I would have been very concerned, for example, if the local Fukuoka paper had run spreads on US gun crime in the wake of the recent outburst of yakuza violence there.

In any case, this type of record is necessitated by the fact that it has NOT been normal for this kind of complete reporting in the past and what you have shown me here is a quantum leap from just a few years ago, a jump that has been empowered by the beefing up of newspaper websites. This seems like a great step that I’d like to see duplicated elsewhere – I hope that things are getting better in US reporting and that the critical war stance will continue to be a check on politicians in years to come.

Wow, that blog is a harrowing piece of web reporting. Damn, just going back a week gives me a cold sweat. One of the most important things that I have seen online in a long time, thanks for the link.

The Homicide Report is a weekly listing of all homicide victims reported by the Los Angeles County coroner, combined with updates every few days from law enforcement agencies of new homicides not yet listed. Any human being who dies at the hand of another in Los Angeles County, and whose death is recorded by the coroner, is included in the report.

The report seeks to reverse an age-old paradox of big-city crime reporting, which dictates that only the most unusual and statistically marginal homicide cases receive press coverage, while those cases at the very eye of the storm—those which best expose the true statistical dimensions of the problem of deadly violence—remain hidden.
[...]
But Angelenos also know that not all suffer equally from homicide. Night after night, vastly higher numbers of young men, most of them black or Latino, many with criminal records, are shot in drive-by shootings in Lynwood, Compton, Watts, South-Central Los Angeles, Willowbrook, Westlake, Boyle Heights, or any of a number of neighborhoods in the county long associated with relatively high crime rates.

We know the press takes little notice of these deaths. Immense private heartbreak and shattering communal events are thus rendered footnotes or ephemera, while the phenomenon of routine killing in the public streets of a major, first-world city is diffused into virtual invisibility. The public comprehends there is an elephant in the room, but is never given more than a glimpse of its massive bulk; meanwhile the press focuses on a toenail, or the tip of a trunk.

With The Homicide Report, however, The Times seeks to exploit the advantages of the web to eliminate selectivity in homicide coverage and give readers a more complete picture of who dies from homicide, where, and why—thus conveying both the personal story and the statistical story with greater accuracy.

But if the possibility is there and the facts are not, I’m not sure that it is such an issue.

We have heard a lot about the strongarm tactics of the Japanese police, but there is little in the way of coherent analysis to tell us if this is sending innocent people to prison. Case in point – there are some remarkably vocal human rights advocates in Japan (who will remain unnamed). These individuals go nuts about individual “no gaijin” signs on handjob parlors, but, despite the fact that the Japanese prison population is nearing 7% gaijin, have yet to find high profile cases of innocent gaijin steamrolled into confessions—at least not ones that have come to any real wide attention. There have been a few Brits jailed on drug charges who, despite their pleas that they were set up, did time in Japan. This, however, falls under fair play in Japanese law – if you are caught bringing drugs in you are responsible, they don’t care if some guy named Dave asked you to drop off a package for him when you were partying in Amsterdam, you take responsibility for your own bags.

With the absence of anything concrete, I’m apt to chock this up to another example of Japan bashing. Right now, the Democratic candidates in the USA are talking about Japanese non-tariff barriers to American cars just as they were in 1982. Despite the success of the Germans in the auto arena (or the fact that some American companies like Toys R Us are doing far better in Japan than they are stateside by using their own distribution), this type of nonsense still gets fair play. The convictions statistic could fall into the same category. In just about all of the high profile murders that I have followed in Japan—kokosei burned to death in Chiba (it was her boyfriend they picked him up right away and he confessed), the murder of a little girl in Hiroshima by a Peruvian (he put her body in a box that came with a gas range, he had the gas range in his house, he confessed and said that the devil made him do it when he was caught), the curry murders, the murder of the family in Fukuoka a few years back, etc., etc. They seem completely open and shut with few or no police shenanigans. Am I missing something there?

You make some good points about innocents making it onto death row in the USA, but that comes back to the point that I made earlier—in America, killings involving strangers are far more common than they are in Japan and these murders are much more difficult to investigate and the chance of an unconnected innocent being picked up that much greater.

“handful of states (and Texas in particular) skew the overall stats drastically.”

This is a part of the whole USA thing that I still have a hard time getting – sometimes people end up taking like other parts of the country are not part of the general responsibility. The Texans are still beholden to the US supreme court and skewed statistics in one state are still a problem for all.

“I find that theory a bit bizarre, since the LA Times is fairly liberal, and unlikely to support the death penalty at all”

But why articles about Japan’s death penalty at all when the US issue seems far more pressing? Support or not support is not the issue, how they devote their features is. I think that this is a common pattern in US reportage – in 2003-2004 there was a lot of criticism of the “revival of Japanese militarism” kicking around in the US media. Meanwhile the whole show completely dropped the ball on the Iraq War with substantial criticism only really starting up after things had gone to far (not just about WMDs, debate about the whole nature of state power in general). Coming from an academic / outside the US perspective—it is pretty much assumed that major American news sources – even “liberal” ones like CNN and the LA Times (two wishy washy examples) that strike outsiders as being conservative and nationalist – shy away from deep criticisms of the US (particularly foreign policy) and will often run features about gun violence in Brazil (as opposed to gun violence in the USA), racism in Russia (as opposed to hate crimes in the USA), and drug culture in Mexico (as opposed to….), choosing to turn the critical gaze outward rather than inward. This is the opposite of what happens in Japan where feature reporting can be accused of being morbidly self-obsessed.

While I’m no supporter of the death penalty, I was fairly sure that confessions alone cannopt be used as evidence in any Japanese criminal conviction.

Here’s what the constitution has to say:

“Article 38

1. No person shall be compelled to testify against himself.
2. Confession made under compulsion, torture or threat, or after prolonged arrest or detention shall not be admitted in evidence.
3. No person shall be convicted or punished in cases where the only proof against him is his own confession.”

But that’s just the constitution, right? No one actually cares much about that old thing any more.