The current box-office winner in Japan is "Hero," the movie spinoff of a popular TV series starring heartthrob Takuya Kimura as a nonconformist prosecutor. Now there's an oxymoron. In American pop culture, at least, prosecutors tend to be the bad guys since they represent the establishment, but in Japan prosecutors put away the bad guys, who are helped by shifty criminal defense lawyers. If I had to describe this attitude to an American, I would say, "Imagine that everyone on trial for murder was O.J. Simpson."

The difference is that O.J. would have been toast in Japan, and his defense team would have been despised as thoroughly as the one that's currently representing the 26-year-old man accused of raping and murdering a housewife in Hiroshima and also killing her infant daughter. Because the man was 18 in 1999 when the crime occurred, he wins the right not to have his name publicized, but apparently it doesn't disqualify him for being eligible for the death penalty. The young man was convicted and given a life sentence in both his first trial and an appeal, but last year the Supreme Court ruled that the Hiroshima High Court had no reason not to give him the death penalty, and sent the case back.

The team now representing him has more than 20 lawyers and is headed by Yoshihiro Yasuda, who is famous for defending some notorious murder suspects, including Aum Shinrikyro guru Shoko Asahara. Yasuda's group is not just trying to prevent the death penalty from being applied. They are trying to convince the Hiroshima High Court that the defendant's previous admission of premeditation was improperly elicited, and that he did not intend to kill the woman or her baby.