In the 80s, I lived in Tokyo for a few years, and on my very first night there I learned first-hand about the Japanese criminal justice system, albeit it on a small and harmless scale. A friend and I had a dispute with a taxi driver, who, after assuring us that he knew the way to our inn, drove around and around in circles, clearly lost, finally ending up right back where we started. All along, he had refused to turn off his meter. Being young, and maybe not too smart, we refused to pay for his mistake; hence the dispute. We took our suitcases and walked a couple of blocks and stumbled onto our inn, where we settled onto the sofa in the lounge with a cup of green tea and watched “The Odd Couple” dubbed in Japanese on TV.
Soon the front door slid open with a bang and four Japanese policemen rushed in, pausing only to exchange their shoes for slippers, our grumpy old taxi driver bringing up the rear. In a country with a very low crime rate, we were Public Enemy Ichiban. They took us down to the station in separate patrol cars and put us in separate interrogation rooms. Their manner was cold to hostile. Great, I thought, I’m about to set some kind of record for quick deportation.
The one smart thing I had done was to read a book on Japanese history and culture on the way over. One phrase in particular had stuck with me: “sincere repentance.” If you wanted leniency from the authorities in Japan, you had to be sincerely repentant. So we apologized and offered to pay the fare, and it was like a switch flipped and night turned to day. The cops were suddenly our best friends, joking with us, asking us if it was true that everyone in New York carried a gun (of course, we said), and they went out of their way to drop us off at a restaurant they recommended.
It was a good thing it was all over a taxi fare and not a murder. Sincere repentance is all well and good if you’re guilty, but what if you’re innocent and the stakes are high? Presumption of innocence appears not to be a mainstay of the Japanese criminal justice system. If you’re in the police’s grasp, it’s because they think you did it, and what they want to hear is sincere repentance, not your denials. From that, the interrogation tactics flow.
In 1991, Toshikazu Sugaya was accused of murdering a child after a witness said he had been at the pachinko parlor where the child was last seen. After a 13-hour confession, during which he said the police kicked him, Sugaya confessed, and he spent the next 17 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He was exonerated and released last year after prosecutors admitted that his confession was coerced and that a DNA test used in support of the conviction was faulty. “Before, I was famous for being a criminal. Now I’m famous for being innocent,” Sugaya said.
Awareness of false confessions appears to be reaching a critical mass in Japan, where the highest court recently ordered a retrial for two men who had been serving life sentences in a 1967 murder-robbery case. A recent editorial by the Asahi newspaper cites a number of cases that “have raised serious questions.” One of the cases wasbig news in 2007, involving an alleged vote-buying scheme by 13 middle-aged to elderly men and women. Six confessed, but all were eventually acquitted when a local court found that their confessions had been coerced, making “confessions in despair while going through marathon questioning,” according to the presiding judge.
Japan has an astounding conviction rate of over 99%, and an estimated 90% of convictions are achieved through confessions. Hence, confessions are known in Japan as the “King of evidence.” With police able to hold suspects for up to 23 days before they are charged, and with prosecutors only proceeding with a case if they are sure they can win, you can see how psychological and cultural dynamics like “sincere repentance” are exploited.
“The detective grabbed my ankles so I gripped the chair thinking he was about to pull me off it,” said Sachio Kawabata, one of the suspects in the vote-buying case. “He said to the other detective, ‘Kawabata has no blood or tears,’ meaning I was cruel, I had no feelings.” “Look, he can tread on his fathers and grandchildren,” the detective reportedly said as he made Kawabata stomp on a paper with the names of his family on it, a shameful act in Japanese culture. In Japan , as in every other culture, a suspect has his limits. As the book “Torture and Democracy” puts it, “In a society where sincere repentance matters, a confession generates ninjo, warmth and understanding, in officials, thereby lessening the severity of punishment.”
There are signs of reform happening. The jury system, which was suspended during World War II, has been reinstated, which is expected to counterbalance some of the power of prosecutors. And many are calling for the recording of interrogations: “They should squarely deal with growing calls to make the interrogation process ‘visible’ to outsiders,” as the Asahi editorial put it. Without a doubt, awareness of false confessions is increasing, which can only help. Masayuki Suo, the director of the hit film “Shall We Dance,” wrote and directed “Sore Demo Boku Wa Yatte Nai” (“I Just Didn’t Do It”), based on the true story of a young man who falsely confessed to a sexual assault.
For now, though, interrogation remains an unfortunate universal language, and confessions, too often false, remain the King of Evidence in Japan .