Popular Participation in Japanese Criminal Justice: From Jurors to Lay Judges by Andrew Watson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Popular Participation in Japanese Criminal Justice: From Jurors to Lay Judges by Andrew Watson Dimitri Vanoverbeke Popular Participation in Japanese Criminal Justice: From Jurors to Lay Judges. By Andrew Watson. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 177 pages. Hardcover, £72.00/€96.29/$99.99. In May 2009, Japan introduced a lay judge (saiban’in) system, significantly revising criminal justice procedures that had been in place since the start of the postwar period. This innovation, in which six randomly selected citizens participate together with three professional judges in making decisions on guilt or innocence and on sentencing, appears at first sight to mark a radical turn toward greater democracy in the courts. As such it has attracted extensive attention from scholars in various fields, including criminal procedure law, sociology of law, political studies, and history. The new system raises many interesting questions, such as how great a departure with the past it really represents; how much independence is afforded the lay judges, who deliberate in a closed room together with experienced professionals; and how much of an impact the change has had on Japan’s extremely low acquittal rate (which before the introduction of the new system in 2009 was about 0.01 per cent). Popular Participation in Japanese Criminal Justice, by Andrew Watson, contributes to the rapidly growing literature on the lay judge system by offering a concise overview of its background and the main issues associated with it and by raising questions for further investigation or for classroom discussion. Having said that, overall I found the book to be somewhat lacking in depth and unfortunately cannot give it a wholehearted endorsement. Following a very short first chapter (of only several pages), chapter 2 takes a look at the past, beginning with Meiji. Watson rightly makes the point—alluded to in the [End Page 160] book’s subtitle—that popular participation in the criminal justice system is not a brand new phenomenon in Japan. Rather, the new system has an analogue in former experiments with trial by jury, where citizens deliberated—independently from professional judges—in criminal cases. The first attempt to introduce a jury system took place in 1873. That system, called sanza, was only used a few times and only involved higher civil servants as jurors. A second such system was introduced via legislation in 1923 and then implemented in 1928. This time, jurors were chosen from the general population, but with various eligibility requirements that severely limited the pool of potential participants. Once again the results were not considered satisfactory, and over time suspects of severe crimes came to be tried more and more frequently by professional judges alone. In 1943, the system was suspended as the energies of Japanese citizens were mobilized for the war effort. Despite the importance of chapter 2 to Watson’s overall aim, it is also the most problematic chapter in this volume because of its large number of errors; while the book overall contains numerous inaccuracies, the problem is especially pronounced here. In addition to a general lack of consistency in the use of romanization and in Japanese name order, there are also a number of outright errors. One of the main architects of the 1928 system, Hanai Takuzō, is referred to as “Tazuzo Hanai” on pages 12 and 19. Page 30 contains a mention of “Charles Opler . . . , then a young SCAP American legal adviser.” This in fact is a reference to Alfred C. Oppler, the chief officer of the Legal Unit in the Government Section of SCAP during the postwar Occupation. And in the list of references for chapter 2, Oppler is again misidentified (as “Opler, C.”) in a citation to his well-known 1976 book Legal Reform in Occupied Japan: A Participant Looks Back. These errors aside, the description of the actual implementation of the trial-by-jury system in 1928 seems overly broad. Having said that, this material could be used as a stepping stone for in-class discussions on the role of law, on politics in pre–World War II Japan, on the way that culture influenced the jury system, and on the relation between citizens and the state. Later in chapter 2 (pp. 17...