alt Hacker NewsThe author mentions it in a YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2epTf2IW1g (at the 2:20 mark).
But essentially, somebody else sent her a package with something illegal in it that she didn't ask for. The police took her passport for a few months and searched her house. After a few months, she got her passport returned to her, she left Japan temporarily, but when she came back, they arrested her "to ensure [she] wouldn't flee while they finished the investigation".
She also mentioned it was "the most normal type of thing you can think of"; it might have been something like pseudoephedrine/Sudafed. That's a common over-the-counter drug in other countries but it's very illegal here in Japan (unless it's under 10%, or you buy it from Japan)!
Edit: Importing pseudoephedrine above 10% concentrations is illegal, but you can legally buy some higher concentrations over-the-counter while in Japan.
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Skimming the video there's also important unstated context that the person was non-white foreigner, had tattoos, and on visa. It's possible that the combination made an ambiguous grey-area situation much worse.
I am always amazed at details like this. Who would voluntarily go back to this kind of situation?
Likely some sort of stimulant as you point out. It is hardly the first time either as there have been public cases like this numerous times over the last two decades. Some cases even ending with deportation. The one I remember most vividly was someone carrying an unlabeled bottle of ADHD medication that had been sent to them while they were in South Korea by their pharmacist mum in the US; that they then ran afoul of when entering Japan. Similarly, there was a case at the University of Tokyo in the 00s, where an overseas student got sent an (allegedly) unprompted package with cannabis (not a stimulant though) from friends abroad. Allegedly, they were expelled and we got university-wide, anti-drug campaigns with memorable slogans like: "Illicit drugs are illegal".
Due to their history, laws regarding stimulants are harsher in Japan than in many other places in the world [1] and this frequently takes people by surprise. Not that Japanese laws related to illegal drugs are lenient to begin with.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade_in_Japan
What do you do when you have a bad flu or cold if you don't have pseudoephedrine?
> somebody else sent her a package with something illegal in it that she didn't ask for.
> She also mentioned it was "the most normal type of thing you can think of";
This doesn't really answer the question, though. It's frustrating to try to interpret these stories with a lot of writing and video describing everything except the crucial detail about what the charges were for.
I don't think she's trying to withhold information to avoid contaminating the case because she's spilling other details all over the place that could be used to influence the case. Yet the key piece of information that is supposedly "the most normal" isn't revealed