Language Rights in Japanese Criminal Courts: Bridging the Gap Between Legal Professionals and Language Professionals

Abstract

Since the 1980s, Japan has seen a sharp increase in the number of non-Japanese-speaking background defendants in criminal trials. This has posed a major challenge to the Japanese justice system, which must ensure non-Japanese defendants’ rights to receive a fair trial in a language that they are able to understand and use fluently and accurately. Drawing on the author’s fieldwork in Japanese criminal courts and close linguistic analysis of actual court exchanges, contextualised with reference to the existing literature on court interpreting in Japan, I first discuss the issues of access to and quality of court interpreting which may have an impact on the language rights of non-Japanese defendants. Through this discussion I explore what sociolinguists can offer the judiciary in order to raise awareness of language rights. I argue that understanding the language ideologies that have an adverse impact on the non-Japanese-background defendant’s language rights in the bilingual courtroom can contribute to policy changes.