Japanese youth and crime
by Howard W. French
13 October 1999
ISHIO, Japan -- Insulated by the innocence of her 16 years, Hanae Nagatani had never taken seriously the threats against her.
For weeks before she was killed there had been anonymous letters and menacing phone calls. There had been sightings of a young male figure lurking around her house. There had even been disturbing face-to-face encounters with the former middle school classmate who was fixated on her and eventually stabbed her to death.
In many other places, such behavior would be called stalking, and the suspect arrested, or at least called in for questioning. But in this quiet town, which is regarded, just like Japan itself, as overwhelmingly safe, the threats never seemed worthy of a call to the police, or more than a brief word with a teacher and an occasional change of route in walking to school.
Then the killer struck. Hanae was brave, according to the official report, snatching a knife away from the boy and throwing it away. What she did not count on was that he carried a second blade in his bicycle basket. In the end, this was the weapon he used to stab her.
"Once I shouted at the boy on the telephone to just stop calling," said Hanae's mother, Keiko, as she mourned at the shrine to her elder child in the small living room, where incense and candles burned. "Maybe if I had spoken up more strongly all this would have turned out differently."
What the Nagatani family did not realize until it was too late was that youth crime is one of the fastest-growing criminal categories in the country. As schools across Japan, and towns large and small, increasingly become the theaters for attacks by gangs, sexual crimes and theft, Japanese authorities are sounding the alarm.
According to national police figures, violence and crime by school-age youth -- defined here as people 19 and younger -- has been rising fast both in and outside of school for several years now. For the third consecutive year, the number of juveniles arrested in connection with serious crimes like murder, rape and robbery pushed above 1,000 last year.
Yearly arrests of minors for serious crimes has more than doubled in this decade, rising to 2,197 cases in 1998 from 1,078 in 1990, according to National Police statistics.
The number of juveniles interned in the nation's reform schools, meanwhile, has risen sharply, to about 5,500 last year from 3,800 in 1995. Authorities say violent crimes are replacing theft as the most common reasons for sentencing.
Authorities say violent crimes are replacing theft as the most common reasons for sentencing.
The case that grabbed the most attention was the strangling death, in April, of a 23-year-old housewife and her 11-month-old baby during a botched robbery attempt by an 18-year-old in the southern Japanese prefecture of Yamaguchi. Japan's national rates of crime by youth pale in comparison with what Americans have become accustomed to.
Still, for Japan, whose conservative, nearly mono-ethnic society sometimes conveys the feel of an immense village, where elaborate social codes are universally recognized and respected by nearly all, the spread of criminal behavior among young people represents a dramatic departure from the norm.
And if the phenomenon goes unchecked, many here fear, it will destroy one of the features that contributes most to Japan's sense of uniqueness: unquestioned security.
For Japanese experts who are attempting to understand the rise of youth crime, the central irony behind the problem is that it appears to be not so much an expression of social deviance but a byproduct of the single-minded industriousness that has propelled Japan toward economic success. The dark flip-side of the country's economic power, many experts say, has been the gutting of family life and playtime in the name of workplace performance and school achievement.
A consensus is emerging that the long work hours of many Japanese, followed by long commutes, and job-related social engagements has stripped many children of almost any meaningful contact with their parents, and particularly their fathers. Children, meanwhile, face intense competitive academic pressures from early elementary school, and typically finish day school only to go to afternoon school in order not to fall behind their peers.
Even for many pre-teens, this means quickly dropping their bags off and picking up a packaged dinner at home immediately after school and hurrying off to the ubiquitous juku, or private cram school, where their studies will often continue until 10 or 11 p.m. Young children returning home from the juku at night are a common sight in Tokyo's subways. In the case of the 17-year-old boy who killed Hanae, the father was a long-distance truck driver who was often absent, and the mother worked too.
"There are many children in Japan who cannot get any kind of interest from their parents, and are really desperate for some involvement with them,"said Toshiko Toriyama, a former elementary school teacher who has written books about the problems of youth. "After a time, we see the children's spirits sort of dry up. This is a form of child abuse, too.
"Most kids want positive attention, but if they can't get that, they will seek other kinds of attention. This includes robbery or committing real acts of violence."
Many other reasons are invoked to explain crime, and other problems associated with Japan's youth. A perennial culprit is the intensely competitive educational system, whose heavy emphasis on testing, starting at a young age, has not changed, even as the country as a whole has been transformed.
The ultimate goal of most parents, of course, is to see their child admitted into one of less than a handful of super elite colleges. In Japan's tightly hierarchical educational system, which college a person attends determines, far more than in most countries, what he or she can achieve.
"If you are not rated so highly by the standards that are used, you are regarded as valueless by adults and by teachers," said Hideo Takayama, who has studied childhood development for 35 years. "In such a system, the kids themselves lose sight of any greater purpose in life, or of their own personal worth."
Historically, being admitted to a top school has virtually guaranteed a prestigious job and a good life. But a perverse effect of Japan's extraordinary economic rise has meant that the intense sense of national purpose that drove the last generation to study long and work hard in order to rebuild a nation destroyed by war has given way for many to meaninglessness and apathy.
What is worse, after 10 years of unprecedented economic stagnation, record unemployment has begun to shatter the implicit social compact that seemed to justify so much of the self-sacrifice that this society demands. Suddenly, at the end of an educational rainbow built of cram schools and scant social life for teens, people have discovered there may not be a job at all.
Asked what he made of the recent murder of young Hanae, in Nishio, Shiro Miyamoto, director of the Tama Juvenile Training School, a reform school for boys an hour west of Tokyo by train, merely shrugged. "I missed that case," he said with a touch of weariness. "There are so many like that these days."
The Tama school, for juveniles 14 to 19 who have generally committed serious crimes, involves many of the same rigors that characterize ordinary Japanese society, only in larger doses: discipline, repetitive tasks, respect for the group and for hierarchy. The boys rise by 7:00 a.m. every morning, scrub their spartan dorms, sing in chorus and then do group exercises, driven throughout by a drill-master.
In the afternoons, there are vocational classes, counseling, and a brief spell of private time.
"I am here because I used to try to force people to do things according to my will," said one student, an 18-year-old with bushy hair, lively eyes and a straightforward manner. "When people would answer me back, I couldn't stand it. Sometimes I would respond by trying to scare people, or even hurting them."
The school would not allow the students to be identified, or permit questions about the specific details of their crimes. But experts say problems like these, related by students in their confessional tone, reflected a less often acknowledged price exacted by Japan's highly driven school system: a lack of opportunities for youthful recreation and the relationship building that comes with it.
"Our children have no time to play, they have no kids to play with, and they have no place to play when they are growing up," said Takayama, the childhood development expert said. "The result is that kids play alone, and this lack of socialization has a lot to do with the rise in crime by youth.
"It is becoming more and more difficult for kids to live socially, understanding the feelings of others, so they turn inwards. At some point, though, society makes it impossible for them to preserve their isolation, and the result is a sudden show of emotion and eruptions of violence, either verbal or physical."
Using different words, the reform school student told much the same story.
"I started to reject contact with my family," he said. "I never used to express my true feelings to other people. Until I got in trouble I would either keep them to myself or tell straight-faced lies. It wasn't until after I came in here that I realized how self-centered I had become."
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