In Japan Rape Cases, ‘No’ Still Means No Conviction, and Protests Are Growing
TOKYO—Incest is not a crime in Japan. This may surprise some people but maybe they should be more surprised to find that rape isn’t really a prosecutable crime either—if the victim hasn’t resisted “enough.”
As far as the Japanese courts and the legal system are concerned, in a case of sexual assault, a woman’s “no” only means “no” if she backs it up with violence and loud resistance. Just since March there have been four verdicts in which the “common sense” of the male judges resulted in men accused of sexual assault walking away scot-free. And this in a country where the conviction rate is 99 percent for anyone other than a rapist.
The disconnect has not gone unnoticed.