We’ve had a few lawyers now in Japan for a few different things, and they’re not like the TV shows. That’s probably not surprising, but the degree to which TV is wrong is immense. We talk about our experiences with lawyers in Japan, plus our usual digressions.
Transcript
K: So, lately I’ve been thinking about Japanese lawyers and the Japanese legal system.
C: I love thinking about lawyers, how did you know?
K: Well, I’ve just been like kind of reminiscing about our life, and I think something that’s so weird about my life personally, is that something that they don’t tell you about when you’re a foster kid is that sometimes it involves a lot of lawyers. So I’ve had lawyers in my life since I was about 9 years old because that’s when I decided I didn’t want to go back home – that I was just going to stay in my foster home. And I had to get- it was a whole thing. It was a whole thing to stay in the foster system and break away. And then I had lawyers when I emancipated, and then- it was just a series of lawyers throughout my life. I had lawyers after I had Rasta. I had lawyers when I got a divorce, lawyers when we got married, and it just feels like lawyers for days.
C: Yes.
K: Sort of my life. And if you watch popular television – well, I never watched any Japanese serial television shows, so I don’t know what the Japanese popular television says their lawyers are like, but I know that the news makes it sound like their lawyers are really effective and really go-getters and don’t lose. Like the district attorney never loses kind of thing.
C: Well the prosecutors rarely lose. There’s like a 99% conviction rate in Japan.
K: Right, but what they don’t tell you is that the police don’t send a case to the prosecutors that they think they won’t win.
C: Right, so they do send- there are less people in Japanese jail per capita than the US. The US (prison system) is one of the most populated in the world despite having only like a 60% conviction rate.
K: Right, so something that I thought was- that I think is really interesting is the difference between American lawyers and Japanese lawyers. Or the difference of my perception of what lawyers should be.
C: Mhmm.
K: Because in the United States, you expect to get you- so I don’t know if anybody watched Boston Legal or watches Boston Legal, one of our favorite shows. Or Law and Order, another one of our favorite shows. But it makes it seem like lawyers are really aggressive and they fight hard for your case in the United States. Like Alan Shore, he could do everything from divorce to corporate to contract to criminal. Like, he did everything. And that’s not real.
C: Not if you’re charging a thousand dollars an hour. You’re not that desperate.
K: Right? And, but wait a minute, that’s all different types of law.
C: Right. And there’s only one kind of lawyer in the US – there’s lawyers. Like, some might go on to get an LLM or some other stuff, but they’re still just lawyers. And Japan, there’s three different types of lawyers, and they have entirely different systems. You have the bengoshi, who are the trial lawyers, and they can do-
K: So, do bengoshi, do they do criminal and- I don’t think you have to be a bengoshi to be like a divorce lawyer even though sometimes those cases go to court.
C: To go to court, you have to be a bengoshi.
K: Okay.
C: You don’t have to be a bengoshi to handle a divorce, you can be a gyoseishoshi, which is usually translated as “judicial scrivener.”
K: Mhmm.
C: So they’re paperwork experts, but not trial.
K: So is that- so, I personally worked with one lawyer- two lawyers. I personally worked with two lawyers. I had one lawyer that I worked with on a defamation case and our immigration lawyers.
C: Well, and we worked with another lawyer as well.
K: Oh yeah, I forgot about them.
C: So, the immigration ones, because two of them were immigration ones or gyoseishoshi.
K: Okay, and what’s that?
C: That’s judicial scrivener, so they specialize in paperwork and especially in bureaucratic, government-related paperwork.
K: Yeah.
C: But they can also do contracts and that kind of thing.
K: Okay.
C: And then the bengoshis are trial lawyers. So you have to be a bengoshi to be qualified to appear in court.
K: So is that what the person was who handled my defamation?
C: Yes. She was a bengoshi, yes.
K: Because I didn’t defame anybody, someone defamed me.
C: Right.
K: And that’s all I’m going to say about that – if you want to now more about that, read the newsletter (laughs) because it was part of the May, June, and July newsletters, so… you know. Go back, subscribe to our newsletter, get all kinds of cool tidbits about our lives. Stuff that we don’t talk about on the podcast. I think that the newsletter is kind of like the Musicks’ life beyond the podcast, beyond social media.
C: It is.
K: It kind of gives a peek into more of our day to day.
C: Yeah, and between that and the blog, you don’t get everything in the podcast. We digress too much.
K: (laughs) Yeah, because we each have our own blog and if you check out The Musicks In Japan, you can get more of us. In case the podcast isn’t enough. Just in case you didn’t get enough of us.
C: Okay, who could get enough of us? And then there’s a third type of Japanese lawyer, which are tax attorneys. We’ve never dealt with a tax attorney.
K: I thought we had dealt with the tax attorney.
C: We’ve dealt with public accountants and we’ve dealt with non-public accountants.
K: Okay.
C: Which is basically the equivalent of the accountant and CPA system in the US, but we haven’t ever dealt with a tax lawyer because we’ve never gotten into tax trouble.
K: I always feel like knock on wood when you say stuff like that.
C: Okay, I’ll knock on this vinyl here.
K: I knocked on real wood. I don’t know what you’re knocking on, I don’t know what that is. So, just legit, we’re recording this episode in our bed.
C: Yes.
K: And you just knocked on the plastic door to our closet. Because it has a wood veneer.
C: It’s like a plastic veneer over particle board.
K: Okay, I guess I could see that, and I guess that’s technically wood.
C: Yeah, next you’re going to say like if you knocking on a tree, you’re not knocking on wood unless you shave off the bark. This plastic veneer is just the bark of the wooden floor.
K: Wow, okay.
C: Hey, I’m going for the metaphors today.
K: You dig in on that. So, yeah, we’ve recorded almost every single episode from our bed. We record in bed.
C: Yup.
K: That’s why we’re so super chill. Because we always record when we’re in a relaxed, chill space.
C: Yes.
K: And I dig that about us. We’re awesome.
C: And both of us have physical issues and sometimes it’s not always comfortable to sit up. Sometimes it’s more comfortable to lay down. Sometimes it’s more comfortable to sit in bed. Sometimes it’s comfortable to sit on a chair.
K: Yeah, but right now we’re both sitting up, we’re not laying down in bed.
C: Yeah, but the bed is softer than a chair.
K: Yeah, it is way softer. But then there’s- all the rustling’s always me situating and moving the covers and laying down and stuff. Sometimes I’m sitting up and then I’m like “oh I’m just too tired” and I lay down.
C: It’s touching the microphone. And if people would buy us better microphones, then that wouldn’t happen.
K: To do that, you can hit up our Patreon and our Kofi. Oh, that reminds me, we have to do the big thank you because, thanks to you guys, we’re able to pay for someone to transcribe, and that’s a huge help to Chad who has AS. So… uhnn. I was going to go for it and then I said it in my head, what’s AS stand for?
C: Ankylosing spondylitis.
K: I was going to say ankylosing spondylitis
C: Ankylosing spondylitis.
K: Okay. AS.
C: Yes. Which is related to arthritis. It’s a kind of arthropathy.
K: Yeah, which affects your hands.
C: It affects my hands and my spine and my sacroiliac joints, my hip joints, and just about everything.
K: Yeah, your ankles, your toes. All your joints. So, sometimes it affects your elbows and shoulders, but I feel really bad for you when it affects your elbows because on those days you just seem like you can’t get comfortable for nothing.
C: I really can’t because ordinarily they’re not really weight-bearing. My forearms are not so heavy that they constantly are pulling on my elbows. Like “aahh my elbows.”
K: Yeah, and you never really lean on your elbows for anything.
C: Just my cane. So my right elbow, my cane puts some stress on it when I use it, but it’s better than going out without it.
K: Mmm. That makes sense. So yeah, thank you guys so much for donating for that because we really want to keep the podcast inclusive, but the burden of transcribing on Chad’s hands was really bad. Really quite bad. And so because of all the love you guys gave us and all the support, we’re able to keep the podcast inclusive. I wanted to make sure to give you guys a big shout out and a big thank you. And, 25 bucks a month, you get listed on our website as a sponsor.
C: Yup. That’s going to be valuable to somebody somewhere.
K: It is. Our website is happening!
C: Our website is happening.
K: We got all kinds of cool stuff on our website.
C: Yeah, we’ve got more than a hundred posts I think.
K: Yeah, but this is not about self-promotion. But if you want to promote, give us a hundred bucks and we’ll promote you. (laughs)
C: Yeah, sorry, I hear attorneys and I think self-promotion.
K: (laughs) True that. So what I find interesting about Japan is they take specialization to a whole ‘nother level. The HNL.
C: Well the thing about Japanese lawyers is that, and this is slowly changing, like really slowly, that a law degree is an undergraduate degree, so you go to your bachelor’s degree to get a law degree. And it’s five years instead of four. But then there’s only a certain number of people who are allowed to become bengoshi every year.
K: Yeah it’s really competitive.
C: So it’s not just that the test is really hard. It’s that the cutoff is set at whatever number of lawyers. So, if they decide that only a thousand people can become lawyers that year, and you scored a thousand and first on the test by missing one question whereas a thousand people missed no questions, you don’t become a bengoshi.
K: Yeah, so for me though that’s not the part that trips me out. The part that trips me out is that when I was looking for a lawyer for the defamation, was the way that defamation is defined under Japanese laws. Something that completely tripped me out, something that I hadn’t even thought about, like something that hadn’t even crossed my mind. Not even a whisper of when thinking about defamation is that Japanese people have a really bad habit of calling the police on foreigners and lying and saying that we’re committing crimes, kind of like what’s going down with African Americans in the United States where people are calling the police on people having barbeques, on people using the public pool, on people- you know, a little girl with a lemonade stand. Like, that kind of mass-hysteria is kind of going down in Japan. And so if your neighbor calls the police on you and calls immigration on you, even if what they’re saying is true, is defamation of character.
You can’t go around making accusations against people even if they’re true. So you can hire a lawyer and then sue them and get them to stop.
C: Yeah.
K: So for me, I didn’t- that’s basically what I did. That isn’t what happened to me, though. Knock on wood, see gosh my superstition.
C: You’re going to knock a hole right through that wood.
K: I am. So, I have paper. I’m going to knock on wood because I feel like paper is wood.
C: It is. It’s just wood that’s highly refined.
K: Yeah. So
C: It’s upper crust wood.
K: Yeah, so what do you guys think? Is paper wood? And does knocking on paper, if you have the superstition, I have it like it’s almost as bad as a nervous tic or a form of compulsion at this point. It’s the one superstition- well, one of many superstitions I can’t get rid of. Man.
C: It’s the one you notice most often.
K: Yes, it’s the one that other people can see. Because I have a bunch of secret superstitions that happen in my head.
C: Well, I think part of your superstition too is it’s not enough to knock on wood, you have to say “knock on wood.”
K: Yes. That’s what makes it so horrible. (laughter) Because if I knock on wood and I just do it but don’t say it, did I knock on wood?
C: Yeah.
K: So, yeah. So, I knock on wood every time I want to prevent something bad from happening.
C: Yeah. So, the thing with attorneys in Japan is that we’ve dealt with attorneys in the US because we were both married, so we both got divorced.
K: Yup.
C: And we were involved with real estate, so with like selling the house, it involved
K: Yeah, and we also had lawyers for when we moved. We had some legal stuff that we had because we knew we were leaving the US for good.
C: Yeah. So we had all that
K: And all of them were lazy and passive.
C: Yeah. And I thought “wow this is a lot of paperwork.” And then we arrived in Japan.
K: Right? Because permanent residency, which you guys can listen to the permanent residency episode to get all of the details on that, but it was a ton of paperwork.
C: Yeah, so our original application was something like three hundred pages.
K: Yup.
C: So that was a trip. And when we bought the apartment, I think there was like fifty different places that had to be stamped. Not signed but stamped.
K: Because in Japan, we stamp, we don’t sign.
C: Yup. So, we have an inkan or a hanko, those are both the same thing. Like a name stamp. We’ve got several of them, so you’ve got your everyday
K: But if you don’t have a stamp, you can use your fingerprint.
C: Yeah, and some places you have to use your fingerprint anyway, too, so.
K: Yeah. Because I think with the house, I think you also used your fingerprint.
C: Yeah. I might have. I think so.
K: I think you used a stamp and your fingerprint. It’s on super super official stuff.
C: Yeah, and you do it over a revenue stamp.
K: Yeah.
C: Which is how you pay taxes. When we bought the house, there were several revenue stamps that were a thousand dollars or more per stamp.
K: Yeah.
C: And it’s like postage stamp size, but it costs a thousand dollars, and you have to put it down and stamp over it.
K: So for me, what I found interesting, moving back around to the lawyers
C: Okay.
K: was the fact that when I was calling looking for a lawyer, when I would describe the defamation, they were like “that’s not defamation.” So it was confusing, but I was like “I so believe it’s defamation” if someone is saying things about me that is not true, that is attacking my character on a pr- they weren’t attacking me personally, they were attacking my business and my business reputation. Then we found a lawyer, and they were like “yes, but that’s not what we call it. We don’t call that defamation in Japan.” And so it’s tortious interference of business, but learning all the rules and the laws of how to protect myself and how to stay safe in Japan is really overwhelming to me. Because I remember the panic that I felt when I found out that- so I’m not around anybody who smokes weed.
C: Right.
K: I think it’s bad juju, I don’t want to go to prison kind of thing. But I didn’t know that in Japan, if you have it in your system, that counts like possession. So it counts the same as having a bag of weed if you have weed in your system. Which is so important because I told my son, if someone is smoking weed, get away from them.
C: Okay. Because
K: Get a little bit further.
C: If that standard had been applied in California, I could’ve gone to prison every time I left a Raiders game.
K: This is true. This is so true. (laughs) And so, for me, I feel like that’s a scary concept – that having something in your system is considered possession only because, and not in the United States- like I don’t do drugs here, so there’s nothing in my system. But I find that really scary.
C: Well, I think because you can be involuntarily drugged. That’s what I was saying about the Raiders game. You can often get a lot of secondhand marijuana smoke in California before it was legal there.
K: Yeah.
C: And so just having it in your system, I had no intent to smoke.
K: Yeah and so
C: If somebody here doses you with LSD and they arrest you, are you going to get convicted for LSD if you have no intent to take it?
K: Well and something else they do is they take your phone and they contact and interview everybody in your phone when you’re arrested for drugs.
C: Everybody or just the foreigners?
K: Well, I think it’s the Japanese nationals as well. So, through my practice, I’ve known several people that have been arrested for drugs, and through just social life, we together know several people who have been arrested for drugs.
C: Yeah.
K: And yeah they seriously call everybody in their phone.
C: Yeah, and it makes the news when foreigners get arrested. It’ll be like “English teacher in Tokyo found with two joints.” In the national news. Two marijuana joints.
K: Yeah. Because they really don’t like foreigners here.
C: Yeah.
K: And so, I feel like for me, it feels so precarious even though we’re permanent residents. It still hasn’t sunk in to me. Like, I don’t feel any safer or protected. But I never really felt safe or protected in the United States, with the exception of knowing my rights.
C: Right.
K: So I’m obsessed with knowing my rights and knowing how to get in touch with a lawyer, because my whole life I’ve had to fight for my rights. You know, since I was 9, I had to fight for my rights to have lawyers and a legal team, so having a legal team in Japan, I’ve yet to meet a lawyer that I’m satisfied with though. Because they’re all so passive. Like, with- when I was fighting for, to have them stop doing defamation, the lawyer was completely passive, and I had to give them step by step instructions of what to do. Like, they wouldn’t even send an email without me saying “hey, you should end an email” or “hey, send a fax.” It was just very directive.
C: And I wonder how much of that is just not being paid by the hour. Because in the US you could find some lawyers that just handled things for a fixed amount, but most of the lawyers are paid by the hour so if you call them up, they’re like “woohoo billing!”
K: (laughs)
C: Like “send an email” they’re like “woohoo billing for sending an email” and then they’re like “confirm after you send it? Woohoo billing for confirming.” And then you ask “how much is the bill” and they’re like “woohoo, billing for billing!” But here, you pay a certain amount, which the minimums are set by the legal association. So you can get disbarred for charging too little.
K: Oooh, and I like that they take the amount and cut it in half. There’s like, the retainer part is the first half, and then the second half is result, and if they don’t get a result, you don’t pay them.
C: Yeah, that’s for negotiation.
K: Which you think that would make them more motivated, but it does not motivate
C: You would think so. And for trials, it’s like one third, two thirds. So if you go to trial, you pay one third up front and two thirds if you win the trial.
K: So, in my whole life, in dealing with lawyers, I’ve only ever met one that I felt was aggressive and a shark. And I met them because they were representing one of my clients because I sometimes do mediation for divorced couples and negotiations of custody. And they both have their lawyers present while we do that session, and one of the lawyers was just fierce and ferocious. The only lawyer in all of Japan that I’ve met. And even in the United States, that was really fierce and ferocious.
C: Mhmm.
K: I’m always like “okay, so you’re my image of a lawyer” is what I thought in my head. They’re the image of a lawyer for me, and I was like “why are lawyers so passive” even in the United States, they were passive. Where are the Alan Shores of the world? Do we just not have that kind of Alan Shore money?
C: I think we just don’t run in that kind of circle. I think if you look at like… mergers and acquisitions, where you’re talking about another company buys another for eight billion dollars, that’s where the aggressive lawyers are at.
K: I don’t think so.
C: Yeah, I think the aggressive lawyers are where they can make millions of dollars a year.
K: I think there are lawyers that make millions of dollars a year, but
C: You were mostly dealing with family law lawyers and divorce lawyers and
K: But look at the OJ trial. Only one of them was aggressive on that whole panel of judges. And I was kind of disappointed in Allen. I thought Allen would be the pit-bull on the team, but no Johnny was.
C: Allen Iverson?
K: You know that’s not who I’m talking about.
C: Yeah, he’s a basketball player.
K: Yeah. So, anywho, I’m talking about the guy from Reversal of Fortune.
C: Allen Dershowitz.
K: Yeah. So, I’m not talking about whether or not OJ was guilty or innocent. That’s not what I’m doing. What I’m talking about is how passive all those lawyers were.
C: Yeah.
K: There was what, about twenty of them, inside the courtroom, and only one of them was aggressive. “If it doesn’t fit you must acquit” I want that rapid rhyming lawyer. Can help me get away with murder kind of thing.
C: See, that’s a different thing. I would just rather never be caught. I mean, not that I’ve done anything.
K: Yeah, or how about we just don’t murder anyone?
C: Yeah, that’s worked out well so far.
K: So something I thought that was weird when we went through the permanent residency thing was our lawyer asked how our neighbors felt about us.
C: Yes.
K: Nobody came out and interviewed our neighbors.
C: No, but there used to be a website where you could report people as foreigners for their various crimes, and one of the crimes you could report was being annoying or “I don’t like foreigners.”
K: Well that one neighbor was upset with us because (laughs) okay this is so wrong of us. You guys are going to get another level of the Musicks. So, there was a time when our balcony was- so, okay, before I talk about the balcony, I have to talk about throwing things away in Japan. So, to throw anything away in Japan is so complicated. You have to sort your garbage, which makes me feel really good because Japan recycles everything. So, your milk cartons, you have to wash them and cut them and tie them up and then take them to the grocery store to be recycled. Cardboard boxes have to be tied up and then they go down once a month. And then PET the plastic water bottles you strip the plastic off of it, they go in a separate thing. Plastic goes in a separate thing. Burnable and paper. So, that’s just your everyday trash, but then to throw away electronics you have to get a sticker where you pay extra to throw electronics out.
C: Well, we can throw away small stuff once a month for free.
KK: Yeah, but most of it requires a sticker. But to get the sticker, you have to call the place, and then you have to pay for it, it’s like a whole thing. And so for a really long time, we just couldn’t manage that, okay?
C: Yeah, I have it bookmarked now.
K: Yeah, and it has to be done in Japanese, so don’t judge okay? If you’re judging, stop. Because it’s… everybody, so, Japan peeps, get our back on this. Just be like “yes, garbage, throwing things away in Japan as a foreigner is difficult.”
C: It’s not just for foreigners because I went to the ward office, which for those who don’t know, the ward is like city hall but for big cities they have multiple city halls. I went to the ward office and there was a big advertisement there for garbage throwing away service, and it showed a balcony that was full of garbage, and it said “does your balcony look like this? Call us and we’ll take all the garbage from your balcony and throw it away.”
K: Yeah, that’s so us. So, we had a bean bag that we put out on the balcony, and it was there so long that the little bean balls
C: Yeah, the little polystyrene beads.
K: Yeah, were getting everywhere. And so our neighbor came over and showed us our beans, our little pods that had gotten there. He had a cat, he’s not our neighbor anymore, but he had a cat and he was like “you can put someone’s eyes out with these.” So he was afraid it was going to swirl around and put his cat’s eye out. But then we cleaned it up after that.
C: Yeah we did.
K: That was the thing that made us clean up our balcony because it was like okay, it’s affecting our neighbors now.
C: Yeah, we’re not trying to be jerks.
K: Yeah, we’re not. We’re just confused, man. Garbage is a thing.
C: It is.
K: But then, Rasta’s sort of the grace of the family. He’s made friends with everybody in the building. On all the different floors. They all love him. And he’s bilingual and bicultural and just cute as a button, and he has the most beautiful afro in the world.
C: We’ve been living in this apartment almost twelve years now, so the people who have been here have known him since he was a kid.
K: Yeah. Funny thing, though. Whenever we take official pictures, he always has to redo them because we forget that his afro, his entire afro has to be in the picture. They want all of his hair in the picture.
C: Oh yeah, for passports and such.
K: Yeah, and it’s like “how are we supposed to get all this beautiful afro?”
C: Yeah. Most of the pictures are three centimeters to four centimeters for official documentation.
K: Yeah, and it has to be all the way down to his chin. They want from his chin to the top of his hair, so we have to pack his afro really tight.
C: Yeah, so his face is five millimeters tall and the rest is all just afro.
K: Yeah, so I wonder if we should just start doing curly qs on that. Not doing afro on picture days.
C: I don’t know.
K: I don’t know. But, so, when the lawyer was like “yo–“ bringing it back to the lawyers, the lawyer told him “hey we need you to do a different picture because your afro”
C: But they never say anything about my beard.
K: They don’t, and that’s so weird to me. Like, how do they know what the tip of your beard looks like?
C: Right?
K: How do they know you’re you if they don’t know how long your beard is?
C: Okay, I could just cut off my beard and just vanish. Nobody would know.
K: You could. I wouldn’t know who you were.
C: Yeah.
K: I would scream. I would scream and then slap you.
C: (laughs) I’m not even saying shave it close, I’m just saying cut it.
K: Oh okay. No, it’s- I’m out of here if you shave the beard. I’m out of here. Well, we did say on our podcast a few months back I think that for a million dollars, they can see your face. I’m not crazy now, a million dollars, where’s the razor? We’re shaving it.
C: Okay. Because I can go hang out in a hotel for a couple weeks until it regrows.
K: (laughs) And a nice one at that.
C: Yeah.
K: So, we are doing our hustle. And part of our hustle is if you want to advertise with the Musicks in Japan, it’s a hundred bucks, and we’ll pitch whatever you’ve got on air.
C: Yeah?
K: Yeah, both of us.
C: Yes.
K: And it’ll probably fit into some digression. I don’t know.
C: We can digress anywhere.
K: (laughs) We can digress to any destination.
C: Yeah.
K: So, for me, something that I think is really weird was defense lawyers. So, I’ve been up close and personal to several criminal legal cases now because I work with a person who is on trial. And because I work with them, I’ve testified in court several times now in the Japanese court.
C: Because some of your clients are troubled.
K: Most of them are.
C: I don’t know your clients, I just know that some of them are troubled.
K: I’m a therapist.
C: I just know that every once in a while there’s a phone call at three in the morning and you’re like “I’m sorry, I’ve got to get this.”
K: Yeah.
C: Every once in a while, it’s a Monday when you ordinarily have the day off, and you’re like “I’m sorry I’ve got to go.” And that’s how I know.
K: Well, you know if I travel out of town to testify in court, and I’ve done that a couple of times.
C: Yeah.
K: And so, what I think is interesting is that even those lawyers don’t argue. There’s no banter, no objections. No nothing. They just patiently wait to take turns.
C: Well it’s a much more administrative system than it is an adversarial system.
K: So every time I’m in court, I have the strangest phenomenon, it’s so bizarre to me, and I just wonder “why are they doing this?” So, the prosecutor always yells at me. Like, always starts screaming. Like having a full meltdown, but it’s in Japanese, so I can’t understand it. So they start repeating themselves and banging on the table and pointing at me. And I’m just looking at them
C: Waiting for the interpreter.
K: Yeah. I’m looking at them to be respectful.
C: Yeah.
K: And then the interpreter is just like “is that your true opinion? What evidence do you have to support your opinions?”
C: More intensity.
K: Yeah. So, and- all of the legal interpreters have deadpan English. Their English is monotone. “Do you agree with your opinion? Do you stand by your opinion? Do you believe what you’re saying to be true? Are you lying? Are you trying to protect them?” Like that, whereas the prosecutor is just screaming at me. And then the defense attorneys hardly ask me any questions whatsoever. And then afterwards, most often, my clients are angry because they’re like “why didn’t you ask her this or ask her that” and they’re like “you didn’t tell us to.”
C: Uh-huh.
K: And it’s like dude, you’re the lawyer, figure it out. Lawyer. But they don’t. They’re just not aggressive. Prosecutors are super aggressive, though.
C: Well, I read an article that said defense lawyers in Japan are seriously depressed as a profession. Most of them have never ever won a case.
K: Mmm. That’s tough.
C: Yeah, so being a defense lawyer in Japan is
K: I just did like “taihen.” (laughs) Which is Japanese for “that’s tough.”
C: Yeah. Being a defense lawyer in Japan is more about getting as little time for your client as possible. Because sometimes you can just get away with an apology. Writing a letter of apology can fix a lot of things in Japan that would be a big deal elsewhere. Like there was one year that we were late on our taxes by a couple of months. And in the US it would be like “here’s the penalty and here’s triple damages…” The government office here was like “can you write a letter just apologizing for being late filing?”
K: Well you have to apologize and pay within twenty four hours or pay a late fee.
C: Yeah. Because we weren’t willfully not, we just didn’t realize we had to pay a specific tax by a specific date.
K: Yeah. So, the legal system in Japan really stresses and freaks me out because I don’t understand it, and I do not understand what would get someone’s permanent residency taken away. Because I’ve worked with clients who have broken the law and they lose their permanent residency.
C: Right.
K: But they’re able to keep their visa, and their clock restarts for their permanent residency march. And so I think if you have a drug offense, your first drug offense you lose permanent residency but you can keep your visa, like a visa to stay in Japan. And then five years after you’re clean and cleared and you don’t have any more offenses, you can reapply for permanent residency.
C: Mhmm.
K: So I don’t feel like I know all of my rights as a permanent resident, and that’s something that I’m going to make a note to research my permanent resident rights. Because it still feels super precarious to me. I feel like at any minute they could just say “get out.” I think it’s because I’m watching American news.
C: I think it is because you are watching American news.
K: Yeah, American news always bums me out.
C: It does, and I think we’ve talked about this before. It’s very pessimistic.
K: Yeah, and all of- so for me, it’s weird because I’m an immigrant, so even though I’m American when I’m listening to Americans talk about immigrants, it feels like they’re talking about me.
C: They are talking about you, they just don’t realize it.
K: Right. So, sorry I have to yawn. Oh my gosh, I had to yawn because Chad snuck a yawn in while I was talking, and he is looking dead in my eyes yawning at me.
C: I did not and if you keep saying that I’m going to have to hire a lawyer.
K: (laughs) To get me for defamation.
C: Yup. She said I was sleepy when I wasn’t.
K: Yup, I did. I didn’t say you are sleepy. Are you sleepy?
C: It doesn’t matter if I’m sleepy or not, you said it.
K: I did not say you were sleepy, I asked if you were sleepy. I said you yawned while I was talking.
C: Oh okay.
K: Because you do stuff like that.
C: I opened my mouth and inhaled air. Is that yawning?
K: See, now I’m yawning because we’re talking about it. I’m so yawn easy man, everything makes me yawn these days.
C: Yeah.
K: I don’t know why I’m so yawny.
C: the whole transcript is just going to be like “yawns”
K: Yup. Yawny or Laurel. Guess I’m yawny
(laughter)
K: High five, that was an awesome one.
C: We do air high fives so you don’t get the percussive effect.
K: Yeah because we’re thoughtful like that. But that was a good one.
C: Plus air high fives are nice because you could be totally across the room from somebody and still give them an air high five.
K: Yeah, but the reason we started doing air high fives is because your skin randomly lights you on fire.
C: It does. It does. I have psoriasis so my skin randomly is bright red and painful and sometimes bleeds.
K: (laughs) That is so deceptive. No, I’m not heartless for laughing. Do not get mad at me. Do not rush to Chad’s defense. He is being such drama right now. So, describe how it bleeds.
C: My face when I have psoriasis, and I scrub my face, it leaves little bloody specks on it.
K: It does not leave little bloody specks. Every once in a blue moon, you’ll get like one little red dot and you’ll describe your face as being all bloody.
C: Exactly. Do you know how often blue moons occur? Several times per year because a blue moon is just a second full moon within the calendar month. That’s all a blue moon is. People are like “once in a blue moon” blue moons happen all the time, people.
K: (laughs) Yes, but that doesn’t happen spontaneously. It happens when your face is irritating you and you just rub it and rub it and rub it raw. So it’s not like you just wake up with your face covered in blood spots.
C: No.
K: Yeah, so don’t be drama.
C: Okay, I’ll stop being drama.
K: Oh my gosh, he is just so like Oliver Twist begging for another bowl of soup.
C: Yeah.
K: Was it soup or porridge?
C: Porridge.
K: (laughs) You would know.
(laughter)
C: Yes I would.
K: Being all literary.
C: Mhmm.
K: Being all literate and having read the classics. I’ve never read that.
C: No?
K: What was the classic you read? I read Moby Dick.
C: I’ve read a lot of classics.
K: But no, the one you were reading on the train that you were so proud of yourself for.
C: Oh, I read War and Peace on the train while I was doing my PhD.
K: Was it good? How many pages was it?
C: I don’t know, it was like… it’s not that long compared to a lot of stuff. Like if you could read all of the Harry Potter books, you could read War and Peace in less time.
K: I could not read all the Harry Potter books.
C: I meant the general you, not you Kisstopher.
K: I got to like- I think it was chapter 2 of book one, and then I was out of there.
C: So, my PhD took me two years, and it’s an 11 minute train ride
K: I’ve also read Dune.
C: 11 minute train ride each way, I went five days a week, so in two hours a week, I finished it within about a year. So maybe… probably a lot less than a hundred hours. It’d probably take twenty hours to read War and Peace, and I really enjoyed it.
K: I made it all the way through the Tommyknockers.
C: Yeah. I tried the Tommyknockers, I’ve tried
K: You were with me while I was reading it and you were like “why are you forcing yourself to read it?” And I’m like “because this book will not break me!”
C: Yeah, there was a time when you were reading a lot of horror, and you had the choice- you could read a Stephen King book, which you know the book is going to finish but you don’t know if you’re going to finish the book. Or you could read a Dean Koontz book which you know you’ll finish the book, but you don’t know if the story will be over.
K: Yes. So I read a lot of Dean Koontz because in my first marriage, they were a Dean Koontz fan. And so I read a lot of Dean Koontz. I find now I just read mostly nonfiction because I’m doing my PhD so I read a lot every week, so I don’t have time to curl up with a good book. I’m like give me mindless television any day. And television lies, just in case anybody’s wondering. There are no aggressive lawyers out there that you can just walk in with a stack of money and- so first of all, I don’t have ten grand to just plop down on a lawyer’s desk but even if I did, I think it would be a waste of money. There are no fixers out there. Like, there’s nobody that you can just have on your staff that’s going to go move bodies for you. And television really makes it seem like the rich and famous can hire somebody who will move bodies for them, kill people for them, and just be a total fixer.
C: Yes, despite what you may have heard these people do not exist, we do not know them. We have never paid one.
K: Yeah, you’re trying to be all conspiratorial, and I’m telling you they don’t exist.
C: (laughs)
K: Not like I need any bodies buried, but I would like to have somebody that’s loyal. I would love a Dembe. If you’re a Blacklist fan, that’s Red, the lead character’s, best friend. In the first episode of season one, when they’re- when he’s saying his prayer, and he’s just going to die in front of Red, and they’re just saying goodbye, and they’re not going to open it to get Red out, that Dembe was ready to die.
C: Yeah, because Red had two people with him and they killed the other person.
K: Yeah. Which I was really bummed out.
C: Yeah.
K: So, sorry if that’s spoiler alert, I guess I should’ve did that before we were talking, but that was episode one of season one.
C: Right, like spoiler alert there are a lot of lawyers involved with Blacklist.
K: Yeah, there are. But all of them are shady, so I don’t know. Maybe we need a shady lawyer, I’m not doing anything shady so I don’t know why I want this.
C: I don’t know why you want this either.
K: I want like a lawyer that empowers me.
C: Yeah, I feel like
K: I want a lawyer that would viciously go after people.
C: As a side hustle, I don’t know. Killing people and stuff, that seems like a lot of work and there doesn’t seem like much of a market.
K: I don’t want them to kill people, why are you making me a maniac?
C: You were saying you would kill them and they would drag away the body.
K: (laughs) Why would I kill them?
C: I don’t know.
K: Why am I killing people now?
C: I don’t know.
K: Oh my gosh, you are so dramatic. I have to tell- I’m sorry, I’m going to tell on Chad. Something dramatic that he does, he always paints me as just this psycho that’s going to go around murdering people. So if- so okay, I love apples. I’m absolutely obsessed with eating apples, but I peel the skins with a knife because I don’t eat the apple peels. Chad- it’s a really great relationship because Chad loves apple peels, I love apples. So I peel the skin with a knife and give Chad the peel, I eat the apple pulp. Perfect simpatico. But if, and I like to move my hands around when I talk, I just wave them around mysteriously. So if I’m peeling an apple, I have a knife in my hand, and I start waving it around, he’ll say “don’t stab me, don’t cut me.” Like I’m just going to all of sudden, because he says I’m slashing wildly in the air with the knife.
C: No, when you’ve got a knife in your hand and you’re just waving your hand in the air without paying attention to where it’s going, and you’re talking to a person while you do this, it’s called brandishing. You are brandishing the knife.
K: (laughs) Yeah, so welcome to my world where I brandish knives and I’m a dangerous criminal that apparently needs a lawyer to carry away all the bodies that I’ve what? Cut up while I was eating an apple?
C: Chopped off their nose.
K: Chopped off their nose. Oh, that specific. You know how I am about blood. I do not like blood at all. I’m super germy, I do not want to see people’s blood at all.
C: Yeah.
K: Like if I see someone’s blood, I don’t ever want to see them again.
C: That was one of my first things that I learned about you.
K: Yeah?
C: Yeah. When we were just friends, we were hanging out at the courtyard that we talked about before at our community college.
K: The one where I was like “hey you, come over.”
C: Yeah.
K: That’s how Chad and I met.
C: And at the time, you were a smoker, and most of the people you hung out with were smokers.
K: Yeah.
C: And one of our friends said “hey let me get a cigarette” so you gave them a cigarette, and they lit it and took a drag off it. They were like “do you want it back?” and took it out of their mouth, and it had blood on the filter.
K: Ugh, yes, I remember that.
C: And you were like “no, no. Just keep it. No.”
K: Yeah, but why would I want it back even if it didn’t have blood on the filter?
C: Yeah, I didn’t think you would have either. I assume, I never smoked, but I assumed that once you’ve given somebody a cigarette to smoke, that whole cigarette is theirs to smoke.
K: Well, I had some people I would share cigarettes with.
C: But then they’re not asking for a cigarette, they’re asking for a drag off your cigarette.
K: Yeah. And they’re like- but most people, I just gave them a cigarette if they asked for a drag, but there were certain friends that I would let take a drag off my cigarettes.
C: Yeah.
K: But I miss smoking. I think anytime it comes up, I say I miss smoking. On my 89th birthday, my 85th, my 80th
C: 85. Because your grandparents both lived until about 90, so I want to give you a couple years.
K: So you are going to let me smoke for five years?
C: Yeah, basically.
K: And that’s really giving of you because you’re ten years younger than me, so you’ll just be a young dude in his seventies with his 85 year old wife
C: Well, and apparently whenever you get older I don’t get quite as much older, so I think by the time you’re 85, I think I’m only going to be about mid-fifties.
K: Yeah. Because at first you were seven years younger than me, then a decade younger than me, and now you’re about fifteen years younger than me.
C: Yeah. That’s how you tell it.
K: Yeah, that’s my emotional truth, and I’m standing in my emotional truth. I’m not down with the objective facts today. I’m all about the emotional facts.
C: even though because you’re older, as a percentage you age less each year than I do.
K: Ooo. I got a letter that’s so exciting. I got a letter from the pension office in Japan. They sent me a letter saying I would get ten million yen when I retire.
C: Wow.
K: Which feels really good to see that big of a number on a piece of paper coming to me, but that’s about ten thousand US dollars. But still, that’s nothing to sneeze at.
C: No, it said you’d get one million because ten million would be about 95,000 dollars right now.
K: Oh dammit. Okay, yeah. That’s not as exciting. Ah bummer. Because ten million is a hundred thousand.
C: Yeah.
K: Dang. I want ten million yen.
C: Yeah.
K: That’d be nice.
C: So if you’re wanting to give us ten million yen, hit us up, and we will arrange something other than PayPal because the fees on that would be killer.
K: (laughs) So, if I were a millionaire, I still don’t think that I would be able to find an awesome lawyer because clearly for me an awesome lawyer is someone who hides bodies and intimidates people.
C: And you don’t have to hide any bodies.
K: I don’t have any bodies to hide but that’s beside the point. They should be willing to, or they should at least have the number to a fixer. Like former CIA former NSA. Come on.
C: Okay, so maybe if we weren’t just millionaires but multimillionaires, you could pay someone to procure you a body. Like somebody could just die naturally, and they would just snatch that body and dump it in the living room, and we could pay somebody to take that body.
K: Okay now I feel like you’re going to talk about necromancy and all kinds of random bizarre stuff.
C: No, I was just saying you could have escape rooms. You could have your own little escape room fantasy where you’ve got to- you’re being framed for a crime, and you’ve got to call on all your resources.
K: We don’t need millions of dollars to do that. There’s a company in Japan that will do that for just a thousand bucks.
C: Oh okay.
K: I mean, the person wouldn’t really be dead.
C: Yeah. I was thinking of The Game with Michael Douglas which that was
K: Ew, why would I want that? That did not look like a good time at all.
C: Yeah, but he liked it at the end.
K: And where did his brother get the money for that?
C: Who knows.
K: Yeah, I don’t.
C: Probably some shady lawyer.
K: (laughs) So, what are your legal experiences, and does our description of the law make you want to come to Japan more or less? Keep the conversation going. You can hit us up on The Musicks- oh wow that’s our outro, I’m not going to do our outro.
C: Yeah, don’t do our outro. It’s already all there.
K: Yeah, and I wasn’t even doing it right. Our outro’s all smooth and good.
C: Yeah.
K: So stick around and check out our outro and come back next week. Where we’ll be talking about more random stuff.
C: Bye.
K: Bye.
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