Remember when Japan was roundly criticized abroad for failing to join a widely accepted international treaty and ignoring behavior that elsewhere in the world was a crime?

No, this column will not be about the Hague Convention and international child abduction. Anyway, that has been all sorted out. (OK, that was sarcasm, to be explained another day.) Today I am talking about the U.N. Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.

Never heard of it? According to the Abe administration, implementing the treaty is important enough to justify creating hundreds of new criminal offenses, most comprising an entirely new category, namely "planning the execution of a serious crime for a terrorist or other organized crime group." Most writers are using the word "conspiracy," not just because it describes the new crimes more concisely, but also as this whole endeavor is widely regarded as the repackaging of past government efforts to add conspiracy to law enforcement's arsenal.