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Protecting the Script of the Japanese Criminal Justice System

The criminal justice system in Japan has for decades been characterized by an aura of infallibility supported by an extremely low crime rate. Miscarriages of justice were hardly an issue in the wake of the high degree of professionalism and the rigorous approach of prosecutors and judges alike in what is known as “seimitsu shihō” (precise justice), the long and detailed examination of suspects. Yet the myth of infallibility suffered a severe blow in the 1980s. Flaws were being exposed. New science, for example, made it undeniable that four convicts who had confessed and awaiting execution for several decades, could not have committed the murders that had led to their convictions. One of the foremost experts on criminal procedure in Japan, University of Tokyo professor Ryūichi Hirano (1985, 129), famously assessed in 1985 that the Japanese criminal justice system was “rather abnormal, even diseased (byōteki),” as the criminal court is “simply an institution to check the prosecutors’ determination of guilt ‘for good measure’” (131). Hirano concluded that only the adoption of a lay judge or jury system could bring a way out of the traditional scripts of these “hopeless” criminal trials (142). In the second half of the 1980s, the media also began paying attention to the unwillingness of judges to recognize fallacies and weaknesses in the system in a more general societal mood for change driven by a discourse that Japan needed to move away from state-led paternalistic protection to promote a more individual and critical mindset. All these changes, together with an initiative begun at the end of the 1980s by Kōichi Yaguchi, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Japan, to investigate trials by jury in other countries, has steered the discourse on reforms in a direction that is more transparent and is involving the participation of lay people in criminal trials. Gradually, the challenges to the criminal justice system, in particular, and to the legal system, in general, has resulted in a build up toward a window of opportunity for drastic changes in Japan’s judicial system (Vanoverbeke 2015). The socioeconomic