Skip to main content

JAPAN DOES IT AGAIN!

I reserve the right to be wrong.




So this is a thing. Iwao Hakamada is now going to trial again. I have read in moderate outsider's detail about the legal system in Japan, and the fact that it is a festering pile of shit basically designed to prosecute, not establish truth.

That makes Japan's legal system the very antithesis of the ideal of innocent until proven guilty. You're guilty until the police get a confession out of you ( and by the way, have fun trying to get a defence lawyer, as they can't sit in on police interviews to advise you ).

The more I have learned about Japan over the years the more batshit crazy the country has seemed, and not in an endearing way anymore. Where previously I was drawn to this metropolitan, civilised, powerful and fascinating country on the far side of Eurasia, now I am horrified by an officialdom that is comfortable with no accountability for the systems it sustains, and thus the wanton inhumanity of those systems.

And I'm not the only one. Hiroyuki Okon is an economist in Japan whose views align with the Austrian School and libertarianism, which to me just blows the fucking idea that somehow Japan is unique out of the water. It's a country of people who wanna eat, poop, exchange with one-another, create, and live with dignity, and that's the end of the god-damned news.

So, a dude has a chance at a retrial, and God knows, maybe even being freed if he's found innocent. In prison he is addressed by number, not name. All because the finger was pointed at him in 1966 for the murder of a factory owner, that owner's wife, and their two children. One wonders how the accusation came about. Well, he confessed. Then a trio of judges sentenced him to death.

Why did he confess if he, and apparently others too, are now saying he didn't do it? Does it have anything to do with the insane practice mentioned in my 2nd paragraph above. Wikipedia's article on the man states;

Hakamada was interrogated and, in August 1966, was arrested based on a confession and a pair of pajamas he owned that featured a tiny amount of blood and gasoline. According to his lawyers, Hakamada was interrogated a total of 264 hours, as many as 16 hours a session, over 23 days to obtain the confession. They added that he was denied water or bathroom breaks during the interrogation. [ Japan Times article ]

So is everything about the criminal justice system in Japan, as da kids say these days, full of shit? Did the guy even do what he's in jail for? How many others have died for crimes they didn't commit? How many more human beings have to be made sacrificial lambs for the mincer of Japanese judicial process?

Any hope here?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Zeitardation

A Youtuber called axe863 made a video in which he used scientific, mathematical and statistical common-sense to deliver the KO that the Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement so richly deserved. If his approach seems weird and unconventional it's because he's not attacking from a tradition neoclassical or Keynesian perspective. Axe863's poison is complexity economics, something a good deal more dangerous to ideas like TVP and TZM. [ 2 ] Now to a couple of comment threads from below the video that I thought could od with being replicated just in case they get deleted at source! ~~~ AstralLuminary 1 year ago Why can't we generalize the consumption patterns of middle-income people in the western world, set our constraints equal to the amount of localized resources, and the rate of resource recovery, derive a population growth model that would be sustainable to said consumption patterns, and derive the necessary quantifiable amount of work required to expen...

World Hunger - Getting Better or Worse?

Thinking about how rates of hunger have shifted over the last 25 years led me to the Global Hunger Index , which covers - wait for it - the last 25 years. What do we see by looking at their figures for hunger in different countries in the years for which data are available? The Global Hunger Index uses aggregated statistics to arrive at a 'score' for every country studied in a given year with 0 the ideal and 50+ an absolute nightmare of near famine-level proportions. If you were switched-on enough to follow the link above you probably noticed it includes an interactive world map showing the change in rates of hunger for folks in many countries that might best be described as low-income or middle-income. An illustration of the score system is just below. And just in case it wasn't already obvious that everything is getting better, here is the data for all of the individual countries measured on a scatter plot in terms of their reduction in GHI score from 2000...

Commentaryism - The Death Toll of Capitalism

How many people have died because capitalism exists? How many would still be alive if it had never existed? Let's dig in! We will take two approaches over the course of this blog post by looking at the the death tolls attributed to the word in its broad popular definition - everything socialists don't like - versus the toll that fits the definition offered previously on this blog. By the same token I will not lay any outsized figures at any other mode of production's door except where that mode of production demonstrably caused the problem that killed people. It's political ideologies that really matter here, and this is where the first big problem with even trying to lay a specific body count before capitalism runs into problems - there is no political ideology called capitalism. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Now then, Alfonso Gutierrez says  in a comment thread that "capitalism and free-markets have murdered billions of people" which is a risky cla...