DOCUMENTARY

61 minutes
French / English
2000

Philippe COUTURE
Masami UEHARA

Art&Facts , MFP , France2

THE ONLY INDEPENDENT FILM EVER SHOT INSIDE A JAPANESE PRISON.

Each prison’s system is the implacable reflection of the society that produces it. France, country that wrote the human right’s principles, is deploring its prisons. But how a « successful » prison would look like? What type of society would it be the symptom? Today jail seems to be the most, if not the only, morally acceptable social punishment for the developed countries. And it is maybe in Japan that we might find the most elaborate and « successful » carceral system. Very harsh in it application, and almost never investigated by foreign observers, how does it justify it self to the Japanese citizen, and to the rest of the world? How could other culture and societies accept it? The Fuchu prison is detaining around 500 foreign inmates. How do they cope to the extremely strict rules of the prison? Two French citizens, one still inside jail, the other already released, are telling their experiment and their feeling about this system.