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> If a $10 bill goes missing in a supermarket, the management will know at the end of the day, and will probably be able to figure out where it went. This is routine cash control. It's a solved problem.

Not necessarily, differences are a daily part of working as a supermarket cashier. Most supermarkets have agreements with their employees (sometimes mandated by law), varying from full employee liability to full coverage by employer. It's actually quite common to have differences in your register, e.g. because customers let you keep small-ish returns or give "real" tips or you as cashier in a high-frequency environment make a mistake in sorting in a bill into the right compartment - or fraudsters trick you (http://www.weser-kurier.de/region/delmenhorster-kurier_artik...).

The point is that cash differences in a supermarket get noticed within hours. Some level of error can be accepted, but if somebody comes up $40 short several days each week, they're going to be looking for a new job. Mt. Gox claims they didn't know they were being drained of assets for months.

Exactly. I have a friend who while high school in the '60s worked in one of those highway restaurants, if you travel in the right parts of the US you'd remember their name.

Of all their cashiers she had the highest "volatility", you might say, from day to day. That conceptually annoyed her superiors, but they loved her because she never made a big mistake, and her daily errors averaged out very nicely.

$40 short weeks in a row, or in this case, ~650,000 $500 bills short in a couple years :)

Just curious, searched and couldn't find anything meaningful, what is the "standard 21-day interrogation"?

To make a long story short: the general standard of Japanese policing at present is quite similar to the prevailing standard of US policing in the 1950s. The primary investigative tactic is coercing confessions, and I do not use the word "coercing" lightly. Japanese cops can jail someone on suspicion of wrongdoing for 20-something days prior to having to bring a magistrate into the picture, during which time they're routinely physically and emotionally abused and made to think that signing whatever the cops put in front of them will be the quickest way to end the ordeal.

Doesn't this get abused heavily?

It is systematic abuse; I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about it being abused...

Indeed. Japan is a police state. A remarkably polite one, but things at this level are done for the convenience of the police, prosecutors and judges (at least prior to adding juries to the system, but I'm quite skeptical how that'll turn out for quite a while). Closing cases is more important than finding the real criminal, and atrocities like their handling of the Aum Shinrikyo cult suggest they're not so good when put to serious test.

"Atrocities like their handling of the Aum Shinrikyo cult"? Are you referring to the guy falsely blamed for the Matsumoto attack? The police are indeed likely to blame for leaking his name to the media, but he was never even formally charged, much less convicted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshiyuki_Kouno

The investigation of the Tokyo sarin attacks, on the other hand, seems to have been carried out pretty much by the book and I'm not aware of anybody outside the tinfoil hat brigade who contests that they got the right people.

After the sarin attacks, they did a good job. I'm referring to the multiple times they dropped the ball prior to that point, which among other things allowed the sarin attacks to happen. Their screwup on the Matsumoto attack is an obvious example; they they harmed an innocent in an incorrect focus on him is in a way much less important than letting the culprits later do much worse.

Are they juries? A lay judge is different, and given the implementation of it, it seems barely better than what they had before, since a lay judge is typically going to just defer to the professional judge most of the time, anyway.

I figured the system would end up being "juries" only in form and didn't investigate it, but it's of course it turns out to be much worse as you point out. And then there's this gem from Wikipedia which echoes the early issues with common law juries, which were not much respected by the ruling class if the case was important and they rendered the "wrong" verdict:

"Others have written with concern regarding the harsh secrecy provision in the statute which includes the risk of criminal penalties for those lay judges who would publicly share confidential deliberation room discussion even after trial proceedings are complete.:

I'm sure there's a lot more where that came from, plus of course as you note extreme deference would likely be paid to the professional judges. The above is from the end of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lay_judges_in_Japan

http://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20810572

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8290767.stm

Police can hold suspects for 23 days; those interrogations are private; Japan only recently re-introduced trial-by-jury (2009!); etc

Here's a nice 28 minite radio programme talking about the problems. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01phktd

I don't know if this is actually "standard" or if there are just outliers that receive press attention, but there have been reports of innocent people confessing after being interrogated for 15 hours a day [1].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/world/asia/11japan.html?pa...

Not to mention the 90+% conviction rate in Japan ...

Fun fact: in no year since 1957 has the Japanese court system failed to convict at least 99.9% of indicted suspects.

Even more fun fact: this is not the strongest statement one could make. The last number I remember citing for it was something on the order of two dozen not guilty verdicts, nationwide, out of about 125,000 prosecutions in a year, but don't quote me on that.

99.9808%, given those figures. Some numbers I can find online pin it at 99.97%, which in either case is comparable but greater to that of Communist China (99.93%).

And you're not afraid? Do arrests seem legit when you hear about one?

I'm generally not afraid of the police when they're not actively questioning me on suspicion of me having committed a crime. That has happened eight times. Six of the eight times, it was on suspicion of stealing my own bicycle, the relevant evidence being that I was a) not Japanese and b) riding a bicycle. One time, after the cops had called my bicycle's anti-theft registration number into HQ and received the radio report "That bike is registered to one Patrick McKenzie", I was accused of stealing Patrick McKenzie's bicycle and identity. [+]

Does this answer your questions?

[+] I realize this sounds like the kind of story an Irish storyteller would make up to prove a point and feel that I must add "I swear by all the saints, by my hope of heaven and my fear of hell, this did literally happen."

It's the perfect crime. Steal someone's bicycle, along with their identity, and ride the bicycle with impunity.

That seems incredibly scary to me. When something is that insane, what stops it from taking the next step of insanity? I'm sorry that it happened to you (let alone six times), and am glad you made it out ok.

What next? They make you prove you've never been cloned?

I showed him a particular immigration document issued to me that he is not, strictly speaking, allowed to ask for prior to starting a custodial interrogation. He then started second guessing Immigration's decision to offer me a visa.

That was good news, since it convinced a colleague he was overstepping his authority. I was released 5 minutes later, with an admonition to lock up my bike properly to avoid the scourge of foreign bike thieves plaguing Ogaki.

And the other two times?

How did you convince them you were him and that you hadn't stolen your own identity?

One part of it is that the Japanese police won't arrest someone unless they think they can nail them. A lot of murders may be ruled suicide because there's no convenient scapegoat, he-said-she-said rape cases not pursued, etc.

OK, but that's approximately true of criminal justice in the US. For instance: wiretaps are administratively expensive to pursue, and so police don't request them until they're sure they've got enough evidence to win the warrant. But civilians aren't persuaded by this logic; instead, they see it as evidence that the whole system is tilted in favor of the police.

It should be as disquieting (or not disquieting) in Japan as it is in the US.

If you look at the criminal justice system as having some amount of diagnostic sensitivity at each stage in the process (having both false positives and false negatives as all systems do), then our comparatively lower conviction rate means that (assuming end-of-the-day-justice is equal), we should be even more willing to waste people's time developing cases that have no merit (because more of the diagnostic sensitivity is in the trial/conviction stage). So it's not unreasonable to assume it's easier to get a wiretap in the US than it is in Japan -- another explanation is that Japan is substantially more likely to have false negatives (as implied elsewhere -- but the false negative rate for many crimes in the US is quite high, as roughly half of all murders go unsolved). Could also be that the diagnostic sensitivity is extremely bumpy in America or Japan (read: basically one or two steps / people get an extremely high share of the criminal justice discretion).

Should be easy enough to prove or disprove by comparing the number of X-type arrests made to the number of X-type crimes committed.

If it's absurdly high, or significantly higher than some comparable country, then you've got a problem - with a 99.9% conviction rate.