Robik Wrote:I am not going to claim that SS is ponzi scheme (though similarities are striking), but the fact is, that it can work only as long as there are enough new people that join the system or someone has to pay the difference.

And paying pensions by increasing the debt is really only kicking the can down the road and not a solution. Postponing the inevitable is what politicians do most of the time, because their focus is to the next election, not decades in the future. Who can blame them though? Would voters vote in politicians with painful but necessary policy proposals? Yes, but history teaches us, that everything must be in shambles before that happen.

As someone that couldn't collect SS for another 3-4 decades, it really does feel like a ponzi scheme because I feel more certain as time goes on that it won't be there when I'm older. Yet, I still feel like the idea behind the system would work if the govt. didn't pull the money out and use it for whatever pet project (read: war); they have. If you were putting money away in Roth or mutual fund for retirement, you wouldn't turn around and spend it on a new F-ing car because you wanted it. If you saved it like you are suppose to then you can make reasonable guesses on the interest/gains you will get over time.

Maybe my logic on the SS system is flawed, but I always saw the mechanics of the SS system as a forced mutual fund system. I'm pretty sure the govt. doesn't invest it like that, but that's how it should work to a certain extent.

Either way, its not going to be just the old people that screwed over though; the youth will be screwed in their own unique way as well. With no SS system in place when they retire and the way that wages have stagnated, most won't have any way to retire when they hit 60. Hell, there are a lot of people that are retirement age now that can't retire fully because they don't have the money (this makes it hard for younger people to move up in their career as a result). Something major will definitely have to happen though for there to be huge changes.

[Zgarbas]

Yeah, SS shouldn't be 'the working population supporting the elderly' so much as 'the elderly are supporting themselves thanks to the money they put aside via taxes over the decades in which they were part of the working population'
The problem is caused by incompetent spending, not by the working population/SS ratio.

I don't have a link for this, but on the TV just now I'm seeing that police conduct around trying to force a confession out of some old guy has been declared illegal. I've heard of that sort of thing happening but this is the first time I've ever heard the Japanese talk about it.

Also, the police in the interview sound like yakuza gangsters from a bad anime.

Aikynaro Wrote:I don't have a link for this, but on the TV just now I'm seeing that police conduct around trying to force a confession out of some old guy has been declared illegal. I've heard of that sort of thing happening but this is the first time I've ever heard the Japanese talk about it.

Also, the police in the interview sound like yakuza gangsters from a bad anime.

I'll try to find a story about it later if somebody else doesn't, but I wonder if that ruling will have any real teeth. There's a history of just ignoring court decisions, and nobody seems to care much.

The practice of basically torturing until confession is widespread in Japanese policing. Doing real investigations and following a chain of logic is super めんどくさい compared to the fairly quick process of strong-arming a confession. Then the confession goes to the prosecutor, and the prosecutor says, "well, he wouldn't have confessed if he didn't really do it," the person gets locked up, police and prosecutor inflate their figures, and Japanese society pretends this is justice.

This kind of thing happens in America for sure too, but when it happens in America there are a fair number of people outraged at that kind of miscarriage of justice. In Japan, it is perceived AS justice.

It might be a bit harder to completely ignore this one though. There's a recording of the police interviewing the guy (an 81 year old man) and they're clearly, obviously just trying to browbeat a confession out of him. I mean - I doubt anything will really change, but I can't imagine normal people seeing this and not getting upset about it.
Or has this sort of thing been played out in public like this before? Everything I've heard about the Japanese police being dodgy has been from foreign sources - never seen it on the news or heard it from my students. I kind of figured it wasn't widely understood or known about, rather than actually condoned by society.

It could lead to something, and I hope it does. It's hard to be hopeful about social progress in Japan, though. It seems like around '07/'08 there were two cases that made the news, and led to new national guidelines for interrogation. Shockingly, the guidelines don't seem to have helped in this case. There has also been a push toward digital recording of all police interrogations in all cases, but nothing ever really happened with it.

It's true that your students and most Japanese people probably don't know a whole lot about the Japanese justice system. The likelihood of your students and people you know having interacted with the criminal justice system is very low. Japan has a pretty low crime rate, but then also has only 2,000 prosecutors nationwide for a country of like ~135 million. So cases get dropped a lot or resolved out of court(with bank transfers) if it's a civil matter between private citizens. Even in cases where it could be a criminal matter like say, sexual assault, that also has been settled out of court on occasion.

The reason you hear so much about Japanese police being dodgy in foreign sources is because Japanese police are at their most dodgy when interacting with non-Japanese. Foreign news also has no reputation to lose by calling out the police. Japanese news probably does actually cover these things, but does so in a way that avoids rocking the societal boat. So it will be relegated to one sentence maybe or attributed as a quote to the accused or the lawyer of the accused. Japanese society reads that article, and already perceiving anyone having been accused as guilty, pays no mind.

The reason I say that it's tacitly condoned by Japanese society is due to the mean streak Japan has with victim-blaming even in the most egregious one-sided cases. There is a presumption that Japanese society "works" and if you are having a problem within Japanese society for any reason then you must have caused the problem in some way. Not all Japanese people are lockstep like that, but it's something that happens often in the aggregate.

Found a story for it.

http://www.asahi.com/articles/ASH2R6W9YH2RPTIL031.html :
Court rules police handling of a 81 year male suspect unconstitutional, awards 2 million yen (~$23,000 USD).

erlog Wrote:Foreign news also has no reputation to lose by calling out the police. Japanese news probably does actually cover these things, but does so in a way that avoids rocking the societal boat. So it will be relegated to one sentence maybe or attributed as a quote to the accused or the lawyer of the accused.

This is completely unrelated to Japanese police interrogation practices, but I've noticed that Japanese news sources tend to ignore certain social ills in a systematic way. I remember when China's GDP surpassed Japan's, it was front page news throughout the world... except in Japan.

However, I should add that that this sort of behavior doesn't only happen in Japan, but more or less everywhere (although to different extents). In fact, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote a book about this topic called Manufacturing Consent. Definitely a good read if you're interested in how the media is driven to self-censorship by internal and external forces.