(cache) WaiWai: Mainichi on Foreign Crime Fearmongering as NPA policy

This article is reproduced from the discontinued, but much loved Mainichi Waiwai column by Ryann Connell. Read more about this at the bottom of this article.The following waiwai number was also featured in Japanese (PAGE 1, PAGE 2) in the Mainichi Shimbun, 31st December 2006.

Article starts: For years, people like Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara have been up in arms about rising crime rates among foreigners and juveniles in Japan, but one of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s public safety experts has come out to say the claims are groundless, according to Sunday Mainichi (12/31).

Ishihara and his ilk have long laid the blame on foreigners for a perceived worsening of public safety standards that has allowed the powers that be to strengthen and crack down on non-Japanese and teens.

But Hiroshi Kubo, the former head of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Emergency Public Safety Task Force, says they’ve got it all wrong.

“Put simply, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s public safety policy involves telling people that public safety standards have worsened and police groups need strengthening to protect the capital’s residents,” Kubo tells Sunday Mainichi. “But I’ve realized there’s something unnatural about this ‘worsening.’”

In his newly released book, Kubo goes through the statistical data being used to justify taking a hard line on foreigners and kids and argues that maybe it’s not quite all there. For instance, the growing crime rate in Tokyo is based on reported crimes, not actual crime cases. This means the count includes cases where people who have been scared into believing their safety is under such a threat they contact the police for any trifling matter only to be sent away with no action taken.

And taking a look back over the past 40 years shows that violent crimes by juveniles has actually declined. Current worries about how youths are becoming more criminally inclined — and at a younger age – sound like a recording of similar cries dating back to the ’60s.

Crimes by foreigners have long been highlighted, but there’s little to suggest that Tokyo or Japan is in the midst of a violent crime spree. In 2002, there were 102 non-Japanese arrested in Tokyo for violent crimes including murder, armed robbery, arson and rape. The following year, that number jumped to 156, fell back to 117 in 2004 and was just 84 in 2005. And the number of violent crimes foreigners are committing in Tokyo is not a patch on the Japanese, who account for about 1,000 cases a year.

Kubo says authorities are merely fear mongering, taking statistics that work in their favor and molding them to suit their purposes. National Police Agency data is used the same way as authorities are doing in Tokyo, spreading fear nationwide.

“There’s an underlying current of anxiety throughout society. People have no idea what’s going to happen in the future, they’re worried about employment and pay and declining living standards and somebody who’s going to openly talk about the reason for their anxieties is going to attract their interest,” the public safety expert tells Sunday Mainichi. “Say somebody comes out and says ‘foreigners’ violent crimes are all to blame’ then anxious people are going to go along with that. And the national government, prefectural governments, police and the media all jump on the bandwagon and believe what’s being said.”

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(The Mainichi Waiwai column ran online from April 19, 2001 - June 21, 2008. It was a much loved form of entertainment amongst foreigner in and outside of Japan. To any reader it was obviously not serious news, but it was a set of articles that portrayed quite well how the Japanese tabloids actually write about their own country. In 2008, a small number of Japanese people bought it to the attention of rival news groups that Mainichi was running an anti-Japan column on its website. With the bad publicity, Mainichi was forced to shut the page down, and take punitive measures against the journalists that were working on it, claiming that it was receiving opinions that were critical of the column, such as “its contents are too vulgar” and “the stories could cause Japanese people to be misunderstood abroad”. A perfect example of how Japanese consider what they write in their own script to be an acceptable secret code, that the rest of the world cant understand. When that same tabloid rubbish gets inconveniently translated to English to make light of some aspects of the Japanese people, it gets canned. Stippy.com finds this unacceptable, and will reproduce as much of the Waiwai content as possible in order to bring it once again to our computer screens for a good laugh. Of course we claim no credit for this content, and attribute it to it’s writers who were former Mainichi employees. Waiwai in its true and glorious form has been discontinued, but it’s legacy will live on at stippy.com for all to enjoy.)

Tags: Mainichi, Waiwai Archives