Can you be arrested without evidence in Japan?

Wife’s friends story has me questioning the sanity of the police here so I was wondering if others can provide some info?

My wife regularly went to a massage therapy ran by a middle aged husband and wife. One day, the husband got arrested and was put in a detention center for up to a year on allegations of sexual assault (not sure how severe) during massage. There is no hard evidence and as far as the neighbors know, the husband is good character.

However, the hearsay is that a local massage competitor hired a woman to destroy the competition.

He was released on house arrest for a few more months, then got arrested again because the woman refused to settle the case.

My question is this :
– Can you be arrested and detained for up to 1 year with utterly no evidence at all? Doesn’t that seem too extreme and prone to abuse?

3 comments
  1. Idk about a year, but I think the law is you can be detained up to 23 days without a charge.

  2. Speaking from experience. Highly HIGHLY unlikely. I had evidence in a sexual assault case and the man was released and not held/arrested while the paperwork was sent to the prosecutor to see if they would press charges. Charges are only pressed by prosecutors when prosecutors are very sure that a guilty verdict will be won, since sending cases to court that end without a conviction reflects poorly on them personally apparently. That’s why the conviction rate is 99% or whatever. It’s a misconception that they just lock up everybody who has an accusation thrown at them, it’s not because of that, it’s because they only take SURE WINS to court to begin with, everything else is dropped before it gets that far.

    There has to be some sort of evidence for a report to have been filed and sent to the prosecutor. Try going to the police and saying “Taro over there killed somebody and buried them in his backyard!” And the police aren’t just going to make a case off of LITERALLY NOTHING and arrest him and send nothing but your word to the prosecutors.

    My guy was deemed “not a danger to the public” despite being a rapist and literally admitting it to the police (just not in the way he actually raped me). Unfortunately this was before the new laws, backwhen you had to basically prove you were able to fight off your rapist, creating this paradox where if you fought him off he is a rapist but you didn’t get raped because you fought him off, but if you didn’t successfully fight him off then he’s not a rapist because you didn’t fight him off successfully.

    “Refused to settle the case” means that he got a lawyer, and tried to bribe her to settle out of court which is VERY commonly done in Japan, esp for sexual offenses. That’s why you often see the conclusion of sexual cases in the news in Japan end with “x was released for unknown reasons” or “charges were dropped against x” or some variation. What happens is the victim meets with the perpetrator and their lawyer and agrees to a gag order where they aren’t allowed to publicly talk about the crime/case, and aren’t allowed to have the police send the case to the prosecutors, in exchange for a sum of money that can be agreed upon. So seems like this woman has not agreed to that, and is insistent on sending the documents to the prosecutors to try to get a trial.

    The whole “force a confession” out of them thing is overblown in the gaijin community and there’s literally no reason for the police to try that in the vast majority of cases. They gather the statements and other evidence, send it to the prosecutors and it’s SOLELY the prosecutors decision whether or not to prosecute. It would literally be more work for the police to try to force somebody to confess over weeks and weeks than to just wash their hands of it, send what they have to the prosecutors and it’s out of their hands and not their job anymore. That kind of forced confession would only have a reason to be made if it was some high profile case where they don’t know who is actually the perpetrator, but they NEED somebody to pin a crime on or they look incompetent to the public. Japan isn’t exactly known for its record of locking away sexual deviants and rapists and other sex offenders and protecting women or girls. It’s not standard to force confessions out of criminals like this, it’s standard to just ignore them or brush them to the side. Women reporting sexual crimes have a very slim chance of their case going to the prosecutors, let alone going to court or getting a guilty verdict, so if it did go that far I would be pretty sure to believe the person was guilty. I’ve researched all those statistics back when it happened to be and it was pretty sobering how slim of a chance there is even when you have evidence.

    Honestly not really your place to judge whether or not there is “hard evidence” or that the guy is of “good character” either. You literally know nothing about what evidence the police do or don’t have, unless you’re on the police force??? You’re just listening to gossip and hearsay. And if he is held awaiting a trial, then that means the prosecutor decided to send the case to court which means he certainly thinks there’s a 99% chance of winning the case, so they must have some pretty hard evidence.

  3. 99.8% conviction rate. While technically illegal, conviction by confessions alone may still happen. The fact is the court just agree with whatever the prosecutors say most of the time.

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