Japan Undergoing Shock Treatment
By Mark Schreiber,
Asia Times, June 13, 1997The year is not even half over, and Japan's annual "quota" for sensational crimes has already been filled.
In late March, the body of a 39-year-old female executive at Tokyo's electric utility corporation was found in an unoccupied apartment in one of the capital city's seedy love hotel districts. Investigators discovered that the woman, a graduate of an elite private university, had led a secret life outside the office, moonlighting as a prostitute. A Nepalese laborer was later arrested for the killing.
Aside from its grislier aspects, the case set off a wave of social commentaries over the difficulties professional women face in balancing full-time careers with their personal lives.
Then in May, just as the story began breaking of yet another major financial scandal, this time involving millions of dollars in illegal payoffs to a corporate extortionist by top executives of Nomura Securities and Dai-ichi Kangyo Bank [Coyner's note: complete with executive suicide], the public's attention was diverted to a bizarre murder in Kobe.
In the early morning hours of May 27, an obviously-deranged individual [Coyner's note: turned out to be a 14-year-old male student from the same school!] placed the head of an 11-year-old retarded boy in front of the main gate of a junior high school. The head had been mutilated and a cryptic handwritten message inserted into the mouth by the killer, boasting that he "enjoyed killing" and challenging the "idiot police" to catch him. The same person is also believed responsible for the slaying of a 10-year-old girl two months earlier.
While some news reports suggest an arrest is imminent, the citizens of Kobe have been understandably nervous, all the more after the local newspaper received a rambling message from someone claiming to be the killer that implied he might strike again. The theatrical style of the message showed chilling similarities with "Zodiac", a notorious serial killer who terrorized communities in the San Francisco area for several years in the 1970s, leading one commentator to offer the observation that Japanese violence has become "internationalized".
Foreign writers based in Tokyo, however, once again took their oft-stated position that Japan's self-image as a relatively crime-free society no longer corresponds with reality. In this writer's view, that is not quite the case. Rather, the occurrence of random, unprovoked incidents of violence has created an element of terrifying unpredictability to what continues to be one of the world's safest societies.
Some of those incidents have been described as "delusionary crimes", in which the adult perpetrators, themselves formerly victims of group bullying at school or other forms of torment in their youth, seek to vent their fury on children and other defenseless victims.
The best known example was the arrest in August 1989 of serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, who murdered four girls between the ages of four and seven. A 27-year-old recluse at the time of his arrest, Miyazaki suffered a physical handicap and was ostracized by his schoolmates. Although his lawyers entered an insanity plea, a Tokyo court sentenced him to death two months ago. His case is under appeal.
One of the things that has made it possible for criminals to operate successfully in Japan is the relatively relaxed and permissive environment, in which the average citizen does not view strangers with fear and suspicion.
Nor does the populace appear inclined to harden itself, psychologically, against the threat of occasional crime. Merchants still stack their goods, unguarded, on wagons fronting busy streets. Vending machines generally are not vandalized. And public restrooms can be entered safely, day or night, without being kept under lock and key.
While relations between the police and community are for the most part good, citizens remain wary of the potential for abuse of police powers.
In August 1996, a year before the 15-year statute of limitations was due to expire, an association affiliated with the Ehime Prefectural Police announced a reward of ¥1 million (US$ 9,000) for information leading to the arrest of a 48-year-old woman suspected of having murdered a co-worker at the bar where she worked. The woman had been at large since 1982.
Several commentators denounced this move by the association as "dangerous", arguing that tempting citizens with offers of money would set a bad precedent and encourage people to start informing on their neighbors - as they were expected to do during the "police state" era before the end of World War II.
Although the issue of crime involving foreigners has been kept low-key, partly due to fear of stirring up a diplomatic row, Japan does have a problem with imported crime - and it is growing. Operating in both cities and rural areas, foreign criminals traffic in stolen credit cards, jewelry, motor vehicles and stimulant drugs. Another of their lucrative businesses has been the counterfeiting of money substitutes, such as department store gift coupons and electronic prepaid cards.
It is clear that most of those foreign criminals operate with the permission, or even collaboration, of yakuza syndicates.
Japanese authorities are capable of dealing with crime when moved to do so, but sometimes their efforts amount to closing the stable door after the horse has bolted - all but meaningless gestures intended mainly to reassure a nervous electorate.
Within months of the March 20, 1995 poison gas attack on Tokyo subways by members of the Aum Supreme Truth cult, Japan's parliament passed a law making it a crime to manufacture or possess sarin and other toxic nerve agents. It was almost as if the United States Congress had passed legislation making it illegal to rent a yellow truck, fill it with fertilizer and blasting caps and detonate it in front of a government building on April 19.
Concern about overseas reaction can help to inspire legal action. After news reports on prostitution by high school girls created an international embarrassment, Tokyo's metropolitan assembly passed a tough new ordinance cracking down on their male patrons. That was followed recently by another statute aimed at curbing the business activities of so-called "telephone clubs", which are thinly-disguised fronts for amateur prostitution.
After serious offenses by minors soared by more than 25 percent during the first quarter of 1997, Yuko Sekiguchi, newly-appointed director of the National Police Agency, announced his organization would propose a get-tough policy against juvenile delinquency. Waiting in the wings are studies underway on technology for blocking Internet access to pornographic materials. Pornography is already rigidly banned from computer sites within Japan.
There is growing evidence that the authorities feel increasingly moved to suppress what they see as excessive social permissiveness. Although controls on publications portraying female nudes displaying pubic hair were relaxed in 1992, the police are still wary of allowing citizens too much freedom. And censorship is still enforced in portrayals of sadomasochism and pedophilia in videos and printed matter, the sort of materials that were cited as having spurred Tsutomu Miyazaki to commit his crimes.
From a wider perspective, this growing demand for law and order is also likely to figure in the rising chorus of calls for the revision of Japan's US-imposed constitution, which was adopted 50 years ago and which neoconservatives blame for a decline in traditional morality and other purportedly more stabilizing values.
It will be interesting to see if this new legalism, which champions strict laws to protect people from their own base instincts, will play a greater role in Japanese society in the 21st century - and what models, if any, it can offer the world.
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Updated July 7, 1997
