Vice Consul Yoshiaki Nagaya, 33, who has worked for two years as a liaison in the Japanese Consulate in San Francisco, has entered a no contest plea in San Mateo County Court to two felony counts of domestic violence. Nagaya's case has been huge news in the Japanese press, partly because he meets frequently with tech companies in Silicon Valley, and partly because Nagaya's wife went to police with particularly dramatic accounts of being thrown from a slow-moving car, having a tooth knocked out, and being stabbed with a screwdriver.
As the Chron reports:
Nagaya was arrested in March after his wife, Yuka Nagaya, told police he had thrown her from a slow-moving car during an argument in a parking garage near the couple's San Bruno apartment.Yuka Nagaya said her husband had repeatedly injured her from January 2011, about a month after the couple married, until she went to police, prosecutors said, adding she provided investigators with photos of each injury.
Nagaya's no contest plea is treated the same as a guilty plea in a felony case like this, but perhaps it allows him to save face. He will face up to a year in county jail.
As a culture, Japan tends to treat "private matters" like domestic violence with a certain degree of hushed acquiescence, given the shame associated with revealing private troubles. (They're also a fairly gossip-phobic culture, hence, perhaps, why this story became so big over there, because such things don't typically come out about public figures.) For centuries, domestic violence there has gone largely unspoken about and has not prosecuted. Only in the last decade have local governments begun to deal with the issue and legislate against it.
