Summary
Steve Lee Hayes, a 65-year-old American tourist, was arrested in Tokyo for allegedly carving family members’ names into a wooden Torii gate at the Meiji Shrine.
Surveillance footage led police to his hotel, where he was detained.
Hayes admitted to the act, which could result in up to three years in prison or a fine of 300,000 yen ($1,900).
The Meiji Shrine, a significant Shinto site, was built in 1920 to honor Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken. The incident occurs amid a surge in international tourism to Japan this year.
He’s cooked.
For the unaware, Japan has like a 99.9% conviction rate after arrests, because they basically don’t arrest unless they’re absolutely 100% positive that they can secure a conviction. The suspect also has no right to an attorney, and police abuse is common; Even if you’re innocent, they’ll just keep you in an interrogation room without any food or water for 72 hours until you “confess”. They’ll literally just rotate cops into the interrogation room, without giving you a break for food or sleep.
And Japanese prisons are some of the strictest. You’re basically expected to remain silent, and every moment of your time is accounted for. You get like 20 minutes to eat each meal (in your cell) and then like 30 minutes of “recreational” time outside, where you’re expected to kneel in place in an empty courtyard. Moving to and from your cell is akin to old elementary schools where everyone would have to line up single file and silently walk from one place to the next while following the teacher. And that’s pretty much your daily routine for the entire time you’re in. You sit in your cell, slam down what little food you get, silently walk to the courtyard, silently kneel for 30 minutes, silently walk back to your cell, and slam down dinner before bedtime. Any deviation is dealt with swiftly and violently by the guards.
Japan has a very skewed idea of criminal justice, because the prevailing attitude is that if you’re in prison, you must have done something to deserve it. It’s sort of a cyclical problem, where their insanely high conviction rate means that the public already assumes suspects are guilty before they have even been convicted.
Hmm, I happened across this video last week of a womens prison, and it doesn’t seem quite so grim…
https://youtu.be/p8paAewtl0c
I also saw another video in a mens prison a while ago that showed them cooking all the meals, and it looked strict, but not so bad as you describe.
Of course these videos are propaganda…
Still, I would take a Japanese prison before an American one.
“Guilty unless proven innocent” is literally the law in Japan
the Phoenix Wright series was literally made as a scathing critique of the Japanese Legal System, luckily the absurdity appeals to the West even if the commentary doesn’t.
I’m really hoping this does change in Japan once the boomers fall out of power because younger Japanese people are also learning about the world online
Thanks for telling the truth, Alot of media like to show japan as a good country,like they wanna show certain countries as bad and good(I already knew some of the stuff but not everything mentione).
Well, it’s kind of an open secret that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about any non-white majority country that isn’t China or North Korea on American Television.
Not saying that’s a bad thing, in fact before that little “rule” was in place we got shit like “Tokyo Jokey-o” so I full understand the bias in favor of only focusing on the positives.
Ohh they got a rule for it, that would make sense.
The Media used to be all “Look at these backwards countries, isn’t it silly how cultures exist outside of ours?” and kinda had to beckpedal HARD in the other direction because it was racist as all hell.
The 90’s was kind of the last time mainstream media was allowed to hate on asians…
Unless you were using criticisms of anime as a trojan horse for anti-asian sentiment (which explains all those “Lazy shallow parodies” of anime in the 2000’s. For the life of me I have yet to see ANY anime that’s just a school girl getting violated by a tentacle monster, yet the 2000’s Western Media would have you believe this happened like three times in every episode of Sailor Moon, six times in every episode of Pokemon, but only every now and then in Dragon Ball)
Nowadays it’s a little too far in the other direction since you REALLY can’t say the slightest thing negative about any place that isn’t Israel, China, or North Korea. And up until the last three years or so, it was considered Anti-Semetic to criticize Israel in any context.
Perfect Hair Forever was a masterpiece
Perfect Hair Forever was the rare exception that actually felt like the person who wrote it had seen an anime before, as the tropes it mocked were very much in line with anime. It even had a nonsense engrish outro that pretended to be deep.