UTokyo staff union + Greater Tokyo parttime university lecturers union November 2018
The general public living on the archipelago of the rising sun is a far more normal people than they have long been internationally reputed in association with Samurai, Harakiri, Kamikaze, and Yakuza. Certainly, an overwhelming majority of Japan’s resident nationals were duly shocked and disenchanted when the district attorney in charge decided not to prosecute Masato Uchida, the former senior executive board member at Nihon University, the largest private university in Japan, who had also been the Fuhrer of the university’s football team and had persuaded one of his team members into physically terrorist-attacking an opponent player during an official match. The appalling act of terrorism, where the attacker brutally headbutted with his helmet on straight into the lower back of the victim who was thrown high up in the air, has been broadcast and shared to incite national outrage.
Evidence has mounted that Mr Uchida and a coach under his supervision had pressurised the attacker, a student at the university, into the terrorist act. The victim and his family have petitioned that the attacker be tried leniently, on the grounds that much of the blame should fall on the shoulders of Fuhrer Uchida. It has also been uncovered that as a former senior executive, Mr Uchida had been the effective dictator in charge of personnel decisions all over the university.
In spite of overwhelming evidence, however, the DA recently decided not to press the charge against Mr Uchida and the coach. Flabbergastingly, part of the DA’s pretext was that the victim and his family had petitioned for leniency. Namely, their plea for leniency toward the attacker was deliberately misused by the DA in order to favour Fuhrer Uchida and his SS commandant instead. The national public opinion has been dumbfounded.
One needs to be a real connoisseur in order to understand the judicial context wherein this outrageous case is embedded. In essence, “legal justice” in Japan has little to do with true factual justice, who is right and who is wrong, but blindly reinforces the socioeconomic order of the peck between the parties involved, i.e., who is strong and who is weak. In other words, the court of law abandons its mission by siding with the wealthy, the powerful, and the authoritative, who would automatically dominate if there were no law and order. The prosecutor wins in more than staggering 99.6% of all criminal cases, meaning that the defendant is effectively denied the supposedly constitutional right to fair trial. So wins the government against private companies or individuals; the larger company against smaller ones or individuals; the employer against employees; the superior against subordinates; the discriminator against the discriminated against; the harasser against the harassed.
This notoriously reactionary attitude of Japan’s judiciary feigns an ostensible facade of genteel conservatism “protecting the social order and good common sense” all the while effectively encouraging social disorder and thus defying good common sense especially in cases involving organised crimes. Time after time, case after case, the court and the DA are pathologically keen to shoot the messenger more than the godfather. The DA’s undue reluctance to prosecute the Fuhrer and the commandant, is hardly a surprise any longer, although by all means it should be, especially in the light of the fact that the intervarsity foorball league has verdicted guilty and thus purged these two suspects.
Fuhrer Uchida had also been breaking laws by mistreating the university staff. Under his dictatorship, the university personnel attempted to dismiss dozens of parttime lecturers for no good reason other than replacing them with external contractors which would have expressly violated the official terms and conditions for the university’s accreditation. The dictarorial regime had also failed to elect employee representatives in accordance with the labour law, a violation that could legally invalidate all employment contracts and agreements within the university. Hence we, the unions and the university employees longing for law and order in the workplace, expressly unwelcome any attempt in the direction of reviving the influence of Fuhrer Uchida back into the university,
Last but not least, it is particularly noteworthy that the headquarter of Nihon University has allegedly been connected with the largest Yakuza (Mafia) organisation in Japan, one of those “international terrorist groups” sanctioned by the US Department of Treasury. The undercurrent terrorist propensity, either by violence or by dictatorial intimidation, had infested in the university for decades before it surfaced at long last in the said terrorist act led by Fuhrer Uchida.
Hence Japanese legal injustice is not only national disgrace, but a formidable obstacle to the nation’s socioeconomic fairness and wellbeing. The ultimate responsibility rests on the shoulders of the national general public, in that the public opinions have traditionally been far less critical to the legal justice system than to the national government and politics. The recent unjust DA decision shall hopefully incite the belated national and international public condemnation to Japan’s judicial incompetence, which has long been undeserving of the nation’s ostensible “developed country” status.