Category: Law

Fuzzy sentencing: can lay judges beat the computer?

This came out as a coda to a Yomiuri report on the first lay judge trial:

The Supreme Court has introduced a system for searching past sentences handed down for reference when determining appropriate punishments. The use of this system is the focus of considerable attention.

Terminals installed in district courts and their branches across the nation allow data to be retrieved on about 2,300 sentences handed down since April last year. The data are organized into 10 categories, such as whether the crime was premeditated and the types of weapons used. By entering information via a terminal, similar cases and a range of appropriate punishments are displayed in a bar-chart format. Prosecutors and lawyers also can access the system. […]

The Supreme Court’s position on the use of the search results is that they “do not act as a restraint on sentencing, but rather generate material for further discussion.”

Though the information may help lay judges hold active discussions about an appropriate punishment, it may also prevent sentences being handed down that differ widely from similar cases.

Two immediate thoughts:

  1. This highlights yet another distinction between American jurors and Japanese lay judges. In the US, jurors don’t get involved in sentencing at all; that’s left to the judge. In fact, jurors are usually not allowed to know what the punishment is, lest it interfere with their judgment of the facts.
  2. This is a hell of a way to impose sentencing guidelines–basically sentencing by bureaucratic inertia.

To be clear, I think that the opposite extreme can be ridiculous. By “the opposite extreme,” I mean the U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines. This is a point system which binds judges to a narrow range of possible sentences based on facts which have been proven in the case–the nature of the offense, the aggravating and mitigating factors present, and the criminal history of the defendant. It’s kind of like doing your taxes: you have income and deductions and a variety of funky calculations to complete. And like tax returns, there is software to do all the calculating, which is worth a try to get a feel for the system.

There are several motivations behind reducing the judge’s discretion. One is to minimize discrimination in sentencing (though if you play with the online calculator, you will find that crack dealers really do get much worse sentences than coke dealers; also note that this is a concept which would probably fall upon deaf ears in the Japanese Diet). Another is to keep convicts from appealing the propriety of their sentences, which is a major administrative burden on appellate courts even when relatively clear rules are in place. Yet another (which would probably get the highest popular approval rating) is to prevent judges from giving lenient sentences to egregious offenders out of emotional pity.

Still, there is something which seems inherently wrong about judging by computer: the person in the defendant’s seat is a human being, and if the system is supposed to somehow “correct” them, some more serious consideration of their personal state by human eyes is probably necessary. The Federal Guidelines are good at keeping people in jail but not particularly good at giving them a responsible future.

Is the new Japanese method better? Maybe. The problem I see is that it could perpetuate the common practice in Japan of looking to the status quo for guidance, even when it clearly isn’t binding.

The lay judges seem to have avoided that trap in their first deployment. In the first lay judge trial, which was decided this afternoon, the pro-am bench handed down a guilty verdict and a sentence of 15 years, slightly less than what the prosecutors wanted (16 years) and well outside the range of past sentences dug up by the defense lawyer (3 to 10 years). So there’s some evidence of critical thinking in this new system, although it’s hard to guess what might happen in future cases.

緊急提言：報道機関による裁判傍聴制度の乗っ取りを許さない　Media stealing people’s right to observe trials due to ridiculous court rules

(Today’s post about how my chance to observe the lay judge trial was stolen is in Japanese only. For an overview of my experience in English, please check my photo album here. Feel free to leave comments in English!)

8月4日（火曜日）、全国で初めての裁判員裁判を傍聴しようと、朝早くから東京地方裁判所へと出かけた。ニュースで聞いていたとおり、傍聴希望者が数百人来ていて、大きな行列ができていた。報道陣も大勢来ていて、目の前の人にも「なぜ傍聴に来た」と取材していた。

基本的に、裁判の傍聴はアポなしでもできるが、注目が集まるような事件となると希望者が傍聴席の約60席を上回るため、抽選で傍聴券が配布される。当日は並んでいる人に整理券をくばり、9時になると当せん番号をホワイトボードに掲載し、整理券の番号と一致した場合は当せんとなる。

残念ながら、私は外れた。裁判所の前で「惜しい」と悔やんでいたところ、不思議な光景を目撃した。それは次に述べるように「報道機関による裁判傍聴制度の乗っ取り」である。

まず、裁判所の前は報道陣のカメラマンなどであふれている。それに、報道陣から当選者らしき人に対し指示を出し、一つの場所に集めようとしている。

そして、道を渡って警察庁本部の前に行くと、また別の行列ができている。並んでいる人全員が整理券を手に、誰かに渡し、マニラ封筒を受け取る。

封筒を受け取る様子を見てやっとわかった。この人たちはおそらくアルバイトで応募して、当選した場合は報道関係者に傍聴券を譲渡する。当たりでも外れでもお金がもらえるので、抽選の後で封筒入りの現金を渡していたようである。

これを見て、本気で憤りを覚えた。動員されたアルバイトがいればいるほど、その分まじめに傍聴しに来た人が当たる確率が低くなり、その機会が報道機関の動員によって奪われたからだ。

改善策

裁判には報道関係者の立ち入りが禁止されているらしい（利害関係者などは別の傍聴席があるようだ）。その状況下で、なんらかの方法で取材しようとすることが、ジャーナリストとして当然の行動である。しかし、傍聴制度は国民のために設けられ、その権利を奪ってはいけない。

もちろん、バイトの人たちが悪いと思わない。

一番責任があるのは、こんな非効率なルールを作って裁判所の関係者たちである。この状況を改善するには、裁判所に対していくつかの提言を述べてみたい。

１．傍聴券を譲渡不可にする。お金目当てでの傍聴券の入手を防ぐために、傍聴券を第三者への譲渡を禁止すべきである。これによって、「報道機関の乗っ取り」による不公平をなくし、一般人が傍聴しやすくなる。

２．一定の傍聴席を報道機関に優先的に枠を作る。報道陣はどうしても取材したいし、国民の関心のある事件の場合、その社会的価値も高い。法廷のスペースに制限があるので、一般人の傍聴席を少し減らして10席ほど設ければいい。事情により報道機関の立ち入りを一時的に禁止する必要も考えられるので、その場合は枠を作らないで、一般人の傍聴も禁止すべき。

この慣行が何年も続いているので、提言したところで改善すると思わないが、裁判員制度が始まった今、国民の司法に対する関心は高まるに違いない。

以上の二つを実現すれば、傍聴制度は利用しやすくなり、本来の目的を果たすことを期待している。

Koreans will say goodbye to seals

A few months ago, I wrote about the declining use of seals in Japan, and Adamu commented that Japan ought to abolish seals altogether. Well, South Korea is almost there:

At present, 32.89 million Korean nationals, or 66.5 percent of the entire population, have personal seals registered with the authorities, while a total of 48.46 seal certificates were issued last year, incurring enormous social and economic costs, according to government data. Hundreds of personal seal forgery cases are also reported every year.

The Ministry of Public Administration and Security said the government plans to scrap 60 percent of official demands for the personal seal registration certificates this year, with the remaining 40 percent set to be gradually abolished over the next five years.

A separate Joong Ang Daily article explains that this policy was the work of a “Presidential Council on National Competitiveness,” and that Korea’s use of seals only dates back to its days as a Japanese colony (its seal registration law was instituted in 1914).

Petition to end HIV ban

I’ve mentioned the US’s HIV travel/immigration ban before, and Andrew Sullivan reminds me that there are still two weeks left to sign the public comment petition, in advance of what will hopefully be the final stage of the repeal of this severely out-dated regulation. Surprisingly, I don’t see any wording that the petition is limited to US citizens as I would expect, so feel free to jump in and add your comments. I had to submit to an HIV text when applying for my Taiwan visa back in 2005 (I think they’ve eliminated it since then) and found it pretty invasive (obviously I was negative since I got the visa) and look forward to this restriction being lifted on would-be US residents.

Priests can become jurors, but not lay judges

Asahi Shimbun, 28 July:

According to Peter Takeo Okada, who is president of the [Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan], the lay judge system “does not fit in with the mission of the clergy from the start.”

Okada gives two reasons for the conflict. The first is that the basic thinking behind Christianity is the notion of forgiveness. The clergy must preach that whatever the sin, God has mercy for sinners who repent, and therefore, that mission does not go hand in hand with handing down a conviction in a crime.

The other point is the unique position that bishops and other clergy members hold. Their beliefs are formed around the notion that God alone knows whether a person is guilty of sin. Therefore, the clergy do not judge whether a person is good or evil based on information that person has gleaned.

Officials say it would be difficult for the clergy to shift away from such thinking only while they serve as lay judges.

Further down in the article:

In the United States, which employs a jury system, few states make an exception for clergy and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued no instructions to dioceses.

Some suggest that in the United States the clergy have a stronger sense of sharing responsibility as individual members of society.

There’s another major systematic consideration, which Asahi hasn’t picked up on, and which most people overlook when comparing the Japanese lay-judge system to the American jury system.

In the US, a juror’s duty is essentially to look at evidence, to compare that evidence to a list of criteria for legal guilt or liability, and to either decide whether there is reasonable doubt that those criteria exist (in a criminal case) or to decide whether there is a preponderance of evidence that those criteria exist (in a civil case). The judgment of guilt or lack thereof is simply a function of the rules imposed by the system and is not technically up to the juror to decide: the juror is there to decide whether the evidence is credible enough. This is why the judge is generally careful in issuing jury instructions to guide their decision. (Note that, depending on jurisdiction, American jurors can often legally find a “not guilty” verdict if they object to a guilty verdict for any reason, but this ability is disdained by the trial courts and usually isn’t pointed out to the jurors.)

On the other hand, as described in a recent American law journal article (which is horribly edited, confirming all my prior suspicions about Penn kids), Japan has taken a more collegial approach where the roles of judge and jury get blissfully muddled.

At the close of the trial, the panel of judges and lay jurors will retire to deliberate. The Lay Assessor Act provides little guidance for how deliberation should proceed. This question was left to researchers at the Supreme Court. Though every detail is not finalized, summaries of their meetings indicate that some important decisions have already been made. Researchers determined that jury deliberations should open with undirected, free conversation about the trial and evidence, after which judges can clarify disputed points, review the evidence, and explain the law. Great emphasis was placed on guarding against the possibility of judges leading lay jurors to the judges’ interpretation of events. For example, judges will be asked to state their opinion only after the lay jurors have stated theirs. In the case of a disagreement between a judge and the lay jurors, if the judge can recognize the lay interpretation as valid, she should defer to the jurors. Judges should state only their opinion and avoid actively persuading jurors, especially at the beginning stages of the deliberation. However, if a judge cannot compromise on a disputed point, she is permitted to vigorously argue her view.

In short, the professional judges and lay judges (or jurors or assessors or whatever you want to call them) are supposed to be on an even footing in the whole procedure, and they are supposed to reach the decision through a holistic assessment of the situation as a group. In this regard, the lay judges are actually taking a much more active role in administering justice, so it’s little surprise that the Catholic bishops are nervous about subjecting clergy to those duties.

Renting in Japan vs America: Interlude on discrimination

In my post on how renting works in America I included the following paragraph.

I should also add that exclusion by race or nationality is highly illegal, to the point where realtors are legally prohibited from even discussing the racial makeup of the neighborhood, should the renter be trying to, for example, avoid living near black people. This is very strictly enforced (at least in some states.) My mother had a good friend who worked as a realtor, who told me that the New Jersey state board of real estate (or whatever the official name is) actually sends undercover inspectors to do random checks of real estate agents and make sure they are following the discrimination guidelines. Realtors who break the rules lose their license.

I should add that despite being highly illegal this kind of discrimination is far from gone.One of my relatives emailed me the following anecdote, which I have edited to anonymize.

I didn’t want to post this in a public place, but just thought it would interest you. Somebody, can’t remember who now, asked [my partner] and I if — in selling our house — we would give preference to someone Jewish. We were amazed that anybody would ask us such a dumb question. First of all, selecting on the basis of race, religion or ethnicity would be illegal, but furthermore, it never entered our minds. So here we are in the 21st century and many people are still mired in the 1950’s — when this truly did happen on Long Island on a regular basis (and probably everywhere in the USA), and was still happening well into the 1980’s (even tho’ illegal).

I grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, which while today has a moderate Jewish population, until a few decades ago reputedly had an unofficial policy of excluding Jews. Montclair has also always had a large black population, but there has certainly been a history of anti-black racial discrimination in the real-estate market. For example, a brief 1909 item in the New York Times states that “The colored residents of this town are agitating a movement to erect a hotel for negroes in Montclair. The leaders of the negroes here say that such an establishment has become a necessity.” Although I have no other information, this certainly suggests to me that the black community has having a difficult time finding permission to construct the hotel, and furthermore, the very idea of a “hotel for negroes” suggests that they were being excluded from the hotels for whites, despite New Jersey being a Northern state, allegedly free of Jim Crow type discrimination.

Accusations of real-estate related racism today, however, allege a far more subtle manner. In the case of anti-black racism, there has been criticism of such things as the gentrification of neighborhoods in the South End of town, historically where the less wealthy blacks in Montclair have lived, near the train stations whose desirability has increased following rail service upgrades.

As for antisemitism, there was the case of B’nai Keshet, the Reconstructionist (which basically means leaning more towards culture than religion) synagogue that I and my family belonged to until I gave up on religion at age 11. From a 1996 NYT article on the phenomenon of minority religious groups suffering discrimination under the guise of legitimate zoning concerns (they have many other worthy examples in addition to B’nai Keshet):

In Montclair, B’nai Keshet, a Reconstructionist Jewish congregation, ran into tremendous opposition to its plan to move into a former art school. After many contentious hearings, the township ultimately approved the plan. But then the neighbors sued, and incensed synagogue members with comments in the local press likening the group to the cultist Jim Jones, said Susan Green, a past president of the congregation.

I remember this controversy actually going on for years, with B’nai Keshet moving around to a couple of temporary locations before they finally located a building, but I must admit that having quite years earlier, I paid little attention and don’t even remember where they ended up. However, while I may have found them boring, they were about as non-cultish as a religious group can be. A lawyer quoted in the article makes an important point:

”Churches no longer carry the cachet that they once did, that they sweep away for all citizens all opposition, and that’s particularly true when it comes to smaller or less established churches — which means new immigrant groups or smaller denominations,” said Marc Stern, a lawyer with the American Jewish Congress. ”Sometimes it’s flat-out bigotry masquerading as zoning.”

While explicit discrimination in real estate is illegal in the US and there has been much success in eliminating it from the residential real estate market (although I’m sure this varies greatly by region), it persists in more subtle ways, particularly in commercial real estate involving stores or religious/cultural institutions where minority ethnic or religious groups will gather.

Renting in Japan vs America – Part 1

Inspired by the news the other day that a Kyoto district court has rules that housing rental contract renewal fees are a violation of consumer rights, I thought I would write a brief introduction to how renting works, based primarily on my own experiences.

I have rented twice in America, three times in Japan, and one time in Taiwan, with an asterisk. As this post was getting quite long, I’ve decided to split it up into three pieces. Since I want to go in chronological order, I’ll first discuss America with a brief mention of Taiwan, then part 2 will discuss how it works in Japan, and finally in the third part I will break down my actual housing contract as specific examples.

I went to college at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in the small city of New Brunswick. After two years in various dorms I decided to move out, and went looking for a house or apartment to share with a friend or three. The Rutgers campus is surrounded by a zone of houses (with a very few apartment buildings) which are occupied almost entirely by students renting from year to year, formed as if the city were insulating itself from the campus in much the manner of an oyster generating a pearl to protect its soft, fragile body from a piece of grit. Since houses in the area are almost entirely for students, landlords can advertise directly to them quite easily through the housing office bulletin board etc, so there is no need for anyone to involve real estate agents. In most cases, the owner of the house rents directly to students, and are usually very amateurish about arranging repairs etc. The security deposit is equal to 1.5 months rent, as specified by city ordnance, and must be kept in a special bank account which may be used only to store the security deposit. When first moving in, the only thing you pay are first month rent, last month rent, and the security deposit. There is no “renewal fee” or anything similar, and in ordinary circumstances, most of the security deposit is returned.

This is pretty much the procedure throughout the US. While houses may be rented directly by the owner or through a real estate agent (who I presume earns some sort of fee), one often has contact with the landlord (i.e. the actual owner) after moving in, but owners of multiple properties may hire a company to deal with residents for them. Large apartment buildings generally have a superintendent who manages building, particularly construction, although I am somewhat vague about how small apartment buildings generally work. Security deposit is usually legally restricted to an amount of 1.5 or 2 months rent, and contract renewal fees are illegal. There is one big exception in the case of ‘key money’, which I will discuss later.

I should also add that exclusion by race or nationality is highly illegal, to the point where realtors are legally prohibited from even discussing the racial makeup of the neighborhood, should the renter be trying to, for example, avoid living near black people. This is very strictly enforced (at least in some states.) My mother had a good friend who worked as a realtor, who told me that the New Jersey state board of real estate (or whatever the official name is) actually sends undercover inspectors to do random checks of real estate agents and make sure they are following the discrimination guidelines. Realtors who break the rules lose their license.

I lived in one such house for a year (actually the first story of a two family house, as many houses are in the area), went to Japan for two years, where I lived in school dorms, and then returned for my final year at Rutgers, where I shared a second-story apartment of a different two-family house, which had been arranged while I was away by the girlfriend of a good friend (the girl being Jess Rees and the friend being Brian Cervino, both members of the band Huma whose music I recommend), and another guy that she knew. I’m afraid I forget now exactly what the rent was, but it came out to somewhere between $300 and $400 per person, plus some more for utilities. The security deposit in New Brunswick is set by law at 1.5 months, and in both cases most of it was returned, although well after the 30 day window required by law. As a student with no independent source of income, the landlords also required parents to co-sign as a guarantee. This is common in the US in such situations, but is not usual for renters who actually have a stable job. In both cases, everyone living in the apartment signed the lease, but the room and rent allocation was not explicitly spelled out, which in retrospect might have been a good idea, as there were some minor arguments in that area in the first house (although none at all in the second.)

I next went to study in Taiwan for a few months, where had arranged no housing in advance aside from a one-week reservation in a youth hostel, but almost immediately found a promising room advertised on a bulletin board at school. This experience gets an asterisk because as a subleter I never signed, or even examined, a contract and know relatively little about the local procedures and laws. My general impression, however, is that it works more or less the same as in most of the US, with no ‘key money’ or renewal fees, and only moderate security deposits. It seemed to me that rentals often go through agents (at least in apartment building-dominated Taipei) but perhaps in smaller cities/towns there are more landlords renting directly.

Stay tuned for part 2 tomorrow.

Is a national lack of English skills Japan’s Berlin Wall?

Critics of English teaching in Japan have put forth many arguments – it’s ineffective, it’s counterproductive, it attracts the wrong crowd, it starts too late, it focuses too much on English at the expense other languages, you name it. But this post from finance blogger Kazuki Fujizawa (likely a pen name) is the first time I have seen someone argue that English education in Japan is being intentionally undermined by the education ministry.

He starts by noting that the recent political developments in Japan (upcoming election) can be kind of hard to understand. This is only natural because as a free society power is not concentrated in one place – it is a complicated interaction of various interests. On the other hand, it is comparatively much easier to understand how dictatorships like North Korea or the former East Germany are governed – North Korea has its massive propaganda machine and terrorizes the population, while East Germany kept its people from escapting to the West by building the Berlin Wall.

With that in mind, he tells the story of what you might call Japan’s Berlin Wall, which I have translated below:

I think the time has come for the education ministry to abolish its policy of undermining Japanese people’s English abilities.

Viewed from the perspective of the rulers, the question of English language education was a sticky problem.

That is because if the people ever became able to speak English fluently, the talented Japanese people and firms might have gone overseas to get away from the world’s highest personal and corporate income tax rates. But to take in Western technology and develop the country, they had no choice but to give the people English language education. The rulers of Japan wanted to keep the people in bondage while simultaneously collecting as much information from abroad as possible.

The Japanese bureaucrats’ answer was to create an English language education system without precedent anywhere else in the world that was perfectly suited to meet these two opposing demands. They made the extremely specialized skill of mechanically replacing English sentences with Japanese the central focus of the compulsory English language curriculum.

Forcing middle schoolers with young minds to repeat these exercises again and again was wildly successful at disabling the people’s English language communication skills. People educated to turn English sentences into Japanese by moving the word order around become completely unable to speak English.

To the rulers, this was a very wonderful thing.

Unable to communicate in English, the Japanese people could thus be prevented from fleeing overseas without resorting to violence.

The amazing part of this English education system is that even though the Japanese people are rendered incapable of communicating in English, they can still understand written English such as English-language scholarly works. This way, the bureaucrats could disable the Japanese people’s English-language communication skills while at the same time giving them access to the vast archives of English-language written materials.

This system was a key component of Japan’s high rate of economic growth following World War II.
Even as English-language information entered Japan from around the world, the Japanese could only read English but not speak it or write it, meaning that there was almost no outflow of information from Japan to the outside world. This one-way flow of information made it possible for post-war Japan to rapidly industrialize.

But as Japan caught up to the advanced Western nations and caught the “developed nation disease,” this policy of disabling people’s English abilities began to crack at the seams.

Without English skills, Japan’s diplomacy is weak.
There is also little transmission of culture to the world.
A whole range of manufacturing products in Japan are incompatible with those sold in global markets due to Japan-specific standards.

Importantly, most Japanese companies can no longer survive in a shrinking Japanese market as the country’s biggest problem is the shrinking and aging population, which is progressing at the fastest rate in the world.

The era when Japan could shut itself off from the world, import information, manufacture products in Japan, and then sell them to the Japanese market has ended. Nowadays, Japanese people and companies must go abroad and sell their own products. That means they must have communication skills in English, the world’s lingua franca.

Looking throughout the world, in small advanced countries where businesses cannot succeed only in their home markets, the people can speak English almost without exception. Middle school students in the Netherlands and Sweden all get nearly perfect marks on the TOEFL test.

In Japan, our own market will shrink more and more, so we must now go abroad to survive.

Don’t you think it is high time for the education ministry to abolish its policy of disabling the Japanese people’s English abilities?

Civics lessons from 1913

Here are a few quotes from “The Philippine Citizen”, a 1913 reader on civics for students of secondary schools in The Philippines under American colonial rule.

Popular government. Since the Unites States is a representative democracy and is attempting to create a government of this kind in the Philippines, it becomes necessary to study this form of government with great care.

In the phrase of Abraham Lincoln, the government of the United States is a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” that is, popular government. It is important to remember that not all the people in any democracy take part in the election of public officers and the making of laws. In the most liberal of democracies women, with few exceptions, are excluded from a share in the government. Even in the United States only about one fifth of the whole population is entitled to vote. Popular government differs in degree in different democracies. What constitutes a democracy is not the number of people who vote but the fact that the people are the source of the laws.
(…)
It is sometimes difficult to say just how much one should know to be qualified to vote. In the United States, where popular education is so efficient and widespread, some states grant the suffrage to all males over twenty-one years of age. In many of the states, however, an educational or property qualification is also required. This often greatly reduces the number of electors. In the opinion of many, the suffrage should be still further restricted in the United States. It would certainly be a very foolish step to grant unlimited suffrage to people like some of the negroes of Africa, who in many cases know hardly enough to build a hut over their heads.

Woman suffrage. Even in the United States the full rights of suffrage are not granted to women, except in nine states. Many of the women are exceedingly intelligent and possess every qualification of mind and character that the male voters have, but they are not allowed to vote, because the suffrage is not a right but a privilege. This privilege it is not usually considered necessary to extend to women at present. If their votes were necessary to secure civil liberties to the people it would be entirely proper to grant them the suffrage.

The zairyu card law takes shape

Japan Times reporter Minoru Matsutani has been engaging in some unusually hard-hitting journalism in his recent series on the new immigration bill making its way through the Diet. In three articles, he went through the LDP’s perspective, the DPJ’s perspective, and the Immigration Bureau’s plans.

The third piece is the most interesting, as it takes on some of the strongest arguments against the new law: that it would be unduly harsh on overstayers and that it would inconvenience foreign residents.

Here’s the counter-argument on the first point:

If illegal foreigners turn themselves in, they may, under certain circumstances, be granted special permission to stay by the justice minister, or placed in custody in preparation for deportation.

The bills stipulate the justice minister must clarify the standard to grant special permission to stay to motivate overstaying foreigners to turn themselves in.

[…]

The bureau currently has no concrete criteria for granting the permit. Instead, it shows on its Web site examples of cases it granted and those it didn’t, but the information provided may not give illegal foreigners a clear clue as to what their fate may be, [Immigration Bureau General Affairs Division official Kazuyuki] Motohari said.

In one case on the Web site, a 27-year-old Southeast Asian woman was granted permission in 2007. She entered Japan with a six-month student visa in October 2004, dropped out of school and continued to stay in Japan.

She was arrested for overstaying in 2007, sent to the bureau without criminal charges and married a South American man, a legal resident, she had begun living with before the arrest. The bureau concluded their marriage was credible and she otherwise had a clean criminal record, it said on the Web site.

And on the inconvenience factor–the issue of certain changes having to be made at the immigration office rather than at city hall:

The Immigration Bureau is considering enabling foreign residents to report changes in workplace and apply for renewal of residence cards via mail or the Internet instead of requiring them to go to local immigration offices, he said.

Currently, renewing alien registration cards, which are to be replaced by zairyu cards, and reporting changes in personal information can be done at municipal offices, more of which exist than immigration offices.

For address changes, residents can go to municipal offices even under the new system. For changes in name, gender and nationality, they will have to go to immigration offices instead of municipal offices, but such changes rarely occur.

Together with the fact that this new system will give foreigners the same residence records as Japanese, as well as other benefits like free re-entry permits, it sounds as if the change is still, all in all, good for foreign residents.