PRISON JAPAN / day three

WEDNESDAY, MAY 16, 2007 ---- The Tedium of Time.
People working busy lives in big busy cities often complain about HOW FAST times seems to fly these days. My cousin Kellie says this shit all the time. For the person sitting in a prison cell or detention center, however, time is a tedium. The blank boredom of four bare walls. The blank immensity of time, every moment gutted and stretched out, into a blank future without shape or definite conclusion. Of all the subtle tortures perfected by the Prison Establishment, this boredom surely is the most brutal. But, I have got to look on the positive side:

At least I am not getting beaten by the guards. I am not sharing the toilet with cockroaches. And I will probably be getting out of here in a couple of weeks, maybe even in a few days:

And since I can't drink any alcohol inside, and I am in fact drinking nothing but water, I am definitely giving my liver a rest. I am also definitely losing weight, thanks to the PRISON FOOD.

POST NOTE: It is amazing to reflect on the coincidences which happen in life, the chains of events which cover the causal plane like spider webs. For example, when I was eventually released from my 16 days of lockup, everyone in the rest of the world was talking about the impending imprisonment of Paris Hilton. By the some strange coincidence, Paris and I were locked in the same pattern, we were playing out the same archetype. These things are connected, just like all those recent earthquakes in Indonesia. Two weeks ago I was amazed to discover a sudden spike in traffic to my Prison Japan blog -- it jumped from 1/2 hits per day to 25 a day, to 50 a day, eventually right up to 150 a day, which is surely a record for my blogs (a personal best.) The strange thing was, I couldn't work out why my site was suddenly so popular. Had the world finally discovered the amazing appeal of my first hand account behind Japanese bars... hardly, they were just looking for a photo of a blowjob.

Me back in Liberty House, another age brutally ended
The monotony of time passing so slow
and it is only just my third day!
The traffic spike dissipated once the offending image (which admitedly looks like a blowjob at low-res, but at a higher calibre it is just Crystal Meth smoking a can held waist high by Maniac High) sank into the recesses of Google Images. Googles Images visitors don't convert, even if you are getting hundreds of them -- that is what I learnt. Everything is a learning experience, and victimhood is the path to death. So how come Paul Green didn't learn something from his 19 days in lockup in Japan, which in September 2007 became a big story in the English language Tokyo press? Did he not learn anything at all -- for example an acceptance of his fate, a certain flexibility, the realisation that we are all the creators of our lives? Reading Green's story in Metropolis (the largest English language magazine in Tokyo) I didn't get any sense that he had undergone personal growth. Instead you get the fury of someone railing against their fate, bitter and looking for revenge. You just to have to look at Green's photo, with all his bristling pride, to know what you have always felt: prisons are meant for people like him. They are meant to take that chip off their shoulder (or bring them down a peg, or hammer flat the nail that is protruding from the wall.) Paul Green was just the kind of guy who could have learnt something from being in lockup. Sadly he didn't, but that is his problem (and to be fair at least he got his moment of fame in the media, which I didn't/haven't fully received yet (although I am getting there heh! heh!))

That all said, Green's description of life in lockup -- and his encounter with a hard female public prosecutor -- does really correlate with my experience. I reckon he had the same public prosecutor that I had (the one who had a vendetta against gaijin crime, according to my lawyer.) Green writes: "Day 2: The Bus of Torture."

INTO THE BOWELS OF HELL.
"0630: I woke up with a startle to the sound of industrial lights coming on. The cell doors clanged open and my new roommates nodded for me to follow them. We put away our futons on the allocated shelves in the futon room and proceeded to the troughs. It was time to brush our teeth and wipe ourselves down with a hand towel.

"I was lucky enough to have a shower the night before, as it had been bath day. It was to be another five days before I was that lucky again. The shower room was quite tame, with just one other guy in there covered from head to toe in tattoos and missing two and half fingers on each hand.

"After our trough time, the doors clanged shut, and a vacuum cleaner and bucket were passed through to us. The ranking cellmate showed me the procedure of how to clean the already clean toilet. The next time for the doors to swing open was for Undo (exercise time). A guard had already informed me that this actually meant tobacco!

"I was in no mood for anything, so I slumped my face into my borrowed jumper and tried to get back to sleep -- the only place I could go where I wasn't in jail.

This was to be the longest day of my life.

"0830: Shiken (court)! I was escorted out with 12 other poor souls to the preparation room for the the torture bus. I call this the bus of torture not because of the ride itself but because of where it would take me: holding cells for those who have an appointment to see the prosecutor or the judge. On entering and exiting the bus, there is a large flock of blue uniforms, one of whom shouts at the top of his lungs your precinct and the number that's written on your slippers as you pass.

"The room for the day has an open toilet at the rear and hard wooden benches on each wall that seat ten. The handcuffs are left on from 9 a.m. when you arrive to 5:30 p.m. when you leave, with the exception of lunchtime: two bread rolls, one sachet of butter, one sachet of jam and one sachet of chocolate sauce. The only thing I had to look forward to on my bus of torture days was the cheese stick that accompanies this lunch. Talking, sleeping or anything other than sitting was prohibited.

"I had a translator sitting next to my floor-fastened chair. My lawyer said be nice to the prosecutor, so I was, but in truth I wanted to kill her.

"The prosecutor knew the basic facts of the case: I had punched a guy so hard and so many times that his nose was shattered and his monkey forehead ripped. Therefore, I must be a criminal.

Paul Green the front page Metropolis wuss
Paul Green after his release
from his own holiday in hell
"Actually, the victim had shot incomprehensible words at me and my girlfriend, and we had retorted with 'Sorry, what?' which he thought was aggressive. Before we knew it, Kenji the Great was pulling our ties and slapping my arms while shouting in his local yakuza-wannabe dialect, 'You gaijin pieces of crap, I'm gonna smack the hell out of you! Provoked? Doesn't matter.

"I had to reach up toward the sky to connect my blows. The second left his nose in pieces; the third snapped my hand in two and opened up his head; the fourth and fifth were so bloody I knew something was wrong with my adrenalin levels.

"There were two beer bottles involved, both of which, conveniently, had limited-edition labels from the event I was coming home from. One bottle lay smashed in the train station at the crime scene (behind the yellow crime scene tape). The other lay intact in my special event bag next to my girlfriend in the police station. Obviously, this was proof.

"After going through my statement with the mole-ridden prosecutor, I implored, 'I have never been in trouble with the police before; I'm an active, respected member of my local community and I believe I am not a flight risk, so please...'

"The prosecutor simply looked up, sniggered and politely but firmly said, 'Tell that to the judge tomorrow.'

"On the way home, everybody was like little puppies in anticipation. I never thought I'd be so happy to see a jail cell."

I can sympathise with Green having been in the same sordid boat as he -- returning to my little cell at Kitazawa Police Station seemed like checking into the Hilton Hotel, compared with the cramped dark cells of the Public Persecutor's department. After hours and hours of wearing my tailbone down on the hard benches at the PP, I could stretch out at last, and chat with my crew. Nonetheless, I get the feeling that Maniac High and me got me out of being in jail, than Paul Green did. At least he got his 5 minutes of fame, I suppose.

POST POSTNOTE (September 14, 2007): The story gets wierder yet. This morning (bright and cheerful outside, and I was chuffed at having gotten paid after a particularly protracted drought), I got an email from Crystal Meth, one of the heroes of this tail, who exclaimed: "I know the guy (Paul Green) on the cover of the Metro. He does the odd acting job and I bumped into him at the bar last night!"

I said to Crystal by email: "When I read his story he seemed like a bit of a jerk. Is he like that in real life or did the magazine set him up as their victim of the week?"

And Supermae replied: "He's a jerk. I think he thinks he is cool."

Even more amazingly than that, I found out later in the day, there was a link between Paul Green and Maniac High. I was to discover in fact, that the frontpage Metropolis photo of Green behind bars was actually taken by Maniac long before he -- and me, and Green -- were arrested. That's right -- Maniac took the photo on some mock prison style bangumi they did, years before either of them -- or us -- were arrested (what a Shakespearian twist of fate!) Green and Metropolis used the photo without permission. At least Maniac could sue, if he really wanted to (or else demand that Metropolis run our story of Prison Japan next!) But why bother creating a media storm offline, when I can vent one online -- MOVINGHOUSE/PRISON WORLD...

PRISON JAPAN... PRISON PLANET.
Contact the author Rob Sullivan at coderot@gmail.com. All comments will be published at the bottom of this page. Anticopyright September 2007.
For a Japanese language guide to Japanese lockup, click here.
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Contact the author at coderot@gmail.com.