Profound changes in the way Japan dispenses criminal justice are either forthcoming or under consideration. Many people are ready to accept changes, even to welcome some of them, given the rising tide of serious crimes by minors and an apparent breakdown in police discipline. Calls to ensure the rights of victims and deal more harshly with some kinds of juvenile crime are widespread. Improvements in the system are needed, but so are sufficient safeguards built into any large-scale changes that are made.

The revisions in the Juvenile Law on which the three ruling-coalition parties have agreed -- lowering the age at which minors can be punished for serious crimes from 16 to 14 and extending the maximum period of detention before trial from four to eight weeks, for example -- have largely gone unchallenged. Of course, that is because murders and attempted murders by youths as young as 14 and 15 no longer seem rare, and the public agrees that young offenders should recognize they are accountable for their actions. But legitimate concerns over the increase in such crimes should not lead to too-ready acceptance of all the steps announced by the government for punishing the wrongdoers instead of rehabilitating them.

A case in point is the proposal just jointly announced by the Justice Ministry and the Public Prosecutor's Office to allow prosecutors to directly investigate serious youth crimes instead of merely examining reports sent to them by the police, as in the past. This is in connection with such crimes as murder, robbery, rape, illegal confinement and the inflicting of injury resulting in death -- all major crimes, to be sure. These are infractions for which the family courts that deal with such cases are required in principle to send suspects aged 16 or older to public prosecutors for indictment in district courts, but until now this has been at the judge's discretion.