Forced to confess

ON THE face of it Japan’s system of criminal justice looks as if its gets a lot right. Crime rates are lower in Japan than almost anywhere else—the murder rate is less than a tenth of America’s. Those arrested for minor wrongdoing are treated with exceptional leniency. Less than one in 20 Japanese deemed to have committed a penal offence go to prison, compared with one in three of those arrested in America, where the average jail term is much longer. In Japan the emphasis is on rehabilitation, especially of young offenders. The rates of recidivism are admirably low, partly because the state is adept at involving families in reforming those who stray.Yet the state’s benign paternalism has a dark side. The chief reason the system looks good is that Japan is a remarkably safe society. And where once police worked closely with local communities to solve crimes, now they struggle to catch criminals. The system relies on confessions, which form the basis of nine-tenths of criminal prosecutions. Many confessions are extracted under duress. Some of those who admit guilt are plainly innocent, as recent exonerations have shown (see ). The extraordinary lack of safeguards for suspects in Japanese interrogation cells is a stain on the whole system, failing victims as well as those wrongly convicted.