Hostname: page-component-55f67697df-sqlfs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-05-09T20:14:55.598Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Transfer of Power at Japan's Justice Ministry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Lawrence Repeta
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

It may take a little while to get used to this. Longtime observers of the approach to criminal justice sponsored by LDP governments have grown accustomed to several disturbing aspects, including harassment and prosecution of political dissidents on trivial charges (see, e.g., David McNeill), repeated efforts to expand police power through legislation such as the wiretapping law, the long-proposed criminal conspiracy law and others, and total disregard of criticisms and recommendations from international human rights treaty organizations. (Link)

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 7 , Issue 44 , November 2009 , e2
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2009

References

Notes

1 Link.

2 For a valuable discussion of this issue, see David T. Johnson, The Japanese Way of Justice, pp.273-74 (Oxford University Press, 2002).

3 Gavan McCormack's timely book, Client State (Verso, 2007) provides a finely detailed account of this era, including description not only of government measures to promote militarization, but also violent attacks on opponents by rightwing extremists.

4 For description of several cases of prosecutor brutality in the interrogation room, see Johnson, supra n. 2, at 254-63.

5 Johnson, supra n. 2, at 120.

6 The Shibushi case involved the prosecution of 11 individuals for vote buying in a local election in Kagoshima. Many were subject to abusive interrogations for months, including the successful candidate, who was detained for an incredible 395 days. Despite the interrogators' success in producing several confessions, all defendants were found not guilty by a trial court that decided the confessions were coerced and the entire story was concocted by the police. See Norimitsu Onishi, “Pressed by Police, Even Innocent Confess in Japan,” New York Times, May 11, 2007.

Japanese human rights lawyers produced a 45 minute documentary film of this incident which was shown at the headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva and other venues. See this source.