WITH its façade of red brick, Chiba prison, just outside Tokyo, looks like a Victorian-era British jail. That is where the similarity ends. Prisons in Britain are often loud, dirty and violent, but Chiba resembles a somewhat Spartan retirement home for former soldiers. The corridors and the tiny cells are spotless. Uniformed prisoners shuffle in lockstep behind guards and bow before entering rooms.

The deputy warden, Hiroyuki Shinkai, who once visited British prisons as a UN researcher, was shocked by what he found. He can still recall his surprise at seeing inmates freely mingling and talking. “Japanese penal philosophy is different,” he explains. In Japan, talking is banned, except during break-times. Unpaid work is a duty, not a choice.

Japan incarcerates its citizens at a far lower rate than most developed countries: 55 per 100,000 people compared with 149 in Britain and 716 in America. The country’s justice ministry can also point to low rates of recidivism. Yet increasingly the nation’s 188 prisons and detention centres come in for harsh criticism, particularly over their obsession with draconian rules and secrecy (on February 21st the government unexpectedly announced it had hanged three men for murder), and their widespread use of solitary confinement.

Criminal courts in Japan have long relied heavily on confessions for proof of guilt. Though the accused have a right to silence, failure to admit a crime is considered bad sport. Besides, police have strong incentives to extract a confession and, with up to 23 days to interrogate a suspect, the blunt tools to do so, as a stream of disturbing incidents has shown. Detectives tracking down an anonymous hacker extracted separate confessions from four innocent people before being forced in December into a humiliating apology. Court conviction rates are over 99%.

Over two-thirds of the inmates of Chiba prison were convicted for crimes that caused death—mainly murder, arson or manslaughter. Half are serving life sentences. The average prisoner is 50. Many of them have never used a mobile phone or a credit card. Conjugal visits are banned, so marriages break down.

In the prison workshops, inmates silently make leather shoes and furniture, overseen by a single unarmed guard. No riot has taken place in a Japanese prison since just after the second world war. Escapes are rare, and drugs and contraband almost non-existent. The prison notes that its ratio of one guard to four prisoners is roughly half that in Britain. Yet no one can recall a violent attack on a staff member.

A landmark report in 1995 by Human Rights Watch, a lobby group, said this remarkable order “is achieved at a very high cost”, including the violation of fundamental human rights and falling far short of international standards. Europeans and Americans inside Japan’s prison system have developed mental problems. Yet for Mr Shinkai the differences with the West are a point of pride. “Of course we look too strict to outsiders,” he says. But his inmates, he goes on, all come from Japanese society. For them, it works beautifully.

Correction: This article originally asserted that "life means life" in the Japanese judicial system. This is not true. Life prisoners are eligible for parole. Sorry.