I read a few blogs, and an interesting post over on What Japan Thinks about a survey on crime in Japan (and how foreigners are a large contributing factor) pointed me to another very interesting post over on Debito.org on a Japanese magazine about foreigner crime. It is definitely worth taking a look at both posts.
Arudou Debito’s site, Debito.org is quite interesting, but not generally something that I read often. He’s a guy who has lived in Japan for quite a while, gotten citizenship here, and often posts about issues relating to foreigner discrimination in Japan. I’m not particularly interested in that: I know that there is discrimination here, but for the most part I accept it, and I think that mostly it isn’t done with malice. It is just that Japan is a fairly homogeneous country, and many people are not used to foreigners. It is natural to be wary of what you don’t know, so I try not to worry about it too much, and when the foreigner effect goes against me, I try to laugh it off.
The recent post about a magazine that is basically about crime in Japan by foreigners is a bit disappointing though. I also don’t put too much weight into it, because sensationalism sells, and it only takes one or two people with a bad idea to actually get something published. How close did the OJ Simpson confession book come to being published in the US? That’s clearly a bad idea. So I think in this case you probably have a book that not many people are buying, or at least taking seriously, that is getting a lot of attention because it is so offensive to foreigners, but I would hope that most people wouldn’t outright agree that foreigners are ruining this country.
Of course, the post over on What Japan Thinks says that maybe that isn’t the case so much.
Would a similar poll in the US about crime point the finger at largely foreign groups? I don’t think so. But I bet you there would be controversy over groups of people with low economic income or race. Is that similar though? Certainly I think crime is more likely to be committed by people who are desperate, and being poor is a good way to get desperate quick. You can argue that Americans have an institutionalized system in place to keep the poor poor and all sorts of things from there, but it somehow feels a bit different from the blame that foreigners get in Japan for crime here.
Now I’m interested in seeing what the statistics are on actual crime committed in Japan: do foreigners commit most of the crimes? Well, I don’t really know where I would go to look those numbers up, so I’ll just have to continue on hoping that this here is nothing more than a storm in a teapot.
Still, interesting reading. Since Debito’s original blog post in early February, after about a week or complaints to Family Mart (one of the stores in which the magazine was sold) sales of the magazine were halted. You can also read a translation of the publisher’s response to criticism about the magazine.
Leave a Reply