Japan Books : The Japanese Way of Justice: Prosecuting Crime in Japan (Studies on Law and Social Control)

Prosecutors have more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any organization in Japan. Ironically, this proposition elicits widespread agreement but few serious efforts to explore its causes, consequences, or significance. The irony makes the procuracy a little like the weather: everyone discusses it but no one does anything about it.

This is the first book in English to analyze how Japan's 2000 prosecutors exercise their formidable powers. It paints an empirical sketch of prosecutors at work, the contexts in which they investigate, charge, and try cases, and the content of the decisions thereby rendered. Since prosecutors wield vast discretion at every stage of the criminal process, and since criminal proceedings constitute one of the principal indicators of the character of a society, this study offers a window onto Japan. Since this book is comparative, chiefly with the United States, it also affords insights into American law and society.

The Japanese way of justice is in large part determined by the way prosecutors perform their jobs. If justice means taking into account the needs and circumstances of individual suspects, then prosecutors in Japan must receive higher marks than their American counterparts. If justice implies treating like cases alike, then the capacity of Japan's procuracy to do so is impressive indeed. If justice should promote healing, not just punishment, then Japanese prosecutors must be reckoned more restorative than prosecutors in the United States. And if justice depends on uncovering and clarifying the truth, then readers will recognize how fundamental this maxim is deemed in Japan. In these ways and more, the Japanese way of justice is uncommonly just.

Yet this account uncovers serious defects as well. In processing sex offenders, for example, Japanese prosecutors routinely discount and disregard the feelings of female victims. In their passion for preserving high conviction rates, prosecutors sacrifice the interests of victims who yearn to be heard in open court. In their insulation from political and public scrutiny, prosecutors sometimes seem unaccountable to legitimate authority and influence. And in their zeal to obtain the truth through confessions, some prosecutors plea bargain, doctor dossier, and conduct brutal interrogations, all of which are illegal in Japan.

Japan is a long way from the United States. This book demonstrates that in many matters of criminal justice they are different worlds.