Culture Blog - Lay Judge System
The culture blog post can be found at the link below, and my comments are represented below the link.
エミリーSeptember 24th, 2009 at 11:54 am
The reintroduction of a jury system in Japan is an interesting move, because (as many of the above comments have pointed out) Japanese social behavior is essentially the antithesis of how jurors are (to the best of my understanding, having never served on a jury) supposed to behave in the courtroom and in discussion.
In order for this to work, some serious changes are going to need to be made to the way people perceive the courts and authority. Granted, some changes do need to be made, jury system or not, to make courts more fair to the accused (one of the articles above cited an above 99% conviction rate, which speaks either to frighteningly accurate accusations or to the assumption that the accused is guilty and that’s the end of it). Jurors could help, but in order to do so, they absolutely need to be able to express dissent and argue. It is going to be very hard to convince people to break social norms, even if they are doing it for the good of their country and society.
In fact, the nationalism and general sense of duty among Japanese are the main reasons why I believe the jury system could have a chance at being successful. Even if the Japanese are afraid of jury duty, it seems like they are willing to make an effort to learn about it and to at least show up for duty. I was baffled at first by the news that mock trials were being staged throughout Japan (my reaction was roughly, ‘Who would go to those?’), but apparently people did show up to them and did learn something. If the government is enthusiastic and firm about the jury system over time, I think the Japanese will adopt it out of a desire to conform to (the new) standard.
In summary, I can see this going two different ways: First, that the same thing that happened last time will happen again (lay judge system is dissolved due to lack of support), or second, more patience and persistence are exercised by the government, and the system becomes a fixture of the Japanese courtroom.
In the second case, I honestly don’t think that having a lay judge system will upset the basic social protocols outside of the courtroom. Instead, I think the lay judge system will be adapted to fit more nicely into existing norms. Whether this means developing specific interaction protocols between the jurors and judges to ensure all sides are heard, or finding some way to make all judging parties anonymous (so that there is no face, name, or personality associated with an opinion, and therefore less reason to hesitate in expressing doubt or dissent), I have faith that something will be worked out.
This particular culture blog came at a time when I was spending many of my lunch hours watching Court TV, so I was especially struck by the basic differences between the way courts operate here and the way that courts appear to operate in Japan. Two major things: Although the judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney are all major players in the American justice system, they all spend much of their time pandering to the jury. I hadn't realized, prior to watching taped court cases, exactly how much power the jury holds. Also, in specific contrast to the news articles I read about Japanese conviction rates, I found American courts to be very skeptical by design - of particular interest to me was the play-by-play commentary given by Court TV anchors, which often amounted to "This is why we can't convict him."Also in my mind in thinking about this culture blog was the game Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. True to Japanese style prior to lay judging, there is no jury, and unless I can come up with some evidence for the poor guy on the stand, he is assumed guilty and goes to jail. So I have a bit of a background in understanding the differences in the system, even if they do come from junk TV and video games.
But I digress. I've recently been trying to find information on the development of the lay judge system since its implementation, but all I can find is old news - no updates, no news of more big trials, but, importantly, also no news of the program collapsing. The most significant news I did find is a statistical piece on the tendency of Japanese lay judges to hand out probation sentences - why? To keep criminals in the mainstream and away from "unsavory" people, thereby subjecting them to pressure to clean up their act. So it seems that the lay judge system has, in its own way, been adapted to Japanese social culture - it does seem very Japanese to offer shame as a sentence rather than more jail time, and I imagine such a sentence might actually work very well. As I touched on in my original response, the desire to conform in Japan is a very strong force, for better or for worse.
It was very interesting, at the time this culture blog was written and now, to see how change of this magnitude is received in the face of tradition and to predict how things will turn out - it was a great opportunity to think critically about the situation and apply information from multiple disciplines toward a clearer picture.
The title of the animation is "Hello, goodbye, where is my cake?"
I have to admit that when I saw the video clip, I laughed. Perhaps this is due to the fact that I, as an American, have been set up to look at ultra-righteous characters as ridiculous and petty. Saying that, however, makes me feel kind of backwards and insensitive, especially given that (as portrayed in the above articles, at least) this sort of upkeeping of rules is a big deal to the Japanese.
I guess this is another cultural divide - It’s a view held by many Americans that they don’t need to worry what other people think about them, so they’re free to do and act as they please. Even though I was aware that much of the Japanese culture is focused on keeping up appearances, I was a bit shocked to learn the extent to which it controlled people’s actions. I get the feeling that someone behaving this way here would be regarded as overly anxious at best and somewhat mentally ill at worst. It makes me wonder how foreigners living in Japan and subject to these new rules of society feel, and conversely, how Japanese living in America (where all these rules don’t exist to the same extent) feel.
As far as the garbage sorting goes, I’ll agree with the poster above me that it sounds quite confusing, especially for people who aren’t used to it, and it makes me wonder if there isn’t a better way to go about sorting the garbage - is all this micromanagement of waste by each household really necessary, or could it be streamlined in any way? Kudos to these towns for their efforts to protect their environments and eliminate waste, however. That’s really something to be commended.