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Comment by snogglethorpe | Hacker News Reader

Once you're in prison I dunno, but the Japanese police in general are pretty low-key and community oriented, and seem to try hard to resolve problems without officially involving "the justice system." They're quite palpably less threatening than American police in my experience.

It's not just violent crime (something which might be affected by harsh penalties for such) which is rare in Japan, but petty crime as well. As far as I can figure, it's because of strong societal bonds and low income disparities, and that there's less of the sort of sense of disenfranchisement/alienation which seems so common in e.g. the U.S.

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> Japanese police in general are pretty low-key

Ha! There are loads of accounts of the falsely accused getting locked up with zero due process. You can find yourself in an unheated cell and forced to kneel on the floor face against the wall for hours a day under threat of beatings before things are sorted out weeks later. Read about the death penalty in Japan for a taste of how they operate. You get killed in secret and your execution is announced months after the fact. None of this years of appeals stuff.

The basic point is that people in Japan aren't scared of the police, and in fact the police are often thought of as being kind of wimpy and ineffective; most people consider them "those guys you ask for directions when you're lost." Their relationship with the general public is hugely different than that of American police.

So while the Japanese justice system may have some bad habits, that is not an explanation for very low Japanese crime rates.

Right. The general sense I've gotten from the American public is that the police are a paramilitary organization sanctified by the government. You don't ask the police to settle a dispute; you call the police to start a war.

I've heard it being told by some that "the police is the biggest and most well-armed gang in the neighborhood".

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