Editor’s Corner

We often have to grapple with cultural differences in translating this series, but this time a different aspect of culture is a problem: the legal system. Where Holmes has investigated crimes in the past, they’ve been activities that everyone agrees are illegal, like art theft and forgery. But in this volume, a good part of the plot and drama inevitably comes off as almost hard to believe for a North American reader because it involves Japan’s marijuana laws.

As I write this, I’m within walking distance of more than one medical marijuana shop. I could get in my car and within five minutes drive across my state border to a jurisdiction where recreational pot is legal. This can make it hard to take seriously the role that cannabis plays in this volume. It might feel a little like we’ve suddenly been time-slipped into the 1950s—or even the 1930s—and Holmes is about to pull out an old film projector and make everyone watch Reefer Madness (if you’ve never heard of it, Google it, and you can thank me later).

It also reminded me that I once wrote some fiction set in Japan with a plot element involving the risk of deportation for marijuana possession. I gave it to one of my 100% non-otaku friends to read and she literally refused to believe this was possible, and told me confidently that no other American reader would be able to take this story at face value.

In case you reacted to this story like my friend did to mine: be reassured that in fact, using marijuana is a serious crime in Japan. In one famous example, in 1980, former Beatle Paul McCartney was jailed for a number of days, deported, and banned from entering the country for several years—and he was lucky to have avoided a potential seven year jail sentence. The law has not changed since then, nor are Japanese celebrities immune—to take just one of many examples, in 2020, Shion Okamoto, a cast member of the popular Terrace House TV series, was arrested for possession.

It goes so far that, when Canada legalized pot in 2018, the Japanese government warned that it was illegal for Japanese citizens to use it even outside Japan, although it’s hard to imagine how they would enforce this.

Unlike the details we normally have to wrangle in this series, this isn’t one we can finesse by how we render the language or by adding a few words of explanation. All we could do was hope that if you found this hard to believe, you read as far as this editor’s note.