Attitudes towards the Police in Contemporary Japan: Part Five -
Perceptions of Crimes Committed by Foreigners

Professor H. Richard Friman (Director of the Institute for Transnational Justice at Marquette University), Dr. Tom Ellis (Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, University of Portsmouth) and Sean Curtin (GLOCOM fellow and Asia Times)

A full list of articles in this series can be found here.

Sean Curtin: Over the past two decades, foreign crime has never exceeded more than about 4 percent of all crime in Japan, and typically the average has been between about 2 to 3 percent during this period with most of the recorded increase occurring in the early nineties. Why have the police devoted so much time and energy to tackling foreign crime when it represents only a small fraction of all total crime?

Tom Ellis: It is a virtually universal phenomenon that each nation finds it an appealing explanation that foreigners are far more likely to commit crimes than their own nationals. This is usually put down to cultural notions. In reality, there is often some truth in foreign or minority group over-representation in crime, but not usually for cultural reasons. Rather, it is normally because immigrants are denied access to legitimate job markets, or at least access is far more difficult, and so involvement in illicit markets is likely to be higher. This also applies to public housing and other valued resources. For instance, in the UK during the 1970s people from India and Pakistan were almost excluded from local council properties and good mortgages by discrimination, and so were left to initially inhabit run down private properties, and then blamed for their condition (though in fact, this usually improved properties' condition).

It is an unfortunate fact that a murder committed by a foreigner is far more newsworthy than a within-nation domestic violence death.

In Japan, I was also struck by the low level of foreign crime and criminals, yet in prisons, the extraordinary need to define foreign prisoners as very different. The idea of Japanese/non-Japanese is very strong, and as a result, there is far more tendency to regard people as foreign or not, rather than as ethnic groups within the same society. The obvious example is that of the so-called Brazilians, most of whom were encouraged to come in a period of prosperity because of their Japanese ethnicity. However, in a downturn, they are simply referred to as foreigners. There is no graduation, just either/or.

I recall reading several Japan Times articles which were very revealing in that they commented that foreign criminals were few, yet their impact was large because the Japanese were learning form them. In other words, you don't just fear foreigners per se, but you fear the cultural impact they might have, if you wish to deny that crime may come from within too.

Richard Friman: There is an extensive literature you would benefit from regarding the nature of policing and social order in Japan. One aspect is the way in which the police, and the broader public, see a linkage between homogeneity and social order. Homogeneity has always been overstated in Japan, but the very introduction of those who are foreign poses challenges to expectations of social behavior and community. A second aspect lies in the very way in which the police have tried to enforce order in post war Japan. The police have difficulty in dealing with foreign crime, in that the old rules and procedures of law enforcement and expectations of how one deals with suspects and how suspects will respond, for example in the use of detention and expectations of likely confessions, do not apply. The police remain in a very slow learning curve. A third and narrower aspect is that the issue of foreign crime has been a source of financial and other resources for the police in tight budgetary times.

A full list of articles in this series can be found here.

Related article

Japan murder fuels false anti-China furor, Asia Times, 13 November 2004