What’s the Matter with Japan?
A worrying string of random acts of violence by young, troubled men is shaking up the country.
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In a trend that seems to be accelerating on both sides of the Pacific, Japan was shocked on Sunday to hear of yet another stabbing spree, this one proving to be more lethal than most.
By the time Tokyo police apprehended 25-year-old temp worker Tomohiro Kato, he had killed seven people and injured ten more. Because he decided to wreak havoc in Tokyo’s busy Akihabara district, a four-hour drive from the Shizuoka prefecture town where he resided, the incident became the most extensively and graphically documented of what many now see as a worrying string of random acts of violence, the likes of which postwar Japan has not often seen.
Unlike most such incidents in the US, this story does not take place in a small town where nothing much happens. Akihabara is a bustling urban district on the east side of Tokyo, known for its electronics shops and, of late, its status as the world capital of otaku - self-declared geeks with obsessions ranging from “cosplay” (dressing up in costumes, usually of manga or anime characters, sometimes with, sometimes without erotic overtones) to collecting figurines to arranging “dates” with high-tech life-size silicone dolls, almost always revolving around Japan’s booming comic book, animated film, and video game industries.
On Sundays, Akihabara’s main drag is blocked to vehicle traffic and turned into what Kato, in a message posted on a cell phone-based forum prior to the attack, called a “pedestrian’s paradise”. According to statements released by the police and messages Kato posted on the site, this was precisely why he rented a van and drove up from Shizuoka to vent his exhaustion with life.
In the randomness of his attacks and his warnings prior to carrying them out, Kato’s rampage bears unsettling similarities to that of 24-year-old Masahiro Kanagawa, who warned police by calling them from an unmanned police box before killing one and injuring seven in Tsuchiura, Ibaraki prefecture (northeast of Tokyo, about an hour from Akihabara) in March. Both men were stuck in dead-end jobs, Kato as an occasional temp worker and Kanagawa as a part-time convenience store employee, reportedly had few friends, spent large amounts of time on line, and made regular visits to Akihabara.
The common thread of manga and anime, harkens back to the 1989 case of Tsutomu Miyazaki, widely held to be Japan’s worst serial killer, whose apartment was found to be filled with violent, pornographic manga and videos when police searched it after arresting him for the rape, murder, mutilation, and partial cannibalization of four little girls in Saitama prefecture (on Tokyo’s northern border.)
That both Kato and Kanagawa were regular visitors to Akihabara is unsurprising not because reading manga, watching anime, or playing video games, even of a violent, pornographic, or pedophilic nature, necessarily leads to such behavior, but because Akihabara, while teeming with tourists and computer shoppers as well as otaku is a haven for lonely, socially maladjusted young men. Among the district’s myriad shops are maid cafes (where waitresses dressed in French maid costumes welcome “master” “home” before fawningly serving him overpriced coffee and cakes), ordinary counter-service ramen and curry shops, and boutiques catering to just about every hobby or obsession anyone could have. . . except socializing. Unlike the capital’s other busy districts, lively bars, eateries, and izakaya, where groups of people can be found drinking and chatting the night (and day) away, are not a prominent feature of Akihabara.
The other thread tying Kato, Kanagawa, Miyazaki (commonly, like legendary writers, artists, and athletes, known by his first name only: Tsutomu; like referring to Jeffrey Dahmer as just “Jeffrey”), and the other, less “successful” frustrated and lonely young men who engage in random stabbings in Japan on roughly an annual basis, is a professed exhaustion with life, a lack of hope, a perception of being picked on, disrespected, and ignored, which manifests itself in violent outbursts.
Since 1998, when it nearly doubled in a year, Japan’s suicide rate has remained among the developed world’s highest. (Although, arguably, not as high as it is sometimes portrayed as being, with over 30,000 people taking their own lives every year so far this decade.) Recently, suicide in groups, usually by means of a charcoal stove in an enclosed car in a remote park, has been on the rise, with participants usually meeting on line. More recently, suicide has taken a turn toward being a public health problem of the sort normally only considered in areas where the threat of a suicide bombing is a reality: hydrogen sulfide gas and other noxious gasses emerged as a new trend in suicide earlier this year, with people in hotel rooms or other densely populated areas killing themselves, then taking others with them as the gas spread throughout the building or emergency workers tried to rescue them.
So what’s going on in Japan? Samurai movies aside, there’s not strong evidence to suggest that Japan has a culture of death or that people are growing more violent on the whole. Japan, after all, still has one of the world’s lowest overall crime rates and is safe enough that parents still let children travel through the city on their own. Physical fights are exceedingly rare by the standards of most other countries, and you can count on getting your wallet back, cash still there, should you drop it on the street. Yet the headlines like Sunday’s are becoming more and more common.
Some people blame the economy. The lifetime employment and explosive economic growth of the Bubble years are not even a vague memory to today’s twenty-somethings. Kids still work hard, they still leave school to go study at a cram school before heading home to do homework. They still join college sports clubs that demand twice daily practices six days a week and live in a society where becoming (or marrying) a white-collar professional is the primary measure of success, but they also live in a society where the vaunted “salaryman” is becoming less common than the denigrated “freeter” (serial, long-term underemployed “slacker”) or the struggling contract worker, who works full-time, but without the pay or benefits of his salaryman counterparts. They live in a society where stresses abound.
And they live in a society where mental illness and psychological problems are ignored. Japan has a broad and relatively generous national health insurance scheme, open to everyone in the country. Even without paying his own premiums, a freeter like Kanagawa could have remained on his parents’ insurance (and he probably did, seeing as he lived with them) and someone like Kato would have had the premium deducted from his paycheck, as the law requires, so they would have been covered.
That’s good news if they were suffering from bronchitis, a broken bone, or even cancer, but they weren’t. It appears reasonable to assume that they were suffering from some form of depression or that, at the very least, they had issues with which they were unable to deal on their own, and there’s the rub: Japan’s health insurance scheme does not cover treatment for psychological problems or mental illnesses. You are, one has to assume, supposed to buck up, deal with it, be a man, whatever works. Just don’t be a nuisance.
This is still a society that stigmatizes psychological problems, dispensing sedatives or other medications, on those occasions when they dispensed, with advice like, “Stop being so selfish,” (the advice received by an associate, obviously remaining anonymous, of this correspondent) or, at best, sympathy with little else to help if you’re not prepared to pay a psychiatrist’s bill out of pocket.
On Monday, one of the college freshmen I teach said, “At least it wasn’t Cho [Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter]. If Japan had [readily available and legal] guns, it would have been a lot worse. But this is a big problem for Japan. People are losing their morals.”
Not as bad as Virginia Tech perhaps, but not entirely different: young, isolated, frustrated men, fed up with life, who can think of nothing else to do than to remove themselves from society and take part of society with them.
The conclusion seems kind of obvious: If only those guys could have gotten the help they needed, if only someone had noticed the signs.
Garrett DeOrio runs Trans-Pacific Radio, a podcast channel based in Tokyo which provides regular review and analysis of Japanese and East Asian news and politics
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33 Comments
Concerned Citizen:This is sad. I’m not sure there is a psychological profile to identify anyone with here. When you have 120M people packed into a place the size of California, you get the most polite people on earth, as well as those who don’t fit it — like any country, some have a few screws loose. If you lose your wallet on the subway in Tokyo, there’s an excellent chance you will get it back, with all the cash and credit cards. As a stereotype, the Japanese are very self-effacing, you don’t see them showing off that much. Under this calm surface is jealousy, which I would suspect was one of the drivers here.
In Japan, the term for a young male who lives with his parents at home like this is “hikikomoro” — typically they are into anime, online gaming and other anti-social kinds of behavior and many of these individuals never leave their room. They are unemployed, don’t have friends and their parents have been known to hire “rent-a-girlfriends” to lure them out. There is definitely a cultural component to this malady and I have to admit I feel compassion for the victims and the perpetrator.
Jun 10, 2008 - 1:34 pm Whitehall:So what’s to become of China’s “empty branches”? Millions of young men without female partners due to the gender imbalance following China’s one child policy will likely go stir crazy on mass scales.
The Chinese are generally not as tightly wound as the Japanese but…
Jun 10, 2008 - 1:48 pm Zeph:I think we should be looking at a cultural profile. This is just another effect of modern liberalism mixed with society and it’s just starting in Japan.
When you offer up nothing for people to live for, other than vices, you see individuals only reaching for the extremes. In other words, nothing is ever enough to satisfy their need to feel a rush. That IS liberalism.
Jun 10, 2008 - 4:13 pm Garrett DeOrio:Concerned Citizen: I think you’re looking for the word hikikomori; antisocial, sure, but it’s more like extreme agoraphobia than violent psychopathy. All of the perpetrators of these recent stabbing sprees have been at least partially employed and most have lived alone, so it’s hard to show a connection between hikikomori and random violence.
Zeph, to what effect of Liberalism (I’m assuming you meant “Big L” Liberalism) are you referring? What type of Liberalizing? Japan’s politics have not changed much over the past few decades, and that may well be the problem. I’m a bit lost on what you mean by people living only for their vices. If you mean “as opposed to religion,” I’d have to disagree: largely agnostic, atheistic, or just plain disinterested Japan and South Korea have substantially lower crime rates than largely religious America, for example.
If you mean the breakdown of community ties, I can see more clearly where you’re coming from, but am not sure how, in actual practice, people can be forced to return to living in agrarian villages with their extended families.
People might show less deference to their elders now, and the press might be bellowing of doom, but Japan’s crime rate among teenagers and people in their twenties is decreasing and was at its zenith just after WWII, which would suggest that economics is the biggest factor. Being poor and desperate is a better indicator of criminal likelihood than politics.
Jun 10, 2008 - 5:50 pm Right Brain:I spend half of my time in Tokyo and have a different opinion of the Japanese. Firstly any subway train has a special car painted pink that is only for women. Why? Because the men grope the girls in packed trains. Not only is it incredibly disrespectful its oh-so-5th-grade. Can one imagine in NYC that they would have to install a special subway car so the salarymen don’t cop quick feels on the way to work?
More pointedly the Japanese women don’t want to marry Japanese men: 1 out of every 6 marriages in Tokyo is between a Japanese woman and a foreign man, nationally the ratio is 1/10.
There is also this sense of “where did it go” when it comes to Japanese culture: the only unkempt buildings in Japan are the temples of Kyoto. Nobody is interested enough to give them a coat of paint.
Its a fully colonialized population, a culture eviserated by the American occupation and a distain for things Japanese. A culture where Japanese men are viewed as second-rate to foreigners: read Euro or American,
Jun 10, 2008 - 7:09 pm A.Alaalas:Authoritarianism is the opposite of liberalism. It says “you are the cause of my problem because you do not do what is right and proper, you are sinful, evil, and politically corrupt.” You see this in current extremist Christian/Islamic/Buddhist terrorism. You saw it in extreme Japanese and Nazi militarism of the 30’s and 40’s and extreme communism (Pol Pot, Stalin, etc.). It says “here is what you must live for, you have no right to be a liberalized individual.”
Jun 10, 2008 - 7:27 pm Garrett DeOrio:Right Brain,
Do you have a source on those marriage stats? I’m not saying they’re incorrect, but they’re high enough to cause surprise. Nearly 17% of Tokyo marriages involving a foreigner is amazing considering under 2% of the city’s population are non-citizens and this group is mostly Japanese-born zainichi Koreans or Chinese. 10% nationally is equally amazing for the same reason.
I do know that the number of marriages nationwide involving Japanese men and foreign women is substantially higher than the number of marriages involving Japanese women and foreign men, although both categories are growing quickly.
When Japanese men marry foreigners, the top three nationalities are, in order: 1. Chinese, 2. Filipino, 3. Korean. For women: 1. Korean, 2. Westerners (North Americans and Europeans as a group; individually, Americans are the largest group, by a substantial margin), 3. Chinese.
People in general seem to be putting off marriage, with the average age of a first marriage for men reaching 30 (nearly 31) and for women, 28. The divorce rate is also climbing.
As for women-only cars, I have not seen them first hand, but I’ve been told that Boston has introduced a similar, if not identical system.
I think it’s hard to say that the chikan (train groper) phenomenon is uniquely Japanese or a result of Japanese culture. If New York had trains as crowded with standing passengers as Tokyo does, or commutes as long, we might see such crimes increase there. It’s worth pointing out that such crimes are significantly more rare on uncrowded trains and outside of dense urban areas (or trains leading directly to and from them.)
As for Kyoto, while it has been “modernized” in an unfortunate way, its temples are the crown jewel of the national historical monument program and are, as far as I have seen, quite well maintained, even down to regular replacement of Kinkakuji’s 24K gold-plate exterior and meticulous rakings of the city’s famous Zen rock gardens.
Jun 10, 2008 - 9:31 pm Garrett DeOrio:Why Kyoto feels the need to spend money on monstrosities like the Kyoto Tower is baffling, as are the reason for the lack of protection for old houses and more mundane structures - the focus on temples to the exclusion of other items of historical importance is distressing.
Sorry, I should have said: “I haven’t seen Boston’s women-only cars. . .”
I’ve seen Tokyo’s, which are only actually in use during a limited slice of morning rush hour on certain lines headed into the center of the city.
Jun 10, 2008 - 9:34 pm The Curious Cat:Quote: “A.Alaalas:
Authoritarianism is the opposite of liberalism. It says “you are the cause of my problem because you do not do what is right and proper, you are sinful, evil, and politically corrupt.” You see this in current extremist Christian/Islamic/Buddhist terrorism.”
Excuse me? I’d need some documentation for that Christian terrorism you seem to feel is going on out there. Last time I looked, the Inquisition and the Crusades happened hundreds of years ago, not a few hundred days ago.
What acts of terrorism are individual Christians committing on a daily basis in the world today? Where? What church leaders are exhorting their flock to commit acts of terrorism, such as beheadings, bombings, shootings, etc? I’d be interested to hear of these Christian terrorists.
Handy to lump those crazy fundamentalist backwards Jeebus luvers all in with the rest, isn’t it? That way one has a convenient excuse to be bigoted and hateful towards them, simply because one doesn’t like their brand of religion.
Jun 10, 2008 - 10:55 pm Gregory:Garrett DeOrio:
Can I ask what you’re smoking and where I can get it?
Link to Pew Study indicates that up to 40% of S. Koreans are Christians; not only that, but they are aggresively evangelistic ones as well. 3 years have passed - the percentage may be even higher!
Jun 10, 2008 - 11:14 pm Ken:Right Brain:
More pointedly the Japanese women don’t want to marry Japanese men: 1 out of every 6 marriages in Tokyo is between a Japanese woman and a foreign man, nationally the ratio is 1/10.
Not exactly true. 1 out of 10 marriages nationally is between a Japanese and a foreigner, not a Japanese woman and foreign man. 80% of those marriages are Japanese men marrying foreign women, especially southeast Asian.
Japanese men marrying foreign women happens in far, far greater numbers than the opposite.
Jun 10, 2008 - 11:28 pm TYS:It’s off-topic, but, Curious Cat, you’re not seriously saying that terrorism is a strictly Muslim thing, are you? The world is bigger than the Middle East. Even there, though, is each and every Maronite in Lebanon innocent? Have individual Christians not committed heinous acts many times over? Ever heard of the IRA? Shall we take a look at paramilitaries in Latin America? How about bombing abortion clinics in the US?
It all comes down to your definition of terrorism, but if we take it as being violence used to strike fear into the hearts of people in the pursuit of an end, then “terrorists” are a group that includes people of all religion and no religion.
It looks like you’re setting up a very narrow focus, specifically Islamist terrorism in attempt to exempt Christians. It’s also unfair of you to use assumptions of A.Alaalas’s reasoning in order to justify what is eesentially and ad hominem dig. There’s nothing in his comment to suggest the bigotry of which you accuse him.
Back to the topic:
What interests me is the role of manga and anime in this streak of violence in Japan. Is it time for censorship? I hear of pornographic manga and see what I see any time I Google any given Japanese female first name and hear of (probably nonexistent) used panty vending machines, then I hear of censorship of videos and magazines. What impact does pop culture have on these guys?
Jun 11, 2008 - 12:14 am John Samford:What are the censorship rules in Japan?
Nothing new about any of this, except perhaps that the internet and bloggers shine more light on the subject. I used to have to fight my way home from dear ol’ YoHi (Yokohama High Scool, AKA Nile C. Kennick H.S.) which was an American scholl for military dependents and diplomatic children. The Japanese have always been inclined toward violence as a culture. They just don’t talk about it much.
Jun 11, 2008 - 12:28 am TalkinKamel:If suicide is counted as murder (which it should be) Japan leads the world in murder rate.
Read up on Japanese history. Assassination is almost an art form, if not the second most popular sport. The days of Samurai chopping up peasants to see if their sword was sharp didn’t end because chopping parts off of peasants became socially unfashionable but because fire arms replaced swords, which put the samurai class out of business. Any fool can pull a trigger and often does.
Also, there was the incredible violence the Japanese displayed during WWII: the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, hideous experiments on prisoners, and so on; and the Japanese, as a nation, have never really faced up to their past, or apologized for their crimes.
I think this might be a better explanation of their current climate of simmering violence and disinterest in life (as a people, the Japanese are dying out; the old outnumber the young), than blaming it on the American occupation, or anime.
Jun 11, 2008 - 8:36 am MarkD:Does anyone have sources for those intermarriage figures? They seem far too high to me.
Jun 11, 2008 - 10:20 am Tom W.:“Its a fully colonialized[sic] population, a culture eviserated[sic] by the American occupation and a distain[sic] for things Japanese. A culture where Japanese men are viewed as second-rate to foreigners: read Euro or American[.]”
Aw, poor little sweeties, unable to fend off the big, bad, strong, eviscerating American occupiers.
Actually, the Japanese embrace and reject whichever aspects of foreign cultures they want, just like every other country.
There’s no such thing as “cultural imperialism.” That’s simply a term thought up by patronizing westerners.
Having lived in Tokyo for five years and faced virulent Japanese racism, I can say unequivocally that the one thing Japan does not have is a disdain for things Japanese.
The Japanese are not victims, for God’s sake. The name of their country in their own language means “The Origin of the Sun.”
Shrinking violets they aren’t.
Jun 11, 2008 - 12:11 pm lee:South Korea is more religious than Japan.
Jun 11, 2008 - 12:12 pm Whitehall:With an approximate gender balance of marriageble men and women (correcting for homosexuals of both genders) the number of men marrying foreigns should equal the number of women marrying foreigners unless one gender is otherwise forgoing marriage.
Guess we have to assume monogamy too.
Are there large numbers of Japanese spinsters then?
Jun 11, 2008 - 2:17 pm Garrett DeOrio:Gregory, even if 40% of South Koreans were the hardest-core evangelicals in the world, that would still make the country largely non-Christian.
You’re conflating some not entirely accurate reports of the prevalence of evangelical Christianity in South Korea with the percentage of people reporting to be nominally Christian when asked. You’re also asuming that born-again, evangelical Christianity in South Korea is like born-again evangelical Christianity in North America. South Korea most certainly is, as Lee points out above, more religious than Japan. That said, South Korea is still substantially less religious than any Western country. If you were to visit there, you’d find that the number of people actually practicing a religion is a lot lower than the number of people nominally belonging to a religion.
As for Japan, over 200% of the population is registered as belonging to a religion (yes, that’s 200%), yet it is exceedingly difficult to find anyone who professes to be religious.
I’m not saying that religion causes crime, but the two countries with the lowest crime rates in the world are both overwhelmingly secular.
John Samford, Yokohama High School, or any other place where there is extensive interaction between the US military and Japanese civilians, is far from a good measure of how predisposed the entire populace of Japan is to violence. Beyond the broad, sweeping, unsupportable generalization of the entire population, if the Japanese are “inclined toward violence,” they hide it very, very well. Even including the suicide rate as murder (which is ridiculous), Japan has a very low crime rate overall and violent crimes are quite rare.
“Any fool can pull a trigger and often does.” But not in Japan (or South Korea, or Germany, or the Nordic countries, or. . .) If you actually study Japanese history, instead of picking up tidbits out of context, you won’t find hacking up peasants to test swords to have been an everyday practice, even among the tiny percentage of people who could have done it. Besides, taking something from nearly two centuries ago and using it to tar an entire people now is deeply unfair.
Jun 11, 2008 - 6:31 pm Xanthippe:Garrett DeOrio:
“Beyond the broad, sweeping, unsupportable generalization of the entire population, if the Japanese are “inclined toward violence,” they hide it very, very well.”
One thing that has confounded me - (I was born 12 years after WWII ended) — is the scope and brutality of the Japanese people. It seems at odds with the public face of Japanese culture.
The Rape of Nanking, the Manila Massacre, the Bataan Death March, the way the Japanese treated POWs during WWII … there are more examples but these should suffice to show that the Japanese, as a culture, are not non-violent.
I’m still searching for an explanation.
(Does Japan still censor their history books with regard to their part in WWII?)
Jun 11, 2008 - 8:41 pm Garrett DeOrio:Xanthippe,
War is war. Few people, and fewer societies, behave the same way in the midst of a huge, bloody war, cut off from supplies and, in many cases, clear instructions from home, as they do at home, in peacetime.
There’s little serious argument, even within Japan, that the Japanese Imperial Army did not commit atrocities. What’s debated is to what extent that happened and, more intriguing, I think, to what extent Japan was alone in that.
The point is that it makes no more sense to say all Japanese are one way or another than it makes to say that all Americans are one way or another. Some Americans are violent, some aren’t. Same thing’s true in Japan.
During the first year of the Occupation, US forces in Japan committed as many as 300,000 rapes. Does that mean that every American serviceman committed rape? No. Does it mean that American servicemen are now rapists? Of course not. Does it mean that Americans are inclined toward rape? That would be silly, wouldn’t it?
Extrapolation of a social characteristic based on anecdotes, even horrific ones, especially historical ones, is unreliable at best.
John Samford brought up the example of samurai testing new swords on peasants and used this as an example of how the Japanese are violent. You used examples of past wars. Shall we apply this same logic to the US?
During WWII, the US segregated the military, generally sending black soldiers to do construction or maintenance work, such as building the Ledo Road in Burma. This was based on the explicit assumption that blacks had a lower cranial capacity and were not intellectually capable of handling combat or leadership roles. From this, we can assume that
Americans today are racist, or at least inclined toward racism.
Slavery was once legal in the US and a tiny percentage of people in the US owned large amounts of slaves, from this we can determine that Americans are inclined toward slave ownership, like slavery, and are likely to enslave people.
US soldiers present at the Mi Lai massacre in Vietnam have confessed to, or admitted to having seen Americans killing women and children indiscriminately. From this, we can assume that Americans are indiscriminate killers.
Do you see my point here? It would be ridiculous to make such assumptions about Americans based only on the worst actions of some members of our society. It is equally wrong-headed to make the same judgements about the Japanese today.
The fact is that Japan has one of the world’s lowest crime rates. Violent crime might be rarer here than anywhere else in the world (South Korea is a contender, too.) It is exceedingly rare to see people physically fighting, or even verbally at each others’ throats. Japan’s only military actions since the end of WWII have been in auxiliary, non-combat, non-weapons roles supporting the US.
No one is claiming Japan is pacifist, or that no Japanese person is capable of violence, but it is a rather nonviolent place. That’s what makes an incident like Sunday’s so very shocking.
As for textbooks, yes, there is still some level of “oversight,” which I would call censorship. This is generally for junior high school textbooks and is not nationwide, though. Most of the censorship takes the form of vague statements.
Books on Japan’s wartime atrocities are freely published and such topics are discussed in universities. People know. Look at it this way: How are wars presented in American elementary and junior high schools? It’s similar here.
As for an explanation of Japan’s WWII atrocities, I don’t think there will ever be an adequate explanation? Don’t let that make you think that all Japanese people today are violent or not to be trusted, though. A lot can change in 63 years.
Jun 11, 2008 - 9:52 pm TYS:Garrett DeOrio: Killjoy. You’re not supposed to throw all the cards down like that.
I’m still waiting for an answer. I’ve Googled, but apparently have bad Google-fu. What are Japan’s censorship laws? Is there any talk of taking a look at manga as was done with recorded music in the US 20 years back? If Prince wrote a manga and sent it to Tipper Gore, would that make a difference?
While Googling, I found that only two cops have been killed by gunshots in the line of duty since 2001. Astounding. But crime rates are obviously on the rise. Japan’s traditional values are eroding, divorce is becoming more common, abortion is becoming more common, open homosexuality is becoming more accepted, and violent crime is on the rise. Coincidence?
Jun 12, 2008 - 2:23 am TalkinKamel:Tom W., my brother-in-law was stationed in Japan for a while, and he noticed a lot of Japanese racism too.
I would like to point out that, before and during WWII, Japan had a great deal of censorship, yes, including manga and western style comics.
It didn’t do much to rein in the violence they perpetrated on the Filipinos, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. So, yeah, I’d have to say “coincidence”. Whatever the reason for the current rise in Japan’s crime rate, I don’t think censorship is the answer. The jump is crime is surely caused by a number of problems.
Given its history: the samurai warrior cast, the war with Russia, WWII, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Japanese culture is not pacifist, and that it does harbor violence within it. This doesn’t mean it’s evil. It does mean that, like every other culture, Japan has problems (and the human potential for violence and crime) that it needs to deal with realistically.
Jun 12, 2008 - 8:12 am Kay:Xanthippe:
Garrett DeOrio:
“Beyond the broad, sweeping, unsupportable generalization of the entire population, if the Japanese are “inclined toward violence,” they hide it very, very well.”
One thing that has confounded me - (I was born 12 years after WWII ended) — is the scope and brutality of the Japanese people. It seems at odds with the public face of Japanese culture.
The Rape of Nanking, the Manila Massacre, the Bataan Death March, the way the Japanese treated POWs during WWII … there are more examples but these should suffice to show that the Japanese, as a culture, are not non-violent.
I’m still searching for an explanation.
(Does Japan still censor their history books with regard to their part in WWII?)”
Yes they do. The release of several books like ‘the rape of Nanking’ or Unit 761 came to much outrage about 10 years ago as many of the nation’s youth had no knowledge it ever happened-almost as in the dark as our youth. Oddly enough, wikipedia has a fairly broad list of the atrocities here:
Jun 12, 2008 - 10:44 am Garrett DeOrio:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes
Kay,
“Much outrage” is a relative term. Iris Chang’s “The Rape of Nanking drew some ire, but, as the book is in English, it didn’t exactly dominate headlines. It angered a relatively small group of hardcore conservatives in the same way that the publicizing of any American misdeed provokes vigorous denials and attacks from some hardcore American conservatives.
A decade prior to Chang’s book came a series of magazine articles by a Japanese reporter who received death threats from some uyoku (extremist right-wing groups, often tied to organized crime). At this point, while there are still deniers, the debate over WWII atrocities by the JIA usually focuses on scale, relative importance, and what constitutes apology or reparations.
There was no legal prohibition against publication of The Rape of Nanking - it was more a situation of publishers not wanting to get involved in that kind of controversy.
That said, I think Xanthippe was referring to the censorship inherent in the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Technology’s (MEXT) textbook selection process. On numerous occasions, the chosen junior high school textbooks have downplayed, glossed over, or omitted Japanese wartime atrocities. Every couple of years there’s a highly public row between textbook publishers and the textbook selection committee.
Surveys that “show” that people in Japan know little about what happened in WWII tend to have to flaws: 1. Random calling or stopping random people on the street is likely to garner whatever response will end the exchange most quickly, and that response is usually, “I don’t know.” 2. Wartime atrocities are, obviously, sensitive, controversial issues. Japan is somewhat old-fashioned in terms of there being “things not to be discussed in polite company.”
Granted, this is often used as a way of avoiding unpleasantness, and, yes, people here are as influenced by what they hear or read as anywhere else, which can warp perceptions. However, there isn’t a vast conspiracy to pretend that WWII never happened.
Most countries are the same.
It’s telling, though, that an article about a present-day individual crime so quickly led to WWII and multiple indictments of an entire nationality based on incidents from WWII. The young men in question now are young enough that even their grandparents are often too young to have fought in WWII. It really is the equivalent of trying to explain Columbine through the prism of WWII. Not the most fruitful strategy if you really want to understand what’s going on two, even three generations after the end of the war.
Jun 12, 2008 - 5:38 pm Xanthippe:Garret DeOrio:
Thank you for your response (as well as your very interesting post).
You said: “It’s telling, though, that an article about a present-day individual crime so quickly led to WWII and multiple indictments of an entire nationality based on incidents from WWII. The young men in question now are young enough that even their grandparents are often too young to have fought in WWII. It really is the equivalent of trying to explain Columbine through the prism of WWII. Not the most fruitful strategy if you really want to understand what’s going on two, even three generations after the end of the war.”
The reason that I brought up the Japanese wartime atrocities is to illustrate the incongruity of Japanese culture and violence - yet there it was. Just as today, these violent young mens’ behavior is incongruous with Japanese culture.
I’m not equating them other than to say that both are puzzling - and both illustrate that even in Japanese society, violence exists.
These things happen all over. That they happen also in Japan is not particularly surprising to me.
On another note, you said earlier: “During the first year of the Occupation, US forces in Japan committed as many as 300,000 rapes.”
Do you have a cite for this? My understanding is that there were 350,000 American servicemen in Japan the first year of occupation (with the number decreasing every year after). That is an incredibly high rate of rape.
Jun 13, 2008 - 12:38 pm Kay:That number is completely off the wall and unsubstantiated. The need to immediately attempt to justify Japanese war crimes by throwing out things we supposedly did(as is done today to ‘forgive’ islamic barbarianism) is ridiculous. Nothing matches the Japanese in WWII other then the Nazis.
The main thing about understanding the vast amount of Japanese war crimes, and other events such as balloon bombs and experiments into anthrax and other WMD(which were eventually to be used together) help explain the decision to use nuclear weapons. These atrocities have been overlooked by modern history making the US look worse and worse with each generation for the reasoning behind the bombs. Not to mention MacArthur was obsessed with becoming president much of this was censored from the American public to make the ‘rebuilding of Japan’ as allies go as smoothly as possible.
Jun 13, 2008 - 3:43 pm Kay:“According to historian Peter Schrijvers, an estimated 10,000 Japanese women were raped by American troops during the Okinawa campaign.[1] Reported cases of U.S. rapes for the first 10 days of the occupation of the Kanagawa prefecture are 1,336″
Thats a long way from feeding thousands of Chinese children anthrax candy and later performing live vivisections on them, to name one many war crimes.
Jun 13, 2008 - 3:47 pm Garrett DeOrio:Kay, I fear you might be missing the point. No one in this thread is attempting to justify Japanese war crimes. It might help to lower your blood pressure if you scroll up and read what I actually wrote.
Besides, how do wartime atrocities by Japanese soldiers justify even one assault on a young woman in Japan?
Balloonn bombs? Balloon bombs were a huge failure, the desperate action of a desperate military in a losing war. They were confirmed to have killed two people.
Vivisection? It was SCAP and GHQ that covered that up. It was the US that decided 731 was not fair game for prosecution as long as their notes were turned over to the US.
If you’re going to get into moral equivalency, you’re very quickly going to get into “my country right or wrong” territory, in which you can justify any crime by naming another crime.
Ranking Japanese war crimes, Nazi war crimes, the crimes of Communist governments, the crimes of the agents of democratic governments - it all leads to not seeing the forest for the trees and can be done by all sides. It’s a fruitless, no-win proposition.
Xanthippe, as many as 300,000. In other words, there were 300,000 accusations or suspicions. Rape statistics are very difficult to pin down as false accusations occur, as do unreported rapes. Then you have rapes that occurred, but were falsely attributed to Occupation troops. Then there are gray areas: if sex is demanded from a starving or destitute woman in exchange for food or other “gifts,” what is that?
So, to be perfectly clear here, there might have been up to 300,000 rapes, but the actual number of verifiable, criminal rapes was surely far lower than that.
When sanctioned brothels for American troops were opened in late 1946, the number of rapes fell off sharply.
Another complicating factor is that Occupation troops were initially very rarely prosecuted or punished for crimes against Japanese civilians. This changed when GHQ realized the extent to which the lack of discipline was hampering rebuilding efforts and efforts to cultivate Japan as an ally (hearts and minds, we’d now say.)
Xanthippe, I think you and I are pretty much on the same page. I absolutely agree with your central tenet that every society, every culture is capable of violence. I think what makes random violence so surprising in Japan is that, for many years, the same hierarchical, communal aspect of the culture that allowed or led to crimes such as the atrocities of WWII is, ironically, the stricture that kept some of people’s worse impulses in check within the society.
Obviously, though, Japan is capable of producing mass murderers, serial killers, and the like.
I’ll try to get back to you soon with sources for rape stats during the Occupation - hopefully on line. If not, I’ll give you the names of books.
Jun 13, 2008 - 6:28 pm lee:I find it hard to believe that 10,000 Japanese women were raped by the occupying Americans, even if it that’s only an estimate.
There’s no denying that Japanese war crimes were atrocious. Personally I’m a bit miffed (as a Korean) that Americans have no problem demonzing Nazi Germany and the Jewish holocaust, but they’re reluctant to dicuss the Japanese empire who committed similar crimes even before WWII. In fact, most Americans are often apologetic for the Japanese relocation camp.
Still, sensible people should recognize that it was more than 50 years ago. Japan isn’t a war mongering nation any more. Compared to the United States violent crimes where lunatics kill 6,7 people are rare. I read Japanese manga and listen to their music all the time. I’d love to visit Tokyo one of these days.
Japan is often a target of INTENSE hatred from Koreans and Chinese who refuse to let of of the past. The criticisms of Japanese war crimes expressed here are downright mild by comparison.
Jun 15, 2008 - 2:28 am Garrett DeOrio:Well put, Lee. Relations between Japan and its Northeast Asian neighbors can get. . . well, unpleasant to say the least. Now that Japanese pop culture items, such as music, movies, and comics are freely and legally available in South Korea, there appears to be some rapprochement in what is still mostly a one-way rivalry. The politics of China’s view of Japan are a bit more complicated.
I agree that Japan gets of lightly by comparison. Perhaps fortunately, perhaps unfortunately, Japan’s crimes were not deeply looked into, and were often covered up by the American Occupation, to the great chagrin of Japanese leftists and those who blamed the Japanese government for the war.
On the other hand, Japanese relocation camps housed mostly American citizens and there were no convictions for treason, aiding and abetting the JIA, or terrorist-lie actions. The US absolutely should have apologized, as it did. It’s a bit late now, but reparations to survivors would be very much in order.
Jun 16, 2008 - 12:11 am Shawn Dudley:I have several friends in Japan, and they tell me a lot of crime, especially sex crimes, basically go unreported. Basically the cops are under political pressure to keep crime stats low, so there’s a high barrier to what they’ll actually do something about. Usually anything that invoves a fatality, however, is treated as a national tragedy.
The same group also gripes considerably about the school system saying that they actually prefer the US model. (I couldn’t believe it when I heard that one!) I asked them why and they thought their own schools were too antiquated, emphasised memorization over analytical thinking, and were highly inflexible. No doubt once they put their kids in public schools here, they’ll change their mind!
They have a real problem in Japan in that the older generation suffered in their work to such an extent that the younger one, spoiled from the riches derived from that work, doesn’t want to follow in their parents’ footsteps. It’s sort of an extreme view - either one completely dedicates their life to their work, or they become a cockroach living at home until they’re 40. Many take the cockroach approach, and don’t make themselves useful. As a result, you get a very low birth rate and declining prosperity in a society that is racially homogenious and very reluctant to allow non-Japanese immigration. They need a social revolution beyond the Otaku one that has taken hold of the youth now.
Jun 16, 2008 - 3:51 pm TYS:I think it’s true that sex crimes are underreported, but that’s cited as a problem in just about every country in the world. People in Japan, though, tend to have a very high opinion of the police and trust the police almost implicitly. For crimes that don’t bring embarrassment on the victim, reporting seems to be rather high.
I agree with most of what Shawn says, but it might be oversimplifying to say that everyone in Japan is either a workaholic or a cockroach. Most of the people I know are far from either extreme.
I also think there’s something to be said for the rigor of Japanese education - it’s a cost/balance between discipline and innovation. Is America’s innovation really worth the shamefully low academic achievement of most of the population?
Jun 17, 2008 - 9:42 pm