Beset by a rash of repeat sex offenders and abusers, Japan is finally implementing a national sex offender registry for organizations whose employees work with children and other vulnerable populations. However, some parents say they want more tools to identify potential offenders in their neighborhoods.
A new website purports to deliver just that in the form of a sex offender map. That’s sparked a debate over whether the service is legal under existing Japanese law.
A new service for tracking offenders
As of this writing, Japan has no registry to identify teachers, healthcare workers, or others who commit violence against children, the elderly, and the disabled. That’s resulted in multiple instances where people convicted of crimes have been able to prey on more victims by moving around Japan.
In March 2024, we wrote about Nagumi Osada, who raped a kindergartener after three prior arrests. In 2018, a school in Aichi Prefecture fired a man for molesting five students – but he’d already been arrested in 2013 on child pornography charges.
As we’ve previously written, Japan aims to introduce a national system patterned after the United Kingdom’s Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) by 2026. However, the service will only be available to organizations whose employees work with the vulnerable – not parents.
That’s led one group to take matters into its own hands. The Amyna Project works much the same way that sex offender locator apps work in other countries. Users can zoom in on a location and see details about an alleged offender’s location and their offenses.
The site currently has free and supporter versions. Supporters who create a recurring subscription of at least 500 yen ($3.35) a month can see more details, such as an alleged offender’s exact address, the date of the crime, and other details.
Is the service legal under current Japanese law? Very unlikely
The site is the project of one man, known online as Yoshilog. He identifies as residing in New York and says he spent 26 years at the United Nations working on refugee, human rights, and peace-related efforts. He’s gone into detail on the site Note about why he started the project and has defended it from its detractors.
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In 2024, after reading about how five men had drugged and gang-raped a young girl, Yoshilog posted on X about how Japan should have a public sex offender registry like the United States. He says the positive response to that post led him to pull together a team of five people – systems engineers, data engineers, marketers, and administrators – to build Amyna.
(It should be noted that the United States is the only country with a sex offender registry system accessible to the public. In other countries, it’s only searchable by law enforcement.)
The question is: Is the site legal under current Japanese law, given the country’s information protection regulations?
The answer: Most likely not.
As usual, the site Bengo4.com has risen up to offer an expert opinion. Lawyer Itakura Yoichiro makes it clear that, under normal circumstances, the information Amyna is offering is protected against non-consensual disclosure by Japan’s Act on the Protection of Personal Information.
However, the Act allows for exceptions under two circumstances:
- The information is public information reported by the media related to a crime; or
- The information is promulgated with the purpose of protecting public health or the welfare of children.
Bengo4 refers to a previous controversial project, the Insolvent’s Map (破産者マップ), which identified people whose businesses had gone belly-up. The controversial project launched in 2019 but was shut down by the government’s Committee on Personal Information Protection for violating people’s privacy rights and subjecting them to harassment while providing no material public benefit.
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“The project will be finished if it goes to court”
It seems clear Amyna can make a case that it’s protecting children. However, says Itakura, a court would also have to weigh whether Amyna was properly handling and vetting sensitive personal information. Without firm verification processes in place, for example, it runs the risk of falsely identifying someone as committing a heinous crime.
Itakura notes that there are many cases, for example, where charges are sent to prosecutors, but they decline to prosecute. Most of these dropped cases go unreported in the news media. That disconnect could lead to inaccurate labeling in a database like Amyna’s.
Another wrinkle is domestic violence cases. Identifying an abuser who still lives with their victim could disclose the victim’s information by proxy.
In the end, Itakura believes that Amyna could be found to promote harassment of individuals, as well as accused of “profiting” off of personal information via its donation/subscription system.
In his recent blog post, even the creator admits that “it’s possible,” as its critics contend, that “the project will be finished if it goes to court.” He seems okay with that.
“I’ll be glad to have made the debate public,” he writes. “This ‘end’ will be a big step forward in making it crystal clear that Japanese society, the law, and its systems are failing to put measures in place to protect kids from sex offenders.”
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