
Always funny watching the UK - where it was described that perverting the course of justice is an instrument of public policy - criticizing other countries legal systems. And bear in mind the UKs 80% (?) conviction rate occurs with a DPP that likes to "engage with risk". Whatever that means.
This is an extremely good programme that deserves more credit than sensitivity of that sort.
It's whole point is to delve neutrally into the numbers put out by different organisations to evaluate and explain the claims.
Given that scrutiny of UK organisations is the norm for it, and that a 99% conviction rate is a headline figure that would more normally be associated with somewhere like North Korea and which begs explanation, it's difficult to see what the problem is here?
I'm an American ex-prosecutor. Our conviction rate is similar -- many places are like this. Note that the 99% figure includes guilty pleas. If this statistic were about "99% of criminal trials end in victory for the prosecutor," now THAT would be something I'd expect to see linked to North Korea. But the extreme vast majority of crim cases never reach trial.
Both here in the States and in Japan, as well as elsewhere, a lot of the reason for the high conviction rate is understaffing. It's a combination of (a) not enough time and money to bring all cases to trial, and (b) only bringing the obviously guilty cases all the way to trial. Guilty pleas are everything. (I'm not saying that's a good thing, because it isn't, but it's the reality.) Approximately 97% of federal felony convictions result from pleas.
As a prosecutor, I felt far far more like a negotiator than a litigator. In one year, I handled approximately 700 cases and had only 2 trials. (Not all of the rest were convictions; many were moved to alternative resolutions (i.e., drug treatment programs), and a few were dismissed.) 700 cases in one year is an unethical number of cases, but what could anyone do? We were only paid ~$40,000 per year (on top of massive loan debt) and they still couldn't afford to hire more. Public defenders were similarly overworked. Hence the pleas, and the high conviction rates.
I'm pretty sure scrutiny of the UK system is down to about the Daily Mail and not much else. The BBC is more likely to criticize such scrutiny than engage in it itself.
And you make a lot of assumptions. 99% could mean a terrible system, or one where only solid cases are pursued. 80% could mean a robust trial system, or lots of shoddy cases pursued by a risk taking, politicized prosecution system.
If the 99% figure has merit, that is what the programme is intended to uncover.
Your point about the Daily Mail is lost on me - perhaps you could point to an alternative podcast on statistics that does a less biased job, so I can see the same nationalist perspective as you are seeing, and understand the value of your objection?
If you're not from the UK, you won't have heard of the Daily Mail - it's a tabloid rag, known for spewing hate, xenophobia (often borderline racism), and outrage, pandering to people's insecurities and using them to whip them up into a frenzy. I find it to be a destructive force in the UK.
I find the notion that it has resulted in anything positive at all in the UK, to be quite ludicrous.
You're using an incomplete, out context quote from a comedy programme that has the aim of seeing how far people can push the boundaries of free speech to make a comment about a completely different programme?
Same here in France. Everyone was shocked about the cruel treatment of Japanese inmates (more specifically Carlos Ghosn), but the media never mentioned the notoriously bad state of French prison. An objective comparison would have been interesting.
The terrible state of French prisons is well known, even though it's not a frequent topic of discussion. The terrible state for the rights of the accused is less well known, IMO. It's improved significantly over the past few decades thanks to numerous damning ECHR decisions, but very slowly and is still problematic. At least the accused now have access to a lawyer early in the process; this was not even common just 20 years ago despite it being a rather clear requirements to comply with a number of human rights supposedly enshrined in the constitution.
Having said that, said rights are less of an issue than in the US simply because we don't jail as many people, by far. It's shocking how easy it is to end up in jail for the average person in the US. Just failing to pay a ticket you didn't even know you ever got because it was ripped off from your car and the court summons was served to the wrong person can land you in jail in the US, but that doesn't happen in France.
A youtuber interviewed a trial lawyer [1] last year and I thought it was really good. I wasn't aware that the holding days could be extended for each crime that you "commit." There's an entire scheme to this:
If you commit two crimes, that could be up to 46 days in detainment.Basically, don't come to Japan and do anything questionable and everything should be fine. In the unlikely event you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, you should know how to wield Japanese well to try to get yourself out of it.
On the other hand, I watched an interaction between a couple of foriegners and the police one day. They were drinking in the park one day (legal and common) and the police were called on them for unknown reasons. After the police arrived, they basically told the police to go away for an hour and refused to show their resident's card (both also legal). Backups and backups of backups were called and eventually they dispersed. I think this is a good example of how there is a lot of restraint with regards to police here. I believe in most other countries jail would have been imminent out of disrespect.
The thing about Japan is that once you're caught up in the system, it has no mercy.
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1ZLGqL1FMo&vl=en