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Japan’s rising crime rate

A TV show on Saturday night asked a panel of Japanese celebrities if they thought that crime was increasing in Japan. Almost every one of them held up signs with a little circle, indicating their agreement with the the idea that Japan is becoming more and more dangerous.

However, a former N-H-K newscaster informs them that they are wrong (see video).

Things he points out in the video:

Compared to other first world countries, Japan has a very low crime rate.
Japan’s crime rate has been declining over the last 60 years.
The Japanese news media focuses on murders from all over the country, giving viewers a sense that they are living in dangerous times. In the past, murders and violent crimes in local areas would rarely be reported as major national news.
Police officers make up a very small percentage of the population in Japan. There are 182 police officers for every 100,000 Japanese citizens.

While I haven’t looked into the numbers he cites, I must agree with his take on the news media. The non-N-H-K news broadcasts devote exhaustive coverage to violent crime these days, and I’ve heard a lot of people talking about how the country is “becoming dangerous.” Even if the numbers mentioned by the guy in the video turned out to be slightly skewed, the fact remains that Japan is still very safe compared to most of the world.

21 comments - What do you think? Posted by James - June 2, 2008 at 4:52 pm

Categories: Japanese TV Tags: crime, japan

http://www.feitclub.com feitclub

That might be the single greatest distinction between the American and Japanese media coverage of crime – for a crime to make national headlines in the US, it must be particularly outrageous, shocking, or tragic. In Japan…I don’t know, their standards seem impossibly low. How many hours of TV coverage have those (separate) missing schoolgirls gotten in recent weeks? Or the restaurant that was caught serving leftovers?
Gabe

Just more proof that you should turn off your TV. This isn’t even something that’s unique to Japan: every country is being told by their for-profit media that they’re practically under siege from violent criminals, rapists, the mentally ill and so on and so forth. Wake up and smell the coffee.

suita_steve

You took the words right out of my mouth. Kill your TV.

Me3

But … I read about it on the Internet …

the overthinker

Question: are these crime rates all using the same stats? Id est, are the varieties of crimes in each country the same? If Country A considers XX a crime and Country BB does not, then, all other things being equal, Country AA will have more “crime.”

http://pontasmemorandum.blogspot.com/ ponta

A good question. For instance,

Unsurprisingly, the government prefers a measure – the British Crime Survey – which paints a rosier picture. But the survey excludes key crimes, not least those against young people, the frequent victims of street crime. The true level of crime is three times higher than the survey suggests – a staggering 30m offences a year.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article2284384.ece

For your reference
http://profiler.hp.infoseek.co.jp/crime_international.htm

http://www.uncjin.org/Statistics/WCTS/wcts.html

Colin

87.2% of statistics are made up on the spot. Or to put it another way there’s a reason that for what Mark Twain said about “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics”.

http://www.globmunity.com Auswandern Japan

Violence sells, thats why show it in the news. I have never been to Japan, but I have never heard of somebody beeing robbed, killed or raped by Japanese here in Germany. Now I make a huge generalization: Japanese(and the rest of the east asian and southeast asian countries) are much less criminal than europeans/americans.

http://dd one

um…. what about China?

concerned Filipino

What about China?

http://alecinjapan.com Alec

First I was shocked at how crime in Japan isn’t that much lower than Italy, even though Italy is painted as a dangerous country and Japan as a haven of safety. I was secondly shocked at how high British crime rates are!

As I write this though, I realise that a lot of this is down to how much crime is reported: when I was in Italy and got something stolen out of my backpocket, I didn’t report it because it wasn’t that important and I didn’t think I would get it back anyway. There’s lots of small crimes like that, the majority of which I imagine don’t get reported to the fairly corrupt Italian police. That’s just an example of how Italian crime statistics might be skewed. We always have to take statistics with a pinch of salt.
404error

what is that fat kid doing there?
kako

and I thought usa is ghetto. WOW Brittian is really ghetto. Japan still don’t need to worry, they are still one of the safest countries.

Joe

yup, Britain is a dump. think the 13th teenager was stabbed to death this year last night.

Pingback: Tissue paper consumption in Japan | Japan Probe
Jack B

This just in, Japan has topped a list of countries with excessive amounts of rankings, a nearby Talento in attendance had this to say “eeeh”.
passser-by

He contradicts the statistics shown here, (http://nippon.zaidan.info/seikabutsu/1999/00181/contents/018.htm)
based on numbers published by Japan’s Ministry of Justice. It reads Japan’s crim rate had steadily increased between 1980 and 2000 by 33%.

http://pontasmemorandum.blogspot.com/ ponta

That is the old statistics.
http://www.moj.go.jp/HOUSO/2007/hk1_1.pdf
Here is the newest one. It seems he is right.

passser-by

Thanks. Mine is too partial to be any proof. But can you really tell he is right even only from these two items of data ? His overall comment sounds somehow misleading to me.

http://pontasmemorandum.blogspot.com/ ponta

Right, he is misleading to the extent that he says crime rate has been decreasing since WWⅡ. That is not true according to the statistics above;though, it is true that the crime rate in Japan is relatively low among the countries mentioned and that it has been decreasing for a few years.

samuel welsh

purely sensalism not many facts
however drug and trafficing of women is huge here

Japan’s rising crime rate

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