UC Berkeley

The Japanese unconvicted (pre-judicial) detention system has recently become an object of scrutiny of international news media coverage, political activism, and social science scholarship alike, primarily due to its imposition of conditions and utilization of techniques deemed inhumane by these sources. Although Japanese criminal law explicitly secures a range of rights and protections on behalf of arrestees, criminal suspects in Japan are habitually detained in police custody and subjected to sensory deprivation, social isolation, restriction of access to legal counsel, and coercive interrogation tactics throughout the period between arrest and indictment. According to recent studies, it is precisely within this gap between policy and practice that utter suspension of constitutional rights and virtually indefinite extension of the pre-conviction detention period is rendered possible in the circumstance of suspicion of criminal infraction, reinforcing Michel Foucault’s claim that “an inner tendency of the whole system [emerges] in the ambiguity between the form of the law and the actual application of the law.” Despite the critical tenor characteristic of more recent scholarship on the topic, the Japanese criminal justice system has been lauded as a global exemplar of security, efficiency, and impartiality in prior studies. Such favorable appraisal of the Japanese justice system is reflected also in public opinion; despite widespread knowledge of existing pre-conviction detention practices and their recent global exposure, there remains among the Japanese populace a strikingly high approval rate of police and prosecutorial action. These three tensions—between criminal law and its material application, between the polarized conclusions reached in late 20th and early 21st-century studies, and between international censure and domestic support—constitute the core of the ethnographic conundrum explored in this project, an ethnographic exploration of the unconvicted detention (miketsu shobun) system in contemporary Japan.