Tidbits
Fingerprinting of foreigners to end - The Ministry of Justice announced that the law for foreigner registration cards will change. Effective April 1, foreigners will no longer be required to be fingerprinted upon applying for a foreigner registration card. Foreigners may also reapply for cards without finger prints attached to them if they wish. Although the practice of finger printing foreigners is common practice in other developed countries, such as the United States, the large ethnic Korean and Chinese populations in Japan have harbored a strong resistance to the practice as it was a painful reminder of past experiences of being treated as prisoners.
Japanese prosecutors batting close to 1000 - Make that about 98 percent of the time a successful verdict, and as a recent case illustrates, the sentence they want as well. In May of last year, Takashi Mochida had been given a life sentence for robbing and murdering a woman. The case was unusual because Mochida committed premeditated murder as part of a grudge against his victim just two months after he finished serving a seven-year sentence for raping the same woman in 1989. Prosecutors appealed the life sentence calling for the death penalty, and in February this year the Tokyo High Court issued the requested death sentence. Prosecutors were not as successful last September, however, when a former teacher at Kabutoyama Gakuen was acquitted for the third time for a 1974 murder. Protection against double and tripple jeopardy was one of the rights that GHQ forgot to add to Japan's constitution when they wrote it after World War II.
Police take another sex offender off the streets - After learning that the police had issued an arrest warrant for molesting a teenage girl, a man living in Iwase, Ibaraki decided he had better turn himself in and confess to his crime in hope of a lighter sentence. He traveled to the Mooka Police Station in nearby Tochigi Prefecture where he was wanted, but police officers on duty told the man that detectives in charge of the case were not there and that he would have to come back the next day. The man returned the next day and was finally taken into custody.
Yakuza banned from waste processing business - The Ministry of Health and Welfare has announced that people affiliated with organized crime organizations will no longer be allowed to receive processing permits, and those crime figures who already have processing permits will lose them. According to the National Police Agency, waste processing has become a major source of income for organized crime, and profits have grown due to improper dumping and processing procedures. Each prefectural police headquarters will be asked to identify the people who are associated with organized crime.
Corrections on the Roppongi story - Japan Traveler would like to extend an apology to Geronimo's Shot Bar at Roppongi crossing. We had sent our intrepid reporter, Kurt Hansen, out to do the story on Roppongi, and in the course of his research he became seriously inebriated with his writing skills impaired and misspelled the name of Geronimo's manager. His name is PAUL, not Peter. Apparently Paul lived up to his billing as the "superfriendly" manager of Geronimo's and was a bit too generous with the complimentary drinks. Our reporter must have staggered out humming 60s folk songs before heading home to do the story when he also misspelled Mogambo. But these corrections have been made on the Web site version of Japan Traveler. If you did not see the Roppongi guide, you can still read it at http://wwwjapantraveler.com under the back issues section.
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