When former Nissan chief Carlos Ghosn used his first press conference since fleeing Japan to give the country's justice system a one-star TripAdvisor review, it drew a collective shrug from the general public. If, as Dostoevsky said, you can judge a society by how it treats its prisoners, I suspect Japan would score highly for indifference.
That's partly because most people here know little about life behind bars. For years, the closest most Japanese viewers got to a real-life jail cell was via yakuza flicks. Though TV crews now venture inside the country's jails on a more regular basis, amazingly, "Prison Circle" is the first feature-length documentary to do so.
Having made two films about the United States' penal system, director Kaori Sakagami spent six years working to obtain permission to shoot at a Japanese prison. She eventually got the go-ahead from an atypical institution. At the Shimane Asahi Rehabilitation Program Center, the daily regimen is as minutely regulated as any other jail in Japan, but the onus is less on making inmates pay for their crimes than ensuring they don't reoffend.