Opinion The Dangers of Modern Communications By JULIET HINDELL	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
現代のコミュニケーションの危険性 現代のコミュニケーションの危険性 昨年末から今年にかけて起きた、伝言ダイヤルを使った昏睡強盗事件で、被害者の女性が初めて会った男性のすすめる薬を飲んだことについて筆者は憤慨している。筆者にとって、知らない人がくれる物を口にするのが危険なのは常識だからだ。

I was alarmed to read about the case of the young man who contacted women through a message service (dengon daiaru) so that he could drug them and take their money. Two of his unfortunate victims died after he left them drugged outside on a cold winter's night. But that they would agree to meet him at all is where they made their fatal mistake.

These sad incidents seem to have a lot to do with our willingness to use modern forms of communication to meet people. When I reported on the sad phenomenon of compensated dating (enjo kosai) the girls I interviewed all used pocket pagers, mobile phones and the Internet to make contact with their dates.

Of course there is no reason why meeting a stranger through phone clubs or message services is more dangerous than meeting someone, for example, at a nightclub. But somehow, people who want to use these modern forms of making contact seem to me more likely to be shadowy.

There's an extra problem in Japan. Because this is such a safe country, people do not have the instinctive mistrust of strangers that girls in Britain, for example, are taught to acquire. From an early age we were told not to speak to strangers, that under no circumstances should we accept a lift in a stranger's car and that we should never take sweets from people we didn't know. Those messages got stronger when I was a teenager in an all-girls school. We were straightforwardly instructed not to trust men. At the time we laughed and thought the teachers had attitudes from the Victorian Era. But even so the message hit home. You can ask for trouble if you don't behave sensibly.

So I was shocked to read that a woman would agree to meet a man through a message service and that she would also trust him enough to take medicine that he offered, even though she had never met him before. Allegedly he told the women that the pills would make their skin look beautiful, and they took them straight away. That shows such a high level of naivete.

If you are willing to take the risk of meeting someone through a phone club or a message service then you should also be wary and take precautions. Of course you cannot always be sure about new people you meet however careful you are. And if you are too careful you will never meet anyone; there is no need to be totally paranoid.

Message services and phone clubs seem to me to be a distressing part of modern life. Why is that we find it so hard to meet people these days that so many people are forced by loneliness to make contact in this way? I think the more we hide behind our computer screens and pagers, the worse we become at normal human communications. Not only could we conceivably put ourselves in danger by contacting people this way, we are also in danger of forgetting how to communicate in any other way.

Shukan ST: Feb. 5, 1999

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