By Henry Hilton

Commentary Jul. 25, 2008 - 07:54AM JST ( 13 )

Waves of enthusiastic applause greeted the private showing of the first ever documentary by the prestigious Japan Federation of Bar Associations. Hiroo Ikeda’s movie on the seemingly dry-as-dust subject of contemporary law gives the lie to the idea that nobody cares tuppence about justice in Japan. In a careful 48-minute production titled “Presumed Guilty - Creating False Confessions,” the nation is in for a shock.

It might just begin to change public attitudes and could herald the beginnings of a new era, particularly as the introduction of lay judges in 2009 ties in neatly with this wider focus on what goes on inside the system.

No one doubts that there are problems with all national arrangements; opinion polls suggest that most Brits would like to see suspects in terrorist cases banged up immediately, but Japan’s appear particularly nasty.

By surveying the case of alleged vote-buying in a quiet hamlet in rural Kagoshima, Ikeda’s documentary highlights the widespread use of false confessions within Japan. Over a dozen individuals were brought in by the police and subjected to repeated interrogation to force them to agree to accusations that were simply not true.

Mental and possibly physical pressure was applied to win false confessions. A variety of long-established techniques were employed, including the distasteful one of inventing letters purporting to be from family members of suspects that required the accused to trample on the writings. The ploy will be familiar to those recalling what happened to early Christians in the same region four centuries ago who were thereby forced to apostatize. Not much seems to have changed.

What seems particularly hard to comprehend is that some of the accused were placed in “daiyo kangoku” (substitute prisons) for as long as a year, while police and prosecutors worked on persuading them to cooperate. These detention centers are, in fact, prison cells where Japanese lawyers cannot attend pre-trial interrogations and the whole process is made even less fair by the refusal, to date, to permit proper video recordings of the sessions.

The only bit of good news out of Kagoshima is that eventually all the accused were found not guilty and one individual has been able to secure some pretty limited compensation from the
state. Let’s hope that others, too, will gain belated funding and that the use of confessions in far more serious capital cases will also become history. When entire murder cases can resolve around questionable confessions, the very least one can say is that Japan has a problem and a half.

It is possible though that, in the opinion of Shinichiro Koike, a lawyer closely involved in monitoring the Kagoshima cases, that public attention on such official misbehavior is growing. Japan, thanks to a lessening gut feeling that those accused are probably guilty, could be breaking out of its traditional respect for authority. Maybe we need banner headings warning all and sundry that the state isn’t always right.

Copies of the documentary with subtitles in English are available from Shin Nippon Films, Shibuya-ku. Tel: 03-3496-4871.