Sexual Assault and the Evidential Body: Forensic Medicine, Gender, and the Courts in Modern Japan

Abstract: According to statistical data published by the United Nations Office of Crime and Drug in 2017, reported cases of rape in Japan are among the lowest in the developed world, 1.1 per 100,000 population, far lower than the U.S. (35.9) and less than half the rate of India (2.6). But a report by the Japanese government in 2017 in that same year reveals how little this number reflects the real number of sexual assaults: according to its survey only 3.7 percent of interviewees who had been sexually assaulted contacted the police about the incident. In this presentation, I argue that Japan’s modern “rape culture,” marked by remarkably low rates of reporting, prosecutions, and convictions, has its origins in the late nineteenth century as the crime of rape was redefined and Western forensic medical knowledge came to be valorized within a new criminal justice system. In the 1870s, crimes of sexual assault came into public view as never before—in the new criminal codes, the courts, and in journalistic reportage. And for a time, it seemed that there was a new willingness on the part of both local and the high court to punish the crime of rape. My research traces the impact of the institutionalization of forensic medicine, as a form of knowledge and practice, on the prosecution of rape in Japan by exploring the intertwined processes of translation, education, and legal reform. I argue that forensic medicine, by requiring new standards of proof in the form of specific kinds of bodily evidence, rendered rape a more difficult crime to prosecute. By the 1920’s Takata Giichiro, a prominent physician and professor of medical jurisprudence, would argue that the role of forensic medicine was not to aid in convictions but to distinguish the few true cases of assault for the many false claims. In his words, because “women have no scruples about lying,” an accusation of rape must be viewed with suspicion.