The number of people suspected of having met unnatural deaths is on the rise, as the police dealt with some 160,000 "suspicious corpses" in 2009 — about 1.4 times more than 10 years before. But the nation suffers from a chronic shortage of experts who can examine such bodies.
The shortage of forensic examiners and doctors who can conduct autopsies could result in attributing crime-related deaths to other causes like illness. In and after 1998, there were 39 cases in which the police first determined that the deaths were not crime-related but then decided later they were caused by crime. Drugs apparently caused death in 11 of the cases.
In 2007, the Aichi prefectural police first determined that a young sumo wrestler died of illness, but after an autopsy conducted at his family's request, they determined that he was beaten to death by other wrestlers.