The murders committed by AUM Shinrikyo guru Asahara Shoko and his henchmen may be the most malevolent crimes in Japanese history. March 20, 1995 was Japan's 9/11, and but for a little dumb luck—including the failure to puncture all the bags of sarin that were planted in the subway trains—the death toll could have been much higher than 13 and the number of persons injured might have reached five digits instead of the true total of 6300.

The comparative study of death penalty policy is a relatively new and unpracticed discipline, and few of the existing studies concentrate on regional rather than global comparisons. This article makes the case for a regional approach by summarizing some of the most important findings from our book about capital punishment in Asia. That book is based on five major case studies of capital punishment in Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and China (chapters 3-7), and seven shorter case studies of capital punishment in North Korea, Hong Kong and Macao, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and India (appendices A-F).

The future looked grim for Abdy Ismail when his criminal trial started in Osaka District Court on January 17, 2011. Prosecutors believed Ismail was the drug lord who had masterminded the smuggling of 4 kilograms of methamphetamines—with a street value of 350 million yen ($4.2 million)—from Istanbul to the Kansai airport on July 18, 2009, and they wanted to imprison the 42-year-old Iranian for the next 18 years of his life.

In April 2010, The People's Republic of China executed four Japanese citizens who had been convicted of trafficking methamphetamines. They were the first Japanese to be executed in China since the two countries normalized diplomatic relations in 1972. At the time of their demise the condemned men—Akano Mitsunobu, Takeda Teruo, Mori Katsuo, and Ukai Hironori—were ages 65, 67, 67, and 48, respectively. All were killed by lethal injection in a province (Liaoning) that borders North Korea—the nation which may have been the source of the drugs—and all were either members of the yakuza or drug mules for them.

On August 3, 2009, Japan began a new trial system in which ordinary citizens sit with professional judges in order to adjudicate guilt and determine sentence in serious criminal cases. This change injects a meaningful dose of lay participation into Japanese criminal trials for the first time in 66 years. Japan had a jury system of sorts from 1928 to 1943, but it was suspended during the Pacific War for various reasons: because defendants who chose a jury trial had to give up rights to appeal; because the jury only answered a set of interrogatories framed by a judge who could reject its findings of fact; because jury trials were expensive and difficult to administer; and because (some analysts claim) a Japanese cultural preference for hierarchy caused defendants to prefer judgment by professionals rather than peers. Notably, the old jury system generated much higher acquittal rates than those that prevailed before or since—15 percent for the nation as a whole, and more than 60 percent in some cities—leading some prosecutors and judges to welcome the demise of an institution that made it more difficult for the state to convict.

I really agonized. I cried many times during the trial, and now when I recall it I still shed tears. I want you to understand this.

Man in his fifties who served on the first lay judge panel that imposed a death sentence in Japan (press conference after the trial of Ikeda Hiroyuki, November 16, 2010)

Does capital punishment do justice? We the people who constitute society have entered an era in which we must directly confront the death penalty and answer this question.

Tokyo Shimbun (November 17, 2010, p.26)

There are two ways in which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. In the second — the Huxleyan—culture become a burlesque…Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Neil Postman (1985)

Minister of Justice opposes capital punishment or does not want to participate in state killing, he or she can prevent executions simply by not signing execution warrants. A few years ago Minister of Justice Hatoyama Kunio of the LDP (who authorized 13 hangings while serving as Minister for less than a year in 2007-08) suggested that the execution process should be made more automatic by abolishing the Minister's discretion to make these life and death decisions. The execution process should be like a “conveyor belt”, he said, and the Minister should not be allowed to turn the switch off.

The arrest and prosecution of Nissan executive Carlos Ghosn, together with his dramatic flight from Japan, have focused unprecedented attention on Japan's criminal justice system. This article employs comparison with the United States to examine issues in Japanese criminal justice highlighted by the Ghosn case. The criminal charges and procedures used in Ghosn's case illustrate several serious weaknesses in Japanese criminal justice—including the problems of prolonged detention and interrogation without a defense attorney that have been characterized as “hostage justice.” But in comparative perspective, the criminal justice systems in Japan and the U. S. have some striking similarities. Most notably, both systems rely on coercive means to obtain admissions of guilt, and both systems have high conviction rates. The American counterpart to Japan's use of high-pressure tactics to obtain confessions is a system of plea bargaining in which prosecutors use the threat of a large “trial tax” (a longer sentence for defendants who insist upon their right to a trial and are then convicted) to obtain guilty pleas. An apples-to-apples comparison also indicates that Japan's “99% conviction rate” is not the extreme outlier that it is often said to be. Commentary on Ghosn's case emphasized the weaknesses in Japanese criminal justice. Those weaknesses are real and important, but by many criteria, such as crime and incarceration rates, Japan outperforms the U.S. As for Ghosn's case in particular, this article explores four scenarios of what might have happened to him if his case had occurred in the U.S. It is not obvious that he would have fared better under American law, nor is it obvious that justice would have been better realized.

The Asia Pacific Journal presents a link to an extraordinary 12-minute video by Matthew Carney of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation discussing the death penalty and the problem of wrongful convictions in Japanese criminal justice. This video explains what went wrong in three cases involving men who were victimized in the worst kind of way by Japan's criminal justice system, and it raises the possibility that these cases could stimulate reform in Japan's system of capital punishment and in the criminal justice system more generally.

A criminal case can go wrong in two main ways. A person who committed a crime can escape punishment, or a person can be convicted and punished for a crime he or she did not commit (Simon, 2012, p.4). Every criminal justice system makes mistakes of both kinds, but most cultures and criminal justice professionals believe that the worse mistake is the false conviction of a person who is actually innocent (Huff and Killias, 2008). As jurist William Blackstone observed, “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” An aversion to convicting the innocent is also well established in Japan's legal culture. Indeed, the main proximate cause of Japan's high conviction rate may be the institutionalized caution of Japanese prosecutors about charging cases with evidence that could lead to an acquittal (Johnson, 2002, p.237). On this view, the criminal justice system in Japan might convict fewer innocent people than do systems in countries that adopt more aggressive charging policies (Sasaki, 2000).

In September 2024, after 56 years under a sentence of death, Hakamada Iwao was acquitted in a retrial in Japan. This article summarizes what went wrong in his wrongful conviction case and what should be learned from it. The Shizuoka District Court's retrial decision concluded that police and prosecutors conspired to frame Hakamada with evidence they had fabricated, but there is more to the case than that. This tragedy occurred because of mistakes and misconduct that were exacerbated by underlying weaknesses in Japan's criminal process. To prevent a recurrence, many things need to change in Japanese criminal justice. The conclusion identifies five priorities for reform.

This article focuses on the criminal justice consequences of the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima that was precipitated by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. Through a process of “mandatory prosecution” initiated by Japan's unique Prosecution Review Commissions, three executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company were charged with criminal negligence in 2015-2016. They were acquitted at trial in 2019 when the Tokyo District Court concluded there was insufficient evidence to convict. Following this verdict, Japanese prosecutors essentially said “we told you so – these cases should not have been prosecuted.” But we argue that a courtroom loss does not mean that the case should never have been brought, for the TEPCO trial and the criminal process that preceded it performed some welcome functions. Most notably, this criminal case revealed many facts that were previously unknown, concealed, or denied, and it clarified the truth about the Fukushima meltdown by exposing some of TEPCO's claims as nonsense. At the same time, this case study illustrates the limits of the criminal sanction and the difficulty of controlling corporate crime in the modern world.

The release of Hakamada Iwao from death row in March 2014 after 48 years of incarceration provides an opportunity to reflect on wrongful convictions in Japanese criminal justice. My approach is comparative because this problem cannot be understood without asking how Japan compares with other countries: to know only one country is to know no country well. Comparison with the United States is especially instructive because there have been many studies of wrongful conviction there and because the U.S. and Japan are the only two developed democracies that retain capital punishment and continue to carry out executions on a regular basis. On the surface, the United States seems to have a more serious problem with wrongful convictions than Japan, but this gap is more apparent than real. To reduce the problem of wrongful convictions in Japanese criminal justice, reformers must confront a culture of denial that makes it difficult for police, prosecutors, and judges to acknowledge their own mistakes.

The current study examines the application of the Pediatric-Buccal-Epigenetic (PedBE) clock, designed for buccal epithelial cells, to endothelia. We evaluate the association of PedBE epigenetic age and age acceleration estimated from human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) with length of gestation and birthweight in a racially and ethnically diverse sample (analytic sample n = 333). PedBE age was positively associated with gestational age at birth (r = 0.22, p < .001) and infant birth weight (r = 0.20, p < .001). Multivariate models revealed infants with higher birth weight (adjusted for gestational age) had greater PedBE epigenetic age acceleration (b = 0.0002, se = 0.0007, p = 0.002), though this effect was small; findings were unchanged excluding preterm infants born before 37 weeks’ gestation. In conclusion, the PedBE clock may have application to endothelial cells and provide utility as an anchoring sampling point at birth to examine epigenetic aging in infancy.

Substance use disorder (SUD) is a public health crisis in the United States associated with significant economic costs including healthcare, criminal justice, productivity, and mortality and morbidity costs. In this paper, we present a tool for a customizable economic analysis that can be utilized by different recovery program owners and operators within the SUD continuum of care that considers these program’s operating and capital costs, location, size, and success rate. The goal of this tool is to provide owners and operators with an accessible tool that can estimate their individual program’s economic costs, benefits, and return on investment. In applications of the tool, we find that there are significant benefits associated with SUD recovery-oriented services, even with more conservative modeling of recovery benefits. Specifically, we find that a representative recovery housing program in Florida yields a net benefit of $143 million over 20 years with an associated return on investment of $22.19 per dollar invested. Further, we find that the net benefits of different recovery-oriented modalities including a recovery house, a recovery campus, and a residential inpatient program are positive, with returns on investment varying from nearly $22 per dollar invested to $1 per dollar.

Youth in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) face limited access to professional mental health resources. A comprehensive assessment of the prevalence of mental disorders would build an understanding of the scope of the need.

We conducted systematic searches in PsycInfo, Pubmed, AfriBib and Africa Journals Online to identify prevalence rates for five disorders (anxiety, depression, conduct disorder, attention problems and post-traumatic stress) among SSA youth with a mean age of less than 19 years. We calculated a random-effects pooled prevalence for each disorder and assessed possible moderators.

The meta-analysis included 63 studies with 55,071 participants. We found the following pooled prevalence rates: 12.53% post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 15.27% depression, 6.55% attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, 11.78% anxiety and 9.76% conduct disorder. We found high heterogeneity across the studies, which may have resulted from differences in samples or measurement tools. Reported prevalence rates were not explained by the sample (i.e., special or general population), but whether the psychometric tool was validated for SSA youth affected the reported prevalence of PTSD and anxiety. In a meta-regression, prevalence rates were associated with the disorder type, with a higher prevalence of depression and PTSD. We found the mean age significantly moderated the prevalence in univariate meta-regression, with increased age correlated with greater prevalence.

Our findings suggest there is a need to explore reasons for varying prevalence rates further and to develop interventions that support youth mental health in SSA, particularly interventions for depression and PTSD. Limitations included a lack of standardization in psychometric tools and limited reporting on research methods, which influenced quality rating. Importantly, the search only considered studies published in English and was conducted 2 years ago. Although recent estimates reported slightly higher than our prevalence estimates, these reviews together highlight the prevalence and importance of youth mental health difficulties in SSA.

Yellow and knotroot foxtail are two common weed species infesting turfgrass and pastures in the southeastern region of the United States. Yellow and knotroot foxtail share morphological similarities and are frequently misidentified by weed managers, thus leading to confusion in herbicide selection. Greenhouse research was conducted to evaluate the response of yellow and knotroot foxtail to several turfgrass herbicides: pinoxaden (35 and 70 g ai ha−1), sethoxydim (316 and 520 g ai ha−1), thiencarbazone + dicamba + iodosulfuron (230 g ai ha−1), nicosulfuron + rimsulfuron (562.8 g ai ha−1), metribuzin (395 g ha−1), sulfentrazone (330 g ai ha−1), sulfentrazone + imazethapyr (504 g ai ha−1), and imazaquin (550 g ai ha−1). All treatments controlled yellow foxtail >87% with more than 90% reduction of the biomass. By comparison, only sulfentrazone alone controlled knotroot foxtail 90% and completely reduced aboveground biomass. Sethoxydim (520 g ai ha−1), metribuzin, and imazaquin controlled knotroot foxtail >70% at 28 d after application. In a rate response evaluation, nonlinear regression showed that yellow foxtail was approximately 8 times more susceptible to pinoxaden and 2 times more susceptible to sethoxydim than knotroot foxtail based on log (WR50) values, which were 50% reduction in fresh weight. Our research indicates that knotroot foxtail is more difficult to control across a range of herbicides, making differentiation of these two species important before herbicides are applied.