Chika Honda spent more than 10 years in an Australian prison for smuggling heroin into the country — a crime that new evidence suggests she did not commit, according to her supporters.
The supporters — a group of Japanese lawyers and Australian academics — say it is a tragic tale of a young life wrecked and justice lost in translation.
Hooked up with a Japanese tour group through a distant acquaintance, Honda, then a 36-year-old waitress from Saitama Prefecture, arrived in Melbourne in 1992, hoping to see koalas and kangaroos.