Japan’s Sexual Predator-Friendly System and the Beginning of Shiori Ito’s Fight for Justice
Plus, updates on how the fight continues today
It was in 2017 that I first met Shiori Ito, a woman who I have come to admire greatly for her courage and her journalism.
Mari Yamamoto and I had been writing about Japan’s dismal approach to handling sexual assault cases and the long-overdue discussions about revising the country’s antiquated penal code for The Daily Beast. The laws governing rape had barely changed in nearly a century, and Japan’s conviction rate for sexual assault cases was depressingly low. By some estimates only 4% of rapes were actually reported to the authorities. The police actively discouraged reporting. Survivors were often silenced, shamed, or discouraged from pursuing legal action, and those who did come forward were met with resistance from law enforcement and the judicial system. On average, prosecutors dropped 50% or more of the cases that did finally make it to their desks. We had just published a long explainer in The Daily Beast called “Does Japan Ever Convict Men For Rape?”
It was in this context that I came across a series of articles in the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho detailing the case of Shiori Ito. The well-reported story was grim: a young journalist drugged and raped by Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a powerful media figure with close ties to then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Even more disturbing was how the police had initially pursued the case, obtaining an arrest warrant for Yamaguchi, only to have the arrest suddenly quashed by a high-ranking government official. Then a political lackey of the Prime Minister scuttled the case, and the prosecutors dropped the ball. It was a blatant example of political interference in law enforcement, the kind of cover-up that reeked of abuse of power.
Shiori Ito had decided to request a prosecutorial review. She wanted to hold a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. The president of the club at the time, more or less, refused to allow it.
I reached out to Shiori, and what she told me was worse than anything I had read. She had done everything by the book—reporting the rape to the police, providing evidence, and cooperating with investigators—only to have the case buried at the highest levels.
That was just the beginning. The story grew, exposing deep cracks in Japan’s legal system and the culture of silence surrounding sexual violence. What followed was a national reckoning, driven largely by Shiori’s courage in speaking out. It wasn’t just about one woman’s fight for justice—it was about forcing Japan to confront its systemic failures.
Over the years, I have become friends with Shiori. I was amused to discover that she once worked at the same clothing store as my sweetheart, Jessy. I have watched her take on the worst of her trolls and win. I have watched her battle in civil court and win. I have read her book, Black Box, and seen her remarkable documentary film, Black Box Dairies. The film has been nominated for an Academy Award. Hopefully, it will be widely shown in Japan someday.
Back in 2017, just after the news broke in Japan, Mari Yamamoto, Mari Saito, and I decided to write the piece for The Daily Beast. It was a time when the New York Times and other major English-language publications hesitated to cover the story, but our editor at The Daily Beast, Christopher Dickey, was very supportive. He asked to see everything we had and substantiate it. He was supportive, but he was also very careful.
After turning in our first draft, Chris gently wrote us back with a note few journalists are lucky enough to receive from their editors: we needed to tell the whole story, from start to finish, with blistering detail about everyone involved and how. “You may have all the space you need. Many people will not read until the end. Some will. Write it for the people who might care.”
And so we did.
To ensure people understand how bad it truly was, I am republishing our original article from The Daily Beast below, along with updates and helpful context. It remains a testament to the way power protects itself and the way survivors, when given a voice, can push back against a corrupt system. This was only the beginning of covering this fight as a reporter. And in an unjust world, I have to say that there is something inspiring in seeing the good people win, now and then.
This is a long post, but maybe you’ll be one of the people who reads until the end. Still, here’s a table of contents to hopefully make things easier to navigate.
Timeline and Updates
The Daily Beast article from June 20, 2017 (Is Japan’s Top Politician Behind a Shameful Rape Cover-Up?)
Background information from June 8, 2017 (Proposed revision to sex crime law promising but not enough: survivors, Mainichi Japan)
The Daily Beast explainer that Shiori read before we met (Does Japan Ever Convict Men for Rape?)
Timeline and Updates
May 29 2017: Ito publicly accuses Yamaguchi of sexual assault at a news conference.
June 2017: Japan’s rape laws are amended for the first time in over a century. The minimum jail sentence for rape rises from 3 years (less than the sentence for burglary) to 5 years.
September 2017: Ito files her civil lawsuit against Yamaguchi.
October 2017: Ito’s award-winning book Black Box is released in Japanese.
June 2018: Japan’s Secret Shame, a documentary about Ito’s case, is aired on BBC Two.
December 18 2019: Ito wins her civil case against Yamaguchi and is awarded 3.3 million yen, although she was forced to pay Yamaguchi 550,000 yen for accusing him dosing her with a date rape drug without evidence. (At the time, Japanese authorities had no way of testing for such a drug.)
July 2021: Black Box is released in English. (It is now available in 10 languages)
October 2022: Ito wins ¥550,000 in damages in a civil suit against Mio Sugita, a conservative lower house member from the ruling Liberal Democratic party, who liked 25 slanderous tweets against Ito. This ruling was appealed by Sugita and Sugita lost the appeal in 2024.
June 2023: Japanese sex crime laws are further updated with a series of bills. The definition of rape is expanded from “forcible sexual intercourse” to “nonconsensual sexual intercourse” including victims under the influence of drugs or alcohol, victims coerced by authority figures, and victims unable to express their lack of consent due to shock. (Explicit hidden camera photography is also outlawed and the age of consent is also raised from 13 to 16.)
January 2024: Black Box Diaries debuts at Sundance to critical acclaim.
October 2024: Ito’s former lawyer Yoko Nishihiro and other representatives accuse Ito of unauthorized use of hotel security footage and audio used in Black Box Diaries. The hotel security footage used in the documentary was blurred to only show Ito’s body being dragged from the taxi into the Sheraton Miyako Tokyo Hotel. (Previously, video of Ito leaving the hotel had been leaked to the media; no legal recourse was taken to address this leak.) Japan generally has one-party consent laws for audio recordings; however, this law can be murky when the recordings are used outside of the context of courtroom evidence.
January 2025: Black Box Diaries is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It is also nominated for Best Documentary at the BAFTAs.
Is Japan’s Top Politician Behind a Shameful Rape Cover-Up?
‘Japanese women shouldn’t suffer rape or injustice in silence anymore.’ A simple declaration by a victim has provoked a complex political crisis.
Published Jun. 20 2017 1:00AM EDT
TOKYO—Japan’s ruling coalition, headed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has been mired in scandal for several weeks amid allegations Abe personally bent the law or broke it to benefit his political cronies and friends. Even a senior member of Abe’s own Liberal Democratic Party says, “There is nothing this administration wouldn’t do to crush its enemies and reward its pals.”
But new allegations have raised the possibility that the administration may have gone so far as to quash a rape investigation on behalf of a close friend of Abe: the dapper, hipster-bearded broadcast journalist Noriyuki Yamaguchi, who also penned two laudatory books on the prime minister.
The story became national news on May 29 when a 28-year-old journalist named Shiori held a press conference at the Tokyo District Court as she sought to reopen the closed investigation into her case. In accordance with the wishes of her relatives, she has kept her family name out of the papers.
In a country where fewer than 10 percent of rape victims ever file a report, it is rare for victims to speak out and even rarer for them to show their faces.
Shiori claims that on April 4, 2015, Yamaguchi, the journalist closest to Prime Minister Abe, and a former Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the Japanese television network TBS, raped her while she was unconscious at the Sheraton Miyako Hotel. She had dinner and drinks with him before losing consciousness.
She filed charges with the Tokyo Metropolitan Takanawa Police who investigated the case diligently and even obtained an arrest warrant for Yamaguchi, only to be stopped by an order from a high-ranking bureaucrat right as they were set to arrest him at Narita Airport.
Like a scene out of a movie, the detective who had at first reluctantly taken her case but had become her advocate told her over the phone, “He’s walking past us. I can’t do anything. I’ve got orders from way above. I’ve just been told I’m being taken off the case, as well. I’m sorry.”
It wasn’t a scene from a movie. That was exactly what happened.
And that is where the story takes a major political twist. It is not surprising that the opposition party and Japan’s media are reporting the possibility of a cover-up or, at a minimum, gross interference in the rape investigation.
It’s quite a cast of characters that show up in this human drama, and it may help to have a program to keep them straight.
The Alleged Victim—Shiori, whose calm anger and direct account of events the press has found more than compelling, and whose case may well have helped force the Japanese parliament to revise the country’s horribly antiquated laws on sexual assault.
The Alleged Rapist—The wiry Yamaguchi, taking the Bill Cosby approach, insists that he is innocent and anything that happened was consensual, even though there is ample proof that Shiori was only semi-conscious if, indeed, she was conscious at all. He is beloved not only by Prime Minister Abe, but also by Japan’s right wing for an infamous article he penned which appeared to dismiss the sufferings of “the comfort women” who were enslaved to sexually service Japanese soldiers during WWII.
Mr. Fixit—Cabinet Spokesman Yoshihide Suga is about as close to the prime minister as white on rice, as they say in some parts of the United States. Physically unprepossessing, he is famed for his sarcasm, quick wit, and ability to keep cool. Suga figures in this story, as in many others in Japanese politics, as a likely go-between. In appearance, he bears some resemblance to the plastic Troll dolls of yesteryear, and in his demeanor, especially in his brawls with the press, he is like the most formidable internet troll made flesh—rarely losing a battle or getting rattled. He is everything that Sean Spicer would like to be, and could give Steve Bannon a run for his money.
The Chief—Suga’s former secretary, Itaru Nakamura, is a gruff, chubby National Police Agency career bureaucrat, who sports a type of combover known here as the “barcode” haircut. He was the chief of the Tokyo Police Criminal Investigation Bureau at the time the arrest warrant was issued. He allegedly gave the orders to stop the arrest and personally intervened to stall or scuttle the investigation.
The Prime Minister—Shinzo Abe, 62 years old, is a proud man with a long memory and a short temper, lashing out at his critics with infamous ferocity. This is his second time serving as prime minister after he gave up the job in 2007 due to illness. Just before Abe quit, he communicated his plans to resign to... Yamaguchi, who delivered the scoop for his network, achieving a great measure of fame as an ace reporter with rock-solid ties to the prime minister.
Yamaguchi’s details of his close relationship with Abe are highlighted in the two books he has written about him, especially his magnum opus, Sori (Prime Minister), which monthly magazine CYZO characterized as “a book full of flattery for Abe” punctuated with “Yamaguchi boasting about his close relationships to the Prime Minister and those around him.” Of course, the trollish Suga also makes an appearance in the books.
The Police Chief, is not mentioned in Yamaguchi’s writings but he appears to be quite loyal to Mr. Fixit and to Abe as well. When a television commentator criticized Abe’s fatal handling of the abduction of the freelance journalist Kenji Goto, The Chief reportedly sent him a message saying, “You deserve 10,000 deaths.” Police officers who know The Chief, aka Detective Barcode, say he doesn’t mince words. Unlike Shiori or Mr. Fixit, he also does not do on-the-record press conferences and has not given a full explanation of how he became involved with the case and why he decided to step in.
Shiori allowed reporters to print her first name and let cameramen photograph her face at her press conference where she spoke about her ordeal. Her full statement is here.
Shiori is an average-sized Japanese woman, thin, and well-mannered. She has worked at large international news agencies and her English is good. She is currently working on a documentary about guerrillas in South America; she is no shrinking violet. And in Japan, where rape victims are expected to cry, break down, and fall apart—or simply pretend the rape never happened—her steely resolve has surprised many.
The odds were never in her favor. Until very recently, sexual assault victims had to file charges for an investigation to take place, Japan’s 90 percent male police force often discouraged victims from filing charges, and first-time offenders could get away with no jail time at all if they apologized and paid compensation. Even if there was an arrest made, prosecutors routinely dropped half of the cases.
Shiori explains her decision: “I wanted to use my full name, but my family was against it. I have to question this situation where victims cannot talk unless they hide their face, remain sad, weak, and believe they have to feel shame,” she said in an interview with The Daily Beast.
“I believe it was necessary for me to talk about the horror of rape and the massive impact it had on my life afterward,” she said. “I am now painfully aware of how much the legal and social system fails sex crime victims. For a long time in Japan, women who have been sexually assaulted blame themselves or are blamed by others. When I was about 10, I went to a public pool in a bikini my parents had bought for me—and was terrified when a man groped me in the pool. But when I told the adults, they told me, ‘It’s because you were wearing a sexy bikini.’ So I thought, oh it is my fault. I don’t think like that any more.”
Shiori said she had met Yamaguchi for dinner in Tokyo on April 3, 2015, to discuss his offer to find her work in the United States. Shiori said Yamaguchi took her to two restaurants where she remembers having a few drinks. Her last memory before she lost consciousness was of dizzily leaning against a water cooler, she said.
A taxi driver who drove the pair later that night said Shiori repeatedly asked to be dropped off at the nearest station, she said, but Yamaguchi instructed the driver to head to a hotel.
“According to the driver’s testimony, I wasn’t able to get out of the taxi on my own, so Mr. Yamaguchi had to carry me,” she said.
Footage from a security camera at the Sheraton Miyako Hotel showed Yamaguchi carrying her out of the taxi and into the hotel. The Daily Beast confirmed the content of the video with a police source who also said investigators spoke to eyewitnesses. The Daily Beast also talked to a third source who viewed the hotel security video and confirmed Shiori’s characterization of the footage.
Shiori said she tried to file a report with the police, but officers initially tried to discourage her, warning her it would ruin her career. Investigators finally accepted Shiori’s criminal complaint in late April after she convinced an officer to check security footage from the hotel. The officer retrieved the footage on April 15. After the detectives watched the footage, they agreed there were grounds for a criminal case.
The police then enthusiastically pursued the case. It should be noted, that Shukan Shincho, the weekly magazine initially reporting on these events was also able to verify the details of Shiori’s account with witnesses.
Police officers obtained an arrest warrant for Yamaguchi on suspicion of incapacitated rape and were waiting to arrest him at Narita Airport on June 8, 2015. But investigators never executed the warrant and instead let him walk away, Shiori said.
They had received last minute “orders from above,” an investigator told her on the phone. Police sources confirmed this with The Daily Beast.
The call to halt the arrest came directly from The Chief (Nakamura) who as mentioned previously, headed the investigative bureau of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police at the time.
When responding to the enquiries of the weekly magazine Shincho, The Chief, admitted he called off the arrest, but said Abe’s administration had nothing to do with his decision. “I made the decision, by myself, based on the details of the case,” he said before Shiori went public.
The Chief began his career as a bureaucrat in Japan’s National Police Agency, which oversees all police forces in the country but cannot conduct investigations or conduct arrests; it gives guidance. Thus NPA bureaucrats are usually dispatched to local police departments at an executive officer level and are referred to as kyaria (career guys) by other police who are local hires. They rarely stay in one prefecture for long and lack the street sense of cops who start at the bottom and work their way up. “They’re the police elite. They usually are more like politicians than police officers,” said one Saitama Prefecture detective. NPA bureaucrats often are temporarily transferred to other agencies as well, such as the Nuclear Regulation Authority. At the time of the rape investigation, The Chief had been temporarily transferred to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.
It is highly irregular for a top-ranking official to stop an arrest warrant or interfere with a case at this level, say many police sources. Jiro Ono, former chief of the Kagoshima Police Headquarters and a former Upper House Member of the Parliament publicly commented. “An arrest for incapacitated rape is typically done based on the judgment of the head of the police department [in this case Takanawa Police] and for the chief of the Criminal Investigative Bureau to butt in and give orders I must say is extremely abnormal.”
The irregularity of how this case has been handled is one reason Shiori is now seeking a reversal of the prosecutor’s decision.
Even a current high-ranking officer in the National Police Agency was critical of the handling of the case, and commented under condition of anonymity: “When you consider Nakamura’s close relationship to Abe and Suga, and the case involves Abe’s closest friend in the media, Mr. Yamaguchi, Nakamura’s intervention in the case was completely inappropriate. It’s a conflict of interest and it gives the appearance of impropriety. To anyone, it might appear that Nakamura, in his position as the head of the investigative bureau, deliberately squashed an investigation to benefit the friend of his former boss, Suga. It’s disgraceful. I don’t know whether that was the case but the problem is that people may reasonably believe that’s exactly what happened. It’s not hard to see why. Here’s how it could happen. Yamaguchi asks Abe or Suga to intervene. One of them calls Nakamura. Loyal to his former boss, Nakamura scuttles the arrest warrant and the case. It doesn’t take a massive criminal conspiracy to make that happen. It just takes a few phone calls.”
When pressed to go on the record, the officer declined, sheepishly explaining the Abe administration just hinted that they will have the whistleblower in the Kake Gakuen case (a brewing scandal involving the licensing of a school) prosecuted for violations of the Civil Servants Act—releasing information gained on the job. “That will be the end of that bureaucrat’s career and possibly time in jail,” the officer said. “I could argue that I am sharing police common sense, not secret information. But even then, as in the case of the whistleblower, anyone who opposes Abe ends up not only having their career shortened but their reputation ruined. If I was retired, like Mr. Ono, I’d be happy to go on the record.”
Former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, however, pulled no punches in his comment on the case. On the evening of May 31, he tweeted, “What is wrong with Japan’s media?...They have remained silent on the rape committed by former TBS bureau chief, Yamaguchi, who is an intimate friend of Prime Minister Abe. Nakamura, the Chief of Criminal Investigations for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, buried the arrest warrant and Nakamura was the former personal secretary of Cabinet Minister Suga. Except for Tokyo Shimbun [the newspaper], no other media outlet will write about this. Has Japan’s media’s sold out their national [sense of] justice to the Cabinet Office?” Perhaps it was the brevity of Twitter that resulted in Mr. Hatoyama not adding “allegedly” in front of the rape accusation, but over 12,000 people appear to agree with his sentiment.
The burying of the arrest warrant is not the only puzzling thing in the investigation.
Following the aborted arrest, the lead investigator was taken off the case, the prosecutor handling Shiori’s case, prosecutor Mori, was changed out, and the case was moved from the jurisdiction of Takanawa Police Department to the Criminal Investigative Division One (Violent Crimes) of Tokyo Police Headquarters, where The Chief would have day-to-day access to the detectives handling the case. The newly appointed detectives urged Shiori to settle with Mr. Yamaguchi and drop charges. She did not agree. The police eventually filed papers against Mr. Yamaguchi with the Tokyo prosecutors, where the case languished for months, until the prosecutors eventually decided to drop all charges against Yamaguchi in July of 2016. They would only say there was not sufficient evidence to indict.
Mr. Fixit, as the Cabinet spokesman, told reporters at a regular press briefing this month he had nothing to do with police calling off Yamaguchi’s arrest and said he was not informed of the investigation. Because The Chief (Nakamura), who called off the arrest, once worked for him, it’s not surprising that even Japan’s media would go through the motions of questioning him.
“I do not know anything about the details [of the Shiori case],” he said gruffly.
Shiori’s news conference led to heated debate online, and supporters quickly set up advocacy groups for her on social media while others stood outside parliament in solidarity, holding placards bearing the hashtag #FightTogetherWithShiori.
Shiori also faced vitriol and criticism for going public. Critics took to social media to say that she was using the case to gain fame, while other commentators blamed opponents of the Abe administration for orchestrating her press conference. And of course, there were many comments that her shirt was too revealing, which for a large number of Japanese men, seems to discredit her allegations.
Shinji Takeda, the president of Tokyo Broadcasting System Television (TBS), told reporters at a recent briefing the company did receive inquiries from the police at the time of the investigation but Yamaguchi quit without discussing details of the case with his employer.
The public distrust and paranoia that the Abe administration’s heavy-handed political tactics have generated have elevated Shiori’s case to a subject of national debate, even in parliamentary sessions. Of course, the opposition party sees it as a political opportunity to cast light on the Machiavellian machinations of Abe and his cronies—but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
Even members of Abe’s own political party fear the allegations that Abe or Mr. Fixit interfered with a police investigation are true. An Upper House Member in the LDP told The Daily Beast, “Do I know that Abe or Suga blocked this investigation? I do not. Do I believe that they could or would? Yes, without a doubt. The admirable thing about Shinzo Abe and his spiritual doppelgänger Suga is their absolutely fierce loyalty to their friends—they would bend the law, break the law, or cover up a scandal for their bosom buddies. In Japan, that’s a virtue. Such loyalty from the Oyabun (father-figure) generates great loyalty from the Kobun (child-figures). They would also do the same outrageous things to crush an enemy or the enemy of their friend. They terrorize members of our own party who express opposition not just the media or the occasional principled bureaucrat. I also believe they are true patriots. The problem is, and sometimes we forget this, elected officials are supposed to serve the public not their cronies or their own self-interests. The fact that the incredibly cautious Japanese media is reporting this at all should tell you, or anyone who knows Japan, that there is a real problem here.”
On his public Facebook page, Yamaguchi has consistently denied all allegations saying, “I have not done anything that violates or touches upon the law,” and has written a long rebuttal to Shiori’s allegations.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s wife, Akie, “liked” his posts.
In an email responding to questions from The Daily Beast, Yamaguchi said, “I am not acquainted at all with Itaru Nakamura, the previous head of the investigative bureau at the National Police Agency. I have never met, spoken, nor made any acquaintance with him at any event. I do not have his contact information.”
He continued, “I have neither informed nor consulted with politicians, including Prime Minister Abe or Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga on this issue.” Yamaguchi insists that this is simply a matter between a male and female journalist and that there was nothing unusual about the investigation.
Yet, it is hard to see this as the case, because multiple police sources assert that if Yamaguchi was not a famous journalist or a friend of the prime minister, he would have been arrested and subject to 23 days of interrogation without a lawyer present, just like most suspects in Japan. The Japanese criminal justice system itself is incredibly problematic and unfair, but it becomes an issue of great concern when the unfairness isn’t applied fairly.
Shiori is preparing a civil suit against Mr. Yamaguchi as well. Her lawyers point to a successful case last March where a civil court ruled in favor of a rape victim. The case, a rare victory for sexual assault victims, involved a then-26-year-old woman who was allegedly drugged then raped by her colleagues in 2011. The woman filed a complaint with the police immediately after the alleged assault, but investigators sat on the case for more than four years, forcing the victim to turn to civil court.
“This case was an important precedent because many victims think that because they don’t remember (the assault) they have no recourse,” said Dr. Chieko Nagai, who treated the plaintiff and provided medical testimony in her civil case. Nagai, who runs a small medical clinic in Tokyo, said she sees parallels in the 2016 case with that of Shiori. She notes Japanese police and medical institutions fail victims by not running blood and urine tests immediately after an alleged attack to determine if victims were drugged.
Lawyers and advocates say sexual assault victims would not have to turn to civil courts if criminal cases were properly investigated. Women forced to seek relief in civil courts because of failures in the penal system are similar to victims of Japan’s organized crime groups, the yakuza. Police sometimes fail to pin murder cases on yakuza bosses, mostly because prosecutors flinch at taking anything but slam-dunk cases, but the families of the deceased can sue the top bosses in civil court for damages under the guise of “employer liability.” They usually win and thus the yakuza will now often settle out of court.
Shiori has asked the Prosecutorial Review Board to rule for prosecution in her case. Her odds of winning such a decision are roughly 1 percent. And even if the first decision goes in her favor, the prosecution may still refuse to indict again.
Her lawyer says, “I know the odds are against us but I believe that an objective review of the evidence we have collected by a disinterested third party will result in justice being done and the case being tried in court, not being discarded at the front door.”
Even if Shiori wins nothing in her own case, she has helped make a remarkable thing come true for Japanese women—the first major revisions of the sexual assault laws in over a hundred years.
Shiori says that she read this Daily Beast article, “Does Japan Ever Convict Men For Rape,” before her press conference and during her speech pointed out that she felt it was problematic that the Abe government had given priority to the terrible “terrorism” bill rather than revising the sexual assault laws.
The audacity of her two sentences of criticism earned her jeers as “a left-wing plant” from Japan’s cyber trolls but it also reminded the public that the sexual assault of women in this country has continued with impunity for far too long.
Despite everything, her efforts were not in vain. Shiori informed us, in a short message written in English, “On the last day of the Diet session [last Friday] I received a message from the Diet Affairs Committee Chairman that they changed the laws on rape in the last day. And he thanked me. :) it is a small step but I’m so happy!”
—with additional reporting by Mari Saito and Mari Yamamoto
Proposed revision to sex crime law promising but not enough: survivors
June 8, 2017 (Mainichi Japan)
The House of Representatives Judicial Affairs Committee unanimously passed a bill to toughen punishments for sex crimes on June 7. While survivors and supporters say the proposed revisions to the Penal Code are promising, they are calling on the government to do more.
The revisions would raise the minimum prison sentence for rape from three to five years and make sexual assaults prosecutable without a victim's complaint. The bill, however, does not include provisions to lighten the burden of proof that weighs on the victims of sexual assault. For a charge of rape, the existence of violent assault or intimidation to the degree that the victim finds it extremely difficult to resist is still required.
The necessity of relaxing this condition was pointed out in the committee's discussion, as there are many rape cases that occur even without violence or intimidation of the victim, but simply with fear of the assailant. Reflecting on this, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partner Komeito, as well as the opposition Democratic Party (DP), Japanese Communist Party (JCP) and Nippon Ishin (Japan Innovation Party) jointly submitted a draft revision to the bill's additional clause stating that further consideration shall be given to measures that would fit the reality of sex crimes once the legislation has been in effect for three years.
However, the Change Sex Crimes Law Project, made up of four organizations of sexual assault survivors and their supporters, submitted a petition with 30,000 signatures to Minister of Justice Katsutoshi Kaneda on June 7, calling for those revisions to be made earlier, among other requests. The push comes amid hopes for the early passage of reforms in the few remaining days of the current Diet session.
"Even just eliminating the provision on sex (of the victim) would be a big step forward," said Taketo Kurono, who would welcome a revision to the law that would recognize the notion that victims of sexual assaults are not always female and attackers are not always male. Kurono was sexually assaulted by a female acquaintance when he was in his 20s, and when he called a sexual assault hotline, he was told that they did not know how to handle male victims. This led Kurono to found the self-help group "Ranka" for male survivors of sexual assault. Many male victims are forced to suffer in silence -- a fact that makes Kurono's hope for swift revision to the Penal Code stronger.
A woman in her 20s in Gunma Prefecture who suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather from the time she was a sixth-grade elementary school student into her second year of junior high school shares Kurono's strong wish for reform. For a crime to be considered rape under the current law, a requirement for violence or intimidation is in place for victims over the age of 13. Eventually the abuse she suffered could not be prosecuted as rape, and her stepfather's actions were instead treated as a violation of the Child Welfare Act, which carried a much lighter punishment.
A portion of her wish will be fulfilled: The revisions include new provisions for punishing parents or guardians who use their influence to force children under the age of 18 to perform sexual or indent acts. "When you think of the wounds inflicted on the victims that will never heal, the new provision is absolutely necessary," she said.
Does Japan Ever Convict Men for Rape?
The law may be changing, but from the ‘comfort women’ of World War II to the victims of today, justice is very hard to come by.
Jake Adelstein and Mari Yamamoto
TOKYO—
Eight thousand people, including many prominent lawyers, submitted a petition to the Japanese ruling coalition last month demanding it finally do something to strengthen the laws against sexual assault in Japan.
The issue has long been a non-priority for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government—which seems to put more emphasis on reinstituting bayonet practice for children than it puts on passing laws that might protect women.
And let’s be clear about this: The laws that are on the books provide very little protection at all.
In Japan, if you rape a woman, your odds of being arrested are fairly low, and the odds of actually being prosecuted about a flip of the coin—slightly weighted toward no prosecution. Even if you’re found guilty, there’s a good chance you may never spend a day in jail if you say you’re sorry and pay damages.
Two cases in the past year involving sexual assault in Japan illustrate how far the Land of the Rising Sun still is from effectively dealing with crimes against women.
You may remember the outrage in the United States when former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner, only spent three months in jail after sexually assaulting an unconscious woman. In Japan, he most likely would never have been arrested. Even if he was actually prosecuted, and found guilty, he probably would not have spent a day in prison. He would not have been required to register as a sex offender either.
In Japan, men get away with rape because the police are reluctant to investigate, victims settle, and for all the talk of “womenomics” it’s still a fundamentally misogynist culture.
Of the arrests made for rape and sexual assault every year, only roughly half (or less) end up being prosecuted, according to Ministry of Justice figures. You could, of course, point out that there are other countries in the world with worse statistics or where rape is almost never punished, but Japan is an economically developed democracy, one that will host the 2020 Olympics. We and the people of Japan can expect better.
Last year in a highly visible rape case, a well-known actor, 22-year-old Yuta Takahata, was released on bail from Maebashi Police Station in Gunma Prefecture on Sept. 9 after prosecutors decided not to pursue rape charges. The incident involved a hotel worker in the city. Takahata reportedly had admitted to the rape when he was arrested, which was headlined in major Japanese media at the time.
However, when he settled with the victim, according to weekly magazine Josei Seven and other reports, the prosecutors dropped the case against him. After that, Takahata’s lawyers released a statement suggesting he was innocent and they would have pleaded innocent if the case had gone to court.
According to Kunitaka Kasai, a criminal defense lawyer from the Rei Law Office, “When prosecutors drop charges there is no way of knowing whether it is because there wasn’t enough evidence.” Kasai also pointed out, “Most settlements usually have written into the text, ‘I (the victim) do not wish him (the assailant) to face criminal punishment.’ This greatly discourages the police from pursuing the case, even if they could do so without the cooperation of the victim.” Rape cases without bodily injury require the victim to file charges, or there is no crime.
A police detective who handles violent crime cases also told The Daily Beast, “We don’t want to be pawns in a civil suit. If the victims would rather seek criminal punishment for the offender than a pay-off, of course we’re more enthusiastic about pursuing the case. It’s a lot of work for nothing if the victim makes a deal.”
According to data from the Ministry of Justice, the number of sexual assaults in Japan per year is not known and data from a 2012 study concluded that in a five-year period only an estimated 18.5 percent of sexual assaults were reported. Moreover, in cases of rape and sexual assault in which arrests are made, more than half (53 percent) are dropped by prosecutors.
First-time offenders, even if they are prosecuted and found guilty, can walk away with a suspended sentence, and as long as they commit no other criminal offenses during the court-determined period of time after the guilty verdict, they will spend no time in jail.
This was the case for Kensuke Matsumi, a Tokyo University student convicted of sexually assaulting a drunken classmate along with several of his friends on May 11 last year. The victim turned down his settlement offer and chose to go to court where the judge deemed his actions “persistent and despicable” and the victim’s mental and physical suffering “unbearable.” Yet on Sept. 20, the judge only sentenced him to a two-year prison term suspended for four years since he “is remorseful and vowed to never drink alcohol again.”
Many women are reluctant to even press charges in the first place for fear of having to relive the events and the stigma of being a sexual attack survivor. Even if the women summon up the courage to go report the case, the chances of a trained female officer being assigned to the case are slight, since only 8.9 percent of the police force are women.
The Japanese National Police Agency for Crime Victims pamphlet on police support for sex crime victims (PDF) states that, “It is also unavoidable that officers, in their contacts with victims, often cause them to suffer secondary victimization.” It then lists ways to minimize the damage, such as counseling, using special investigators, or appointing female officers to assist. But too often the cops on the ground seem to be completely unaware of the guidelines the NPA has put forward.
As an example, Laura Curtis, an American researcher at a prestigious university in Japan was the victim of a sexual assault attempt last summer. After fighting off her attacker, she made a terrifying journey to the nearby police station, fearing the attacker who was still on the loose. To her surprise, the police not only seemed uninterested in pursuing the case but she found herself in a tiny room full of mostly male officers repeatedly explaining in excruciating detail what had happened to her.
This is an excerpt of her account for what happened:
I wondered if this was how questioning normally occurred, crammed into this claustrophobic space, loomed over by five officers, only two of whom really fit in the room with me. But more than the inappropriateness of the space, I began to notice the tenor of the questions.
“What did he look like? He was a foreigner, wasn’t he? Was he white? An American?”
No, I said, he was Japanese.
“A Korean? Probably a Korean or a Chinese person?”
No, I said, he was Japanese.
“She said he looked like a regular salaryman [white collar worker],” the one female officer in the room interjected, “She said he was Japanese.”
“Are you sure he was wearing a white dress shirt? Wasn’t it more like a t-shirt?”
No, I said, repeating myself for the third time. It was a short-sleeved collared shirt.
“And pants like these?” A male officer suggested, tugging on his black cargoes.
No, I said, repeating myself again. They were slacks.
“Like a salaryman,” the female officer echoed. “That’s what she said.”
Interspersed with the suggestions that my attacker could not have possibly looked like a Japanese business man, the officers inserted every few minutes, “You don’t want to submit a police report, right?”
The first few times I hadn’t caught onto the word, and from context I couldn’t tell if I should say yes or no. I heard the word “higai,” damage or injury, in there, but didn’t realize “higaitodoke” was a police report, and stumbled through the questions adrenaline-addled; avoiding giving an answer to something I didn’t understand.”
The interrogation was like a surrealist play, with the final act the policemen taking her to the scene of the crime minutes after the attempted attack. There she was made to reenact the attack with a female officer while repeatedly being questioned about whether the attacker was a foreigner or a drunk. All the while, she was constantly encouraged not to file a report.
Unfortunately, the first instinct of the system and society is to find something or somebody other than the attacker to blame. Namely the victim, or more conveniently, alcohol.
In accused rapist Takahata’s case, the media went after his famous actress mother, persecuting her for her responsibility in raising such a spoiled thoughtless son. She in turn held an apology press conference tearfully condemning his acts but at the same time confessing that she assured him she will be his supportive mother no matter what. When asked for comments to the victim she had not much more to offer than an apology, all the while referring to the woman as “the alleged victim.”
Nobuko Ohyabu, a photojournalist and a rape survivor herself, has worked extensively with Japanese police and counselors to better handle such investigations. She says that failure to hold individuals accountable propels rape culture in Japan.
“It is interesting to see a mother baby her son so much, which is pretty common both in Japan and the U.S.,” says Ohyabu. “Ultimately these overbearing mothers make mama’s boys into irresponsible men who don’t even know how to clean up their own mess. This is a big part of the rape culture in my opinion.”
In Japan today, everyone or everything is blamed when a rape occurs, except the rapist. So it is not surprising that many of the rapists themselves have trouble acknowledging the gravity of their actions.
Masako Makino, an ex-police officer turned gender and sociology researcher at Kyoto University, sees a deep parallel between the narratives of sexual assault she heard from perpetrators today and the attitude Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration has taken toward “comfort women,” forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers during World War II.
Makino has spoken to over a hundred rape survivors and many rapists during her years of research. What she found was the rapists’ complete failure to recognize and identify themselves as perpetrators. “They are willing to apologize to anyone, just as long as it is not to the victims themselves,” she says. “They targeted the victims because they deemed these women as ‘less,’ and for them to fight back using the law is to the rapists the utmost humiliation and defeat. As long as the apology is performed in front of a third party, such as in court, or to researchers like Makino, they feel as though their burden is forgiven, therefore giving them a sense of acceptance from society.”
Makino once asked them to speak from a first-person perspective about their lives and she discovered that as soon as they tried, they were unable to speak, for fear of having to own their own actions. They were only able to describe the rape as “the victim being hurt”—not themselves as “hurting the victim.”
Makino notes this is the same language Abe employs when discussing the comfort women—the Korean, Dutch, Taiwanese, and other women who were abused sex workers during the war. It is something, she says, that was apparent in Abe’s televised address on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II on Aug. 14, 2015.
The apology was not meant for the victims, but a mere performance to gain recognition as doing the “right” thing, she says. He proceeded to mention that Japan must never forget that women were “hurt,” another failure to acknowledge responsibility, and to add insult to injury stated his wishes to “stand by” women who are hurt and to “lead the world into a century where women’s rights are not hurt.”
Makino dissects: “If you wish to lead the world in preventing sexual violence, the most important thing is to not repeat what you have once done, and first and foremost, clarifying what was done, apologize to the victims and to never forget the remorse.”
When the leaders of society refuse to acknowledge the perpetrators’ responsibility as much as possible, it is natural that victims do not step forward. The stakes are too high and so are the hurdles.
Last year in September, a special advisory council to the Ministry of Justice strongly suggested Japan needed to revamp the laws that deal with sexual assault and rape. The council advised that there should not have to be a criminal complaint filed by the victim for an indictment to take place and the minimum penalty should be changed from three years in jail to five years. The council also noted, shockingly (for Japan) that male victims of rape should also be acknowledged, because under current law only women can be victims of rape.
The Ministry of Justice took these suggestions into account and submitted a bill revising the criminal code to Japan’s parliament which was green lighted on March 7. This is the first revision of the sex offense statutes enacted in 1907, the Meiji Era, a change many critics have said is long overdue.
If passed by the Diet, the minimum sentence for rape will be raised from the current three years to five. Also, men finally will be recognized as victims, and a victim’s complaint will no longer be required in prosecuting an assailant in a rape or sexual molestation case.
Other factors in the revision include a new clause for domestic sexual abuse which punishes parents or guardians for sex with children in their care, even where force or threats are not involved and the victims do not report. The current criminal law requires use of force or threats in establishing rape cases.
This is technically progress if the bill is passed, but even then, if the victim does not wish to press charges, it is predicted the prosecutor’s office will probably drop the case, just as they have been doing for years.
And it is still possible that “sincere” apologies could result in a suspended sentence instead of real jail-time.
Misogyny and sexism runs deep and wide in all aspects of Japanese society and taking a firm stand against sexual violence would be a positive step in correcting that problem. Perhaps the revisions to the criminal code will be a step in the right direction, if they pass. For all the government’s talk of “empowering” women, how powerful can any Japanese woman be if she can’t get the man who raped her held responsible for his crime and imprisoned.