Opinion

Denial and scapegoats

By Tony Laszlo

On June 8, Mamoru Takuma entered an elementary school in Ikeda City, Osaka Prefecture, and proceeded to slice and stab at any thing that stood in his path as he moved across a crowded schoolroom. Eight schoolchildren were killed and 15 people, including two teachers, were injured, some very seriously.

As parents collapsed in shock at the news of their loss, people living near the school wept; a few hurled insults at the perpetrator as he was driven away by the police, or as he reappeared to them later, in their mind's eye. The crime, Japan's worst mass-killing since the sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway in 1995, stunned the nation. I am confident that the reader will join me as I extend my deepest condolences to the victims' families.

Taro Aso, an LDP bigwig who was in the running for the prime minister seat earlier this year, touched upon the tragedy in a speech he gave at a party function on June 9. "That was a vicious killing, it's true," he said. "But in the U.S., some kids took machineguns onto the school grounds and sprayed the place with bullets. Fifteen people died in that incident. You won't see that sort of thing happening in Japan, I can tell you that. Why, in Osaka, a woman can walk the streets alone after dark."

There is nothing wrong with suggesting that Japan is a relatively safe country among industrialized nations. However, these comments were made in Osaka City, a short drive from the crime scene on the day after the tragedy.

Under those circumstances, Aso's comments were — to put it politely — inappropriate. No doubt they were of very little consolation to the bereaved and of even less inspiration to the people of Osaka who are desperately looking for ways to prevent similar acts from occurring in the future. In his speech, Aso assured his audience that "Japan was not nearly the horrible country that the newspapers portrayed it to be."

I would say that the speaker was, to use a colloquialism, "in denial." He would do much better to accept that a problem exists and deal with it. The faster he and other influential people can do that, the faster society can tackle the really important issues at hand, such as school security, the treatment of mental illness and the social factors that contribute to the criminalization of people.

Unfortunately, Aso is not the only person in denial. In a May 8 column on the front page of the Sankei Shimbun, Shintaro Ishihara, a possible future candidate for the prime minister post, blames the erosion of Japan's "safe society" on foreigners. In the article, the Tokyo governor introduces the reader to a certain murder case, which he holds up as an example of a vicious cruelty indicative of Chinese "ethnic DNA."

Needless to say, "ethnic DNA" — criminal or otherwise — is a scientifically groundless notion. Furthermore, arrests of foreigners (only 1.9 percent in 2000) are actually on the decrease. Now, something may very well be eroding Japan's safe society. But Ishihara's desire to believe that Japanese people are genetically less prone to crime is preventing him — and probably the readers of that article — from correctly perceiving what that something is.

In these days of economic recession and decreasing public safety, the temptation is strong to point a finger at other societies or people in order to feel better about oneself. Resist it, dear reader, resist it.

Shukan ST: June 29, 2001

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