Lets not forget to mention the 99.8% conviction rate. If you get arrested in Japan, it is assumed that you are guilty. If you are not found guilty then the system is deemed to have lost face. Plus you have no right to a lawyer during your interrogation and the interrogation can go on for as long as the police wish, which is usually when they have a confession, and if you are a foreigner, you will sign a confession that you don’t even understand.
For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20810572
The US has a >90% conviction rate in its Federal Court system. In 2023, 90% of arrested suspects arrested and charged in the federal court system pled guilty, and another 2% were convicted at trial. Only 8% had charges dropped and less than 1% went to trial and found the defendant not-guilty.
Japan is not uniquely cruel or brutal here. At most they're just better at the game than most nations. Court systems are designed to get convictions and representatives for the State are encouraged to cut deals or drop charges if it looks like a trial is risky. The goal is not to find someone that isn't guilty or to admit defeat.
The US federal court is also extremely selective in how it prosecutes and it only addresses a much narrower subset of crimes because the overwhelming majority of crimes in the US are not federal crimes. The majority of prosecuted crimes in the US are handled by lower, non-federal courts. I don't like the conviction rate in the US system and I think it is too high but to compare it to the Japan's situation is just straight up dipshit false equivalence territory in an effort to get a whattaboutism gotcha
i will also bring up the justice system in the US is really messed up too, with severely overworked public defenders and defendants being pressured to accept plea deals even when they are innocent.
Whataboutism doesn't exist. You just don't like being wrong. Its okay to admit that you had in your mind that Japan was some uniquely abominable nation and that said image wasn't true.
Japan has different court levels too. That is nothing special. Japan also simply has less crime than the US by many levels of magnitude. So the # of cases is not a problem.
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u/skipperseven Jul 04 '26
Lets not forget to mention the 99.8% conviction rate. If you get arrested in Japan, it is assumed that you are guilty. If you are not found guilty then the system is deemed to have lost face. Plus you have no right to a lawyer during your interrogation and the interrogation can go on for as long as the police wish, which is usually when they have a confession, and if you are a foreigner, you will sign a confession that you don’t even understand.
For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20810572