[Ngraph]

Japanese, living here. I'd heard 人質司法 (hostage justice) used in news commentary but never really pictured what it looked like inside. 5-day showers, food slid through a slot, sleeping on the floor with lights on. None of that is what most people here imagine when they hear "detention."

A lot of us live with this background feeling that "if you get arrested here, you're done" even if you didn't do anything. Part of it is the system. But part of it is also a cultural thing where being suspected at all is somehow seen as your fault. The people around you start treating you differently before any verdict.

Whatever the underlying charge actually was, none of this should follow from an arrest before any conviction. You were innocent and they still put you through 35 days. As a Japanese person reading this, I'm just sorry. That shouldn't have happened.

[VincePlatt]

You might find her explanation of why she was detained interesting:

https://youtu.be/Q2epTf2IW1g?si=ipy4m3rgFDw3b3cD

[csa]

I will bet dollars to doughnuts that she had been warned multiple times about “risky” behavior.

I’m guessing either she didn’t understand the warnings, or she didn’t follow their guidance.

Simple example, they may have asked her to follow a procedure before leaving the country, and she didn’t because she “thought it was over”.

The law enforcement machine in Japan doesn’t like to arrest people. 99% of the time or so, it only arrests when they have an open-and-shut case and/or the person had been warned multiple times.

Maybe this has changed in the age of social media influencers, maybe this is different for black people, but Japanese cops have always taken the discrete approach with me and the folks I’ve known (both Japanese and non-Japanese).

[VincePlatt]

> I will bet dollars to doughnuts that she had been warned multiple times about “risky” behavior.

Your theory lines up best with Occam's Razor: it's the more likely and simple theory, and probably true. Even so... what counts as "risky"? And the reason for her detention was having been sent something illegal from the outside. The speculation has been OTC drugs which are legal elsewhere but not in Japan. But what would that have to do with "risky" previous behavior? Granted, she missed responding to an email while she was out of country, but that hardly seems substantive either.

Honestly, it seems much more likely that she was targeted because she's visible on social media or because she's black or because she's female; or perhaps she's in some undocumented category of special contempt because she's all of those things.

On that note, I checked out her social media and she showed a property remodel and after purchasing property in Japan. It seems to me like that might show the way to others too. What better way to dissuade future immigration by simply randomly detaining folks in categories they don't like? Of course they would never do something so unseemly so as to make laws specifically disallowing blacks, single females, or even just foreigners but then again the pendulum in Japanese politics is swinging towards conservative isolationism again, no? So, it wouldn't be surprising. And if her own testimony on YouTube is to be believed and she isn't omitting anything, then I have little reason to believe any other version of this.

All that aside, and to keep this in perspective, I have no doubt that Japanese treatment of prisoners in general and even of foreigners is still by and large very good; but it's still unsettling to hear about how this was handled and about how "hostage justice" is the norm there. It seems beneath like it should be beneath them and it's very surprising to learn this about their system.

[e40]

Summary?