COPS – Japan Stylee

Eamon, a technologist in the area of Cybernetics I know[1], posted this:

“If you peruse Japanese foreign-resident forums you’ll read a depressing amount of stories about foreigners being told to sign kanji-laden papers ‘so you can go’, only to find they’ve signed a confession – which the courts accept as totally truthful. That acceptance of the confession is because ‘that’s the way it’s supposed to work in Japan’. The chastened criminal confesses, justice is served, end of story. Foreigners get it even worse, because arguing against one’s confession is seen as insulting to the court. Bigger sentence time.”

…and some other observations of the police forces in Japan. It’s interested reading and story-nugget-laden as well. I don’t know what Eamon expected from Japan but it would be interesting to see what he has made of it so far.

Sub to his blog. You never know, he might talk Sci-Fi!

[1] Eamon was one of the contributors to Crucible Design and one of the go-to guys for Sci-Fi technology, physics and the interactions between bones and stainless steel joints (via a PhD in the wear and tear on hip replacement). I kid you not. In gaming sci-fi, his only failing was ‘knowing too much’ and therefore losing some of the ability to partake of ‘handwavium’ for plot elements. He does know an awful lot about Traveller but I don’t know if he games much these days.