ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the themes and their implications for understanding outsiders’ roles in Japanese criminal justice. Depending on one’s perspective, the criminal justice picture that presents itself when examining legal outsiders’ roles in context can accordingly be characterized by continuity or change, or both. Legal outsiders’ new or redefined roles do affect charging decisions, fact finding processes as well as sentencing decisions. Accordingly, to ask the question of whether Japanese criminal justice is really or actually about bottom line dispositions rather than what goes on in criminal courts is to confuse different dimensions of criminal justice. Legal outsiders add to the already multilayered and multifaceted quality of Japanese criminal justice, thereby altering what administration of justice practices, especially courtroom practices, signify as “part of an authoritative, institutional discourse which seeks to organize our moral and political understanding and to educate our sensibilities”.
