Japan is too soft on sex offenders, vast majority of survey respondants say

Critics say ordinarily tough-on-crime Japan isn’t tough enough.

In some ways, the Japanese legal system can be extremely tough on crime. This is after all, the country where a foreign college student remains in lockup eight months after reportedly breaking a lamp at a bar, and where the police are still searching for vandals who caused a ruckus at a Halloween party in order to bring them to justice, even though we’re well into the next calendar year.

But that doesn’t mean that Japanese citizens think their country is a police state. On the contrary, a recent survey by Japanese survey site Shirabee shows that many Japanese people think their country should be tougher on offenders in one area: sex crimes.

Shirabee recently polled 1,344 Japanese men and women between the ages of 20 and 69, asking them “Do you think that Japan is too forgiving of sex offenders?” The vast majority, 86.5 percent, answered “Yes.” The survey administrators say there wasn’t a large discrepancy between male and female respondents, either, with over 80 percent of both groups saying Japan should be tougher on rapists, chikan, domestic abusers, sexual harassers, and those who commit other acts of illegal indecency outside of those specific categories.

While the survey didn’t ask respondents for specific examples, it’s hard not to think of high-profile cases such as when the creator of popular manga/anime Rurouni Kenshin admitted to charges of possession of child pornography, and not only avoided jail time but was back to work drawing his serialized comic in just seven months. More recently, an idol singer in Niigata Prefecture was attacked by two men who tried to force their way into her home (an incident that took place prior to the survey), but both were released by the police with no criminal charges filed against them, and the singer herself ended up apologizing for “causing a commotion,” so maybe t’s not so surprising that so many respondents feel that Japan needs to stop using kid gloves when dealing with sex offenders.

Source: Shirabee via Niconico News via Jin
Top image: Pakutaso

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