The Diet is expected to soon start deliberating on two bills designed to improve procedures involving autopsies when unnatural deaths are suspected. The bills are a welcome step which will help rectify the current situation in which the police disregard most deaths they handle as having nothing to do with crimes and therefore fail to carry out autopsies.
Annually, the police handle the corpses of slightly more than 170,000 people. But according to the National Police Agency, in 2010, only 11.2 percent of all unnatural deaths whose cause was not immediately clear were subject to postmortems due to a lack of trained forensic doctors.
Since 1998, 45 cases have been reported in which the police first believed the deaths were non-crime related, only to determine later a crime was involved. But this is most likely just the tip of the iceberg.