Prison life in Japan

[thewayne]

This guy (gaijin) goes to Japan, gets very drunk on his birthday, and gets into an altercation with a taxi driver. Huge misunderstandings for lots of reasons, the driver ends up injured, the gaijin ends up in prison.

The Japanese legal system does not sound like a very fun thing.

This is the first part of a series, I haven't delved deeper into it yet: http://www.stippy.com/japan-life/gaijin-in-a-japanese-prison-1/

Comments

[ateji.livejournal.com]

I read a similar story in doing research for a paper on sexual harassment in Japan. A foreign man (possibly French, if memory serves) was arrested on the subway for supposedly fondling a Japanese woman. His Japanese wife wasn't notified for over a week about his whereabouts. I think the charges ended up getting dropped, but it was a horrifying read. As is this. :(

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention it. There was a comment in reply to one of these stories about a newlywed who was accused by a drunk teen of groping her on the subway.

Man, I would think a paper on sexual harassment in Japan would be pretty grim. There are some seriously twisted people over there! ;-)

[ateji.livejournal.com]

It was depressing in terms of human rights violations, but some interesting things turned up, like their borrowing the term sexual harassment and then shortening it to sekuhara because they had no native term for it. Other things that stand out were that it's fine for a husband to rape his wife because, hey, she's married to him. If she tries to go to court for it, both males and females will tell her it's her "duty" (otsutome; when I gave a presentation on the paper, my professor said the word has overtones of being a disgusting duty that one has to just put up with). Really lovely. :\