SOCIETY-JAPAN: Rising Violent Teen Crime Worries Many

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Jul 28 2004 (IPS) - Japan’s image as one of the safest countries in the world took a beating when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi expressed strong concern about the rise in violent juvenile crime in the country.

Koizumi said in a speech on Sunday to senior police officers and politicians in the capital that he wanted to see Japan’s reputation as the world’s safest place restored.

”The government wants to restore people’s confidence in public safety as soon as possible while hoping that the authorities concerned will be more active in reviving Japan’s reputation as the safest place,” he told reporters at a function at the National Police Agency.

There has been growing unease in Japan about increasing crime – in particular juvenile crime.

According to a government survey published in the ‘Japan Times’ late last week, 55.9 percent said the country is ”not safe”, while 39.1 percent said it is. In the multiple answer section, 65.8 percent said Japan is threatened by an increase in social problems such as juvenile crime.

The survey – the first of its kind – was conducted on 2,136 people in their 20s and older.

Lately, there has been a rise of mindless, violent crime in the country, particularly by the young. And violence at schools has also risen in recent years, with teens stabbing classmates and teachers.

A series of headline-grabbing incidents have led to a media blitz on the subject.

The first was on Jun. 12 when a 11-year-old girl brutally slashed the neck of her classmate and left her to bleed to death in their classroom.

Three weeks later, Japanese police took a 13-year-old girl into custody for allegedly pushing a Chinese boy off a high building. The boy suffered minor cuts.

Last week, two 15-year-olds were arrested over the stabbing of a stranger with a kitchen knife at a festival.

In the latest crime case involving a minor, an alleged teenaged serial rapist was attacking a 20-year-old woman on the streets of Sakai city, in Osaka, last month when police officers spotted him. He fled the scene but was tracked down a week later.

While police are still trying to work out why the 11-year-old brutally murdered her classmate, at the same time, however, the country as a whole is wondering what it says about Japanese society and whether rising juvenile crime reflects deeper social problems.

”The killing (of the 11-year-old) is yet another illustration of the lonely lives of young children in Japan,” says Takuji Yasuoka, a former ‘hikikomori’. A ‘hikikomori’ is a young person who leads a reclusive lifestyle – often shunning society for many years by locking themselves in their rooms.

”The accused is a very young child who had no one to turn to for advise when she was faced with rejection from her friends,” Yasuoka tells IPS. ”This kind of society is particularly stressful on young children who feel abandoned and isolated.”

Media estimates put the number of ‘hikikomori’ in Japan from anywhere between 500,000 and one million – and many of them are victims of bullying in school.

Japanese child experts are now talking of a crisis in the country.

”If you look at the big picture, right after the war the crime rate for adults was the same as the crime rate for young people aged between 14 to 19, ” says Masahide Maeda, from Tokyo Metropolitan University.

”Now for every adult that commits a crime, eight youths commit a crime. Overall the juvenile crime rate is very high and it’s a problem,” she said in an interview.

For many people in Japan though, it’s the type of crimes being committed, not the raw number, that is really disturbing. The number of children charged with murder or attempted murder has tripled in just twelve months.

According to latest police figures, violent crime by juveniles in Japan hit a four-year high last year, with the number of serious offenders aged between 14 and 19 totalling 2,212.

Late last year a 12-year-old boy kidnapped a four-year-old, stripped him naked and threw him to his death from the roof of a multi-storey car park. Around the same time three teenagers admitted beating a 13-year-old to death in Okinawa. The beating lasted two hours.

The country is still haunted by memories of a 14-year-old boy in Kobe, western Japan, who cut off an 11-year-old playmate’s head and stuck it on the school gates in May 1997 – this after bludgeoning another child to death with a hammer two months earlier.

Tamotsu Sengoku, a well-known education expert, says what surprises him most in these juvenile crime cases is the lack of guilt in the accused. He blames the Japanese education system for it.

”Most of these kids do not express a sense of guilt or horror at what they have done,” he points out to IPS.

”It is a clear illustration of the lack of ethical education in Japanese schools where the focus is on gaining high marks in subjects such as mathematics and languages, rather than teaching children what is wrong and right,” adds Sengoku.

There’s no doubt that Japan will find no easy answers as it struggles to cope with what was once a problem that belonged to other countries.

”After we lost the war, we threw out all the old ways and tried to start afresh,” Tokyo Metropolitan University’s Maeda says.

”In the process very important things, such as the traditional relationships between parents and children, were denied,” she reveals. ”We placed more emphasis on teaching individuality and freedom rather than on what children should or should not be allowed to do.”