Secret of Japan’s low murder rate
BY ANY standards it’s a horrific tale. When police raided the flat of Takahiro Shiraishi, 27, in the Japanese city of Zama this week, they found nine dismembered corpses, including severed heads in cool-boxes as well as other body parts in rubbish bins.
But if Shiraishi’s crimes are shocking to Western sensibilities, in his home country they have been viewed with even greater disbelief. For despite having a population twice that of the UK, Japan enjoys some of the lowest crime rates in the world.
Japan’s murder rate of just 0.3 per 100,000 people puts it on a par with tiny states such as Monaco and Andorra – compared with a rate of 4.88 for the US and 0.9 for the UK.
Only a single gun slaying was recorded for the whole of 2015 and low-level street crime is all but nonexistent. Incidents of reported rape stand at just one per 100,000 people, drug use is minimal compared with other industrialised countries and overall crime has been falling steadily for 13 years. Perhaps most potently, when offences are committed, the courts boast a conviction rate of 99 per cent.
At the same time police numbers are growing. Japan now has more than 259,000 uniformed officers on the streets, some 15,000 more than a decade ago. Its capital Tokyo boasts the world’s biggest metropolitan police force, a quarter bigger than its equivalent in New York.
So supposedly safe is Japan that there have even been indications that police officers, whether through zeal or boredom, have taken to relentlessly pursuing the kind of minor crimes that would slip through the net elsewhere.
THERE have been reports of major operations to investigate bicycle theft, or the possession of small amounts of drugs. On the website JapanVisitor.com, one woman who had a pair of knickers stolen from her washing line described how officers made detailed notes of the crime scene, drawing diagrams, taking measurements and re-enacting just how the offence might have happened.
For many the country’s law enforcement is held up as a model for how modern policing should work. Japan’s cultural traditions of deference to authority and fear of social stigma have been married to a criminal justice system that is founded on the belief that criminals must repent their misdemeanours rather than simply be punished, meaning that not only are fewer crimes being committed but fewer offenders are being incarcerated. The UK has a prisoner rate three times higher than Japan and the US 13 times higher. So what is the secret of
The arrest of a serial killer stunned Japan this week because it has one of the lowest incidents of homicide in the world. But look more closely and not everything is as it seems
Japan’s success? The issue may not be as black-and-white as it first appears.
What those impressive statistics don’t show is that, despite so many officers and such a low crime rate, only 30 per cent of crimes are actually solved. And when criminals are convicted, it is usually on the back of a confession. The reasons for this are simple. As Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University in Tokyo, says: “It is the king of evidence. If you can get someone to confess to a crime, the court is going to find them guilty.”
The flipside of this is the pressure on officers to secure that “king of evidence”. And that has resulted in some defendants claiming they were coerced into confessing to crimes they did not commit. In 2012 Shoji Sakurai was found innocent of murder at a retrial – after serving 29 years in jail on the back of his original confession. He told the BBC: “I was a bit naughty when I was young and the Japanese police go after people with criminal records so I became the prime suspect for the murder. They interrogated me day and night, telling me to confess. After five days I had no mental strength left, so I gave up and confessed.”
There have also been suggestions that some murder cases with no real leads or prospect of a confession are being wrongly attributed to other factors such as suicide. In direct contrast to its low crime rates Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, with 25,000 people a year taking their own lives. In the UK the figure is 6,200.
Additionally, autopsies are only performed in 11.2 per cent of unnatural death cases in Japan, meaning that the true causes of some deaths may not be properly revealed. While the authorities blame a lack of forensic scientists and a cultural resistance to handling the dead, others believe there are more sinister reasons for this.
“You can commit a perfect murder in Japan because the body is not likely to be examined,” says Hiromasa Saikawa, a former member of the Tokyo police security and intelligence division. He also claims that officers try to avoid attributing deaths to homicide unless the identity of the killer is obvious.
“All the police care about is how they look to people, it’s all PR to show that their capabilities are high. Without autopsies they can keep their percentage high. It’s all about numbers.”
Shiraishi has now confessed to killing the nine victims after police followed a lead that he had met one of the women on a “suicide website”. In a country famed for its low crime rate he remains, for now, an anomaly among otherwise exemplary statistics.