Japan is famous—maybe infamous—for its 99.9% conviction rate. A recent case in Hyogo Prefecture highlights how some of those convictions may come about. After a grueling interrogation, cops got a 12-year-old girl to confess to sexually assaulting a classmate. Months later, however, they concluded that the incident was a false report.
A forced confession
(Warning: This section contains descriptions of sexual assault.)
According to Asahi Shimbun, which broke the story, the incident occurred last February. The mother (51) of the 12-year-old girl, then in her 6th year of elementary school, was told to bring her daughter to the police station for unspecified reasons.
Once there, a female officer led the girl into another room for questioning. A male officer told her mother what was happening: a male student had accused the girl and others in her friend group of sexually molesting him on a school trip between November and December. They allegedly took turns touching his penis over 10 times.
The mother was shocked. Since the girl was under 14, she wouldn’t be charged criminally. But her mom knew she’d have to address her daughter’s alleged behavior and apologize to the alleged victim’s family.
The girl, during three hours of questioning, insisted she didn’t do it. Her mom said she could “feel the anger” of the cops towards her daughter because she wouldn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.
Later, the girl recounted the three-hour ordeal to her mother. The female officer assigned to her wouldn’t take no for an answer. “There’s no way you don’t remember,” she insisted.
In the end, the girl caved. A female officer made her write an apology and sign it with her thumbprint. The police took pictures of her as if they were booking a criminal.
She wasn’t the only one, either. One of her other friends was dragged in and said she saw the incident…after two hours of police questioning. That girl reportedly left the room in tears.
Dropping the case
The girl still insisted to her parents, however, that she didn’t do anything. “No matter what I said, they kept telling me to remember. I wanted to go home, but they wouldn’t let me. I kept thinking, maybe I forgot, I’m such an awful person for forgetting.”
After investigating the laws around questioning minors, her parents were convinced the cops crossed a line. So they went back to the station the next week and asked for her confession to be vacated.
After waiting for 15 minutes, another officer appeared. He said there were “doubts” about the case.
It took two more months for cops to report the results of their investigation. The accuser, they concluded, made up the charges. The girls were innocent.
“I understand how Hakamata Iwao felt”
Afterwards, the girl’s mom lodged a complaint with the police. In the end, the cops apologized for taking the girl’s picture, which they say went against internal policy. However, they defended all their other actions, including interviewing the girl alone without a guardian. (Police failed to inform her parents that, since she was a minor, they had a right to be present for questioning.)
Japanese police have come under fire before for pressuring suspects to confess. In the most infamous case, Hakamata Iwao spent over 50 years on death row for a crime that a court later determined he didn’t commit. More recently, in 2020, Japanese police held engineer Aishima Shizuo in jail on charges of manufacturing chemical weapons. They released him three days before he died of cancer, only to drop all charges four days before trial.
The innocent girl said she heard about Hakamata’s case on TV.
“I know how it feels to be told you did something you didn’t do,” she said.
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