Japan's legal system is a liberal bourgeois system, so of course it's bad. However, when compared to other bourgeois legal systems, it does not stand out as being dramatically worse.
For example, 97% of us federal indictments get pleaded out (i.e. the defendant admits to guilt) and of the remaining 3% that go to trial, more than 80% of defendants are convicted anyway.
You basically have the same chance of losing once you get sucked into either legal system, except Japan doesn't do plea bargaining so their stats seem worse in certain ways.
https://thediplomat.com/2020/03/carlos-ghosn-and-japans-99-conviction-rate/
I'm not saying any of this to defend the japanese legal system, but rather because the 99% stat most often gets trotted out when a white person is being accused of a crime to hypocritically delegitimize the process.
Actually, you'll find that not prosecuting crimes for which there is little or only circumstantial evidence is a good thing.
They also have 23 days of detention without charge in which they torture suspects with sleep deprivation and forcing them to face toward bright lights
And beating
In the US it's like 48 hours
They also only give bail to people who confess lmao. And they don't record the interrogations.
They can rearrest you after 23 days on new grounds, for another 23 days.
Japan is an irredeemably fascist state painted over with self-serving pacifism, led out of the militaristic era by the world's leading fascist hegemon.
And yet their incarceration and crime rates are way below the global average. Japan's police system isn't good, only police abolition is good, but their system is one of the best in the world in terms of outcomes, due in large part to their robust social democracy.
72 hours in most of the US. If someone confesses or pleas at 71 hours you know it was coerced somehow.
yeah, this is a fucking weird one because Japan is dumb as shit and reactionary - so before the change the laws led to absolutely goofy non-punishment of cyberbullying, cyberstalking and online abuse, but the underlying dogshit of what can constitute defamation in Japan makes it dangerous.
EDIT: CW for self harm
as @doublepepperoni guessed, this is literally a reaction to the suicide of Hana Kimura: a pretty notable pro wrestler who was massively on the rise, had a famous wrestler mother as a teacher, was becoming one of the top draws of STARDOM (the company she wrestled for) at like age 20.
...and then she went on Terrace House, a big reality TV show in Japan where 6 young adults move into a house together. An episode cast her in a bad light due to an argument with some guy who wrecked her wrestling attire in the washing machine - the editing made her out to be a psychotic villain and the guy to be a "woe is me" downtrodden man who hadn't done anything wrong (when he had just wrecked her attire that she wore at Wrestle Kingdom in the Tokyo Dome - NJPW's biggest show of the year, in the biggest venue possible, where NJPW only ever holds men's matches - Japanese wrestling companies are largely gender-segregated but the history of that is way too long to explain).The episode kicked off a shitstorm of twitter and japanese social media abuse where 1000s of people daily told her to kill herself mixed in with misogyny and racism (another long one to explain but Kyoko Kimura, while born in japan, is apparently mixed and faced a lot of racism about it).
Hana then effectively posted her suicide note on twitter and posted images of self harm alongside pics of abusive DMs before she stopped responding on social media - she'd killed herself with Hydrogen Sulfide.The first guy arrested for the online abuse he sent her literally admitted it and responded he "couldn’t forgive Kimura’s attitude on the program", but under the law at the time he was fined the applicable amount: $80
Eighty fucking dollars was the cost of bullying someone into their suicide over a reality TV show.Ever since, Kyoko Kimura has been lobbying the Japanese Parliament for new laws/changes to the crimes act to increase penalties for online abuse that causes harm. It was personal on multiple levels, as she had to go identify her dead daughter and then read her DMs that were filled with the same racism she'd been abused with forever.
But the big problem on the other side is that these laws apparently fall under the umbrella of defamation laws in Japan, and defamation in Japan is fucked - because you can defame a person or organisation whether the statement is true or false.
Only if "the act relates to matters of public interest and has been conducted solely for the benefit of the public, the truth or falsity of the alleged facts shall be examined, and punishment shall not be imposed if they are proven to be true". Given the cappies control the levers of power, what is actually "in the public interest" can be redefined to protect business at any time. This is cooked.It's another example of a theoretically good law that will get twisted by the system into something terrible. Not unlike all the government surveillance in the West that's been justified by counter terrorism or protecting kids from pedophiles.
Japan is a country where people can still be denied jobs and educations based on their parents being communists, so I have no doubt this law will ultimately be used for shitty purposes.
Japan is a country where people can still be denied jobs and educations based on their parents being communists, so I have no doubt this law will ultim
Source? Cant find, sorry
I wish I had a good source to give you. Unfortunately I only know about this because people I know have been subjected to it, and one person I know witnessed it happening (i.e. sat in on a meeting where a candidate was denied due to failing a background check for having parents in the JCP).
It's common enough that you can find people asking about whether it's true or not on stuff like Japanese Yahoo answers, but I'd rather say "I can't prove it" than trot that out as proof.
I assume this is more aimed towards cyberbully/stalker types harassing people until they kill themselves
yea it definitely won't ever be aimed at anything else, cool cool no doubt
Just saying that Japanese cyberbullies can get pretty relentless
It's a significant increase from the existing punishments of detention for fewer than 30 days and a fine of up to 10,000 yen ($75).
Sounds pretty weird but we should probably look into the enforcement of the existing law before we get too excited about this change.
This is what the west dumbmocracy like to accuse China of. Now one of their vassal buck, wonder what will they say
Japan's also been getting more nationalistic and upping their military spending. Looks like a return to the Hirohito days.
How much do you want to bet this’ll be used against people bringing up Japan’s war crimes
How much do you want to bet this’ll be used against people bringing up Japan’s war crimes
Yeah that was my first thought, too.
I am completely for such laws, free speech is always for companies and our true powerlevel speech is restricted to really good opsec on peer to peer internets with full encryption and tor like entry nodes on one hand and the meatspace on the other hand, anyhow.
No offense to the free speech warriors, but internet harassment laws are really needed.
I mean, in some sense I agree. But I'd like to think that punishment should be "delete your account" rather than "have your life ruined by a prison sentence".
Rabid, mentally ill, chan-brained people who organize hate campaigns for the most mundane of reasons have become an even bigger problem around the world, and ignoring them just leads to deranged shit like the Sandy Hook trutherism.
There's such an enormous gulf between "ignoring internet hate groups" and "imprisoning people who gets caught spamming a celebrity's Twitter feed".
i mean, if it's a kid being cyber bullied, telling them to log off is like telling them not to go to school. isolating yourself from social situations where bullies might exist doesn't solve the problem and it's basically impossible anyway.
if you've got a strong irl support network then you can log off - but if you've got that kind of support the cyber comments probably aren't going to bother you as much.
Is spreading rumors around online also cyberbullying? You could be entirely offline but everyone you know could hear and spread gossip about you online.
i didn't even think about that, but yeah I would qualify that as cyberbullying too. My point is just that you can't just log off unless you have a strong offline social group (which most kids in the developed world really don't have).
Cyberbullying can just be "your address is 123 oak lane and I am going to break into your house and blow your brains out"
So no
It won't work
Idk, my brother was cyberbullied and I don't think logging off would have helped entirely.
On the other hand, I have a friend who was being getting abused on Twitter by someone and logging off certainly seems to have helped.
I guess the situation is too complex for there to be a one size fits all answer.
I thought it was dumb then and I think it's dumb now. You can log off, sure - when you're not forced to use the internet for work/school - but you can't make everyone else log off. People can still spread hateful content to your family and friends, they can still spread rumors and start hashtag campaigns that all of your peers will see.
And even beyond that, oftentimes the people who face the most harassment online are the ones who have the most trouble fitting in with the real world. They hang out in weirdo anime forums or furry Tumblr and get most of their validation from other internet users. Whether or not that is healthy, these communities don't deserve to be stalked by people hunting for the next big "lolcow" or whatever. They deserve to have safe access to their online communities.
With all of that said, do some people deserve it? Well yeah. The world shouldn't be a safe space for reactionaries. There are some people who should be afraid to show their face, online or otherwise.
