Lonely elderly in Japanese crime wave
TOKYO — Clad in black like an ancient-day ronin or samurai, a man scales walls and squeezes into tight spaces in the dark — but in the name of crime.
His agility eluded the Osaka police for over eight years, during which more than 29 million yen ($255,000) was stolen in about 250 crimes.
But Mitsuaki Tanigawa, dubbed the “Heisei Ninja” — named after the current imperial era — is 74 and, by police accounts, a doddering old man in the day.
His identity was finally revealed on camera after his neck-warmer, which was pulled up to his nose, slipped during a break-in.
Tanigawa, who was arrested in October, said he was “defeated” when confessing to his crimes, adding that he chose to steal because he did not want to work.
Weeks after his arrest, the Justice Ministry released its annual white paper on crime, which cast a spotlight on how Japan’s aging population has sparked a geriatric crime wave, besides a demographic crisis.
Economic hardship and loneliness among poor elderly who have fallen through the cracks in the world’s third-largest economy have often been cited as reasons behind the trend.
About 47,000 senior citizens, defined by Japan as those aged 65 and above, were named criminal suspects last year, the white paper said. This accounted for 20.8 percent of the total arrests — the first time the ratio was above 20 percent.
The spate of elderly crimes comes amid an overall drop in Japan’s crime rate, with reported penal-code offenses last year falling below a million for the first time since World War II, in a country of 126.9 million.
Yet despite this decreasing crime rate, sensational cases have come to dominate headlines.
July last year saw Japan’s bloodiest crime since World War II — the Sagamihara nursing home massacre, where Satoshi Uematsu, 27, went on a stabbing rampage at a home for the disabled in an attack that left 19 dead and 26 others injured. His case is pending.
More recently, Takahiro Shiraishi confessed to killing and dismembering eight females and one male aged between 15 and 26. That case is currently going through the courts.
Sociologist Emi Kataoka of Komazawa University said she was concerned by the rise in heinous crimes by disenfranchised young people who have not reaped the benefits of a recovering economy.
Uematsu and Shiraishi were unemployed and Kataoka said these cases suggest there is insufficient help — economic or psychiatric — for at-risk young people who are living on the fringes of society.
She said beneath Japan’s rosy jobs figures and decade slow unemployment rates is a generation struggling under the weight of “irregular” contractual employment.