Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 4, 1994 TAG: 9405120008
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DAN GIFFORD
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Japanese customs officials would consider such items pornographic or subversive and seize them. His company would be notified. He would be reprimanded and his career advancement ended. Police officials also would be informed. And officers in his home district would note the incident in his dossier and place him on their list of possible sex offenders and troublemakers.
The recent murders of two Japanese exchange students in California have prompted outrageous claims about why Japan has so little violent crime. Unlike America, it's because Japan is a just society devoid of racism and guns, say editorial pages and others. The same claims were widely peddled after two previous killings of Japanese youths in San Francisco and Louisiana.
But firearms prohibitions are only a very partial explanation of Japan's quiet streets. Beneath the veneer of a free society lurks a criminal-justice system most Americans would consider both criminal and unjust. Unlike America, Japan is a virtual police state.
Japanese police may arrest and hold anyone on the pettiest of pretenses for up to four months without letting her see a lawyer or even bringing her before a judge. By that time, prisoners generally have confessed to whatever police tell them to. Not because of overwhelming evidence, but because Japanese police may extract confessions by torture.
Not with hot pokers and iron maidens. Sleep, food and prescription-medicine deprivation, round-the-clock interrogations and various mind games suffice.
Tough it out for a jury trial? There are no jury trials. The accused face a judiciary that convicts trial defendants at the rate of over 99 percent.
During "home visit" inspections, police compile records on who lives in the house, where they work, what hours they keep, who they associate with and the like.
Those methods work in Japan because centuries of repressive rule have forged a cultural and racial monolith rife with xenophobia, racism, rigid social structures and citizens conditioned to obey authority. Misfits are social lepers.
Many commit suicide. Japan's suicide rate is twice that of America's despite the severe gun laws there.
After the military takeover in the 1930s, the Japanese obeyed, just as they did in allying their "Asian master race" with Hitler's Aryans to murder millions in a bid to help conquer the world. When Emperor Hirohito told the Japanese not to resist occupying American forces after World War II, not a single episode of opposition was logged. And when the military two years ago threatened to repeat the '30s coup during a Japanese political scandal, nothing had changed. Resistance wasn't mentioned.
The will to resist aside, there can be no meaningful opposition because the government has almost all the guns.
Japan's system is but one example of a world truth. The apparent peacefulness of other societies is at the expense of personal rights against abusive authority.
Yes, those American-style rights - especially when combined with the lack of individual responsibility promoted since the 1960s - can protect criminals.
But would you really want Japanese-style police power over your life? For all America's imperfections, I feel safer here.
Dan Gifford, a Los Angeles actor/writer and former reporter for ABC News, MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour and CNN, wrote this for the Independence Institute, a think tank in Denver.
by CNB