Here in Japan, the police arrest when they know they can charge the person with a specific crime, something that will allow the prosecutors to get a conviction from a judge. This seems to be what happened in this case.
To reference my anecdote above, it isnt just that words dont always translate exactly, but that also the concepts behind the words differ. The small random sampling of Japanese people I did resulted in something like 90% saying they thought this incident wasnt “rape”.
It seems to me this really isnt a matter of splitting words or arguing about translation (and so I think @frauenfelder was in the wrong to begin with) but that here is a problem of too little information and lots of people being very quick to make judgements on the standards of another culture.
As a side note, the LA Times piece is co-written by Jake Adelstein who as best I have been able to determine does in fact have a good understanding of Japanese and is at least qualified to report on things here but does have an agenda of his own. It would be interesting if he had the column space to expand a bit more on the background details of the industry practice as AFAIK he does have knowledge in that area.
