Opinion

Learning to read the numbers

By Scott T. Hards

You can't believe everything you read!

In my last essay here about crime by foreigners, part of my argument was based on a statistic from a Japan Times article. I wrote, "crimes by foreigners are ... estimated at just 1.39 percent of all crimes committed." But I later realized something crucial: Japan's police only make arrests for about 20 percent of all crimes. And if you don't make an arrest, how can you know whether a crime was committed by a foreigner?

The answer is, you cannot. So I called The Japan Times to ask where they got that 1.39 percent figure: "That was from a Kyodo News article," I was told. So I called Kyodo, and discovered that they had made a serious error. The 1.39 percent statistic was calculated by their staff. They took the total number of foreigners arrested and divided it by the total number of crimes reported. But that compares apples and oranges, and tells us nothing meaningful.

A better calculation is to compare foreigners arrested to the total number of people arrested. When you do that, you get 4.5 percent. That's right. Nearly 5 percent of all people arrested in Japan are foreigners. Since only about 2 percent of Japan's population is foreign, that suggests we are committing crimes at more than twice the rate of Japanese.

So gaijin are crime-prone after all, right? Not necessarily. Without thinking carefully about other factors, you can jump to the wrong conclusion. Consider:

"Arrests" and "crime" are not the same thing. Being arrested does not mean someone is guilty, and the police are quicker to question and arrest foreign people than they are Japanese.

About 55 percent of foreigners in Japan are men, whereas less than half of Japan's population is male. And as we know, men commit the vast majority of crimes.

Likewise, foreigners in Japan have a much lower average age than the Japanese population as a whole. And younger people tend to commit more crimes than seniors, who make up a large chunk of Japan's people.

So if we could compare a group of Japanese and foreigners here who had the same demographics, I think we would find that the crime rates of the two groups are quite similar.

Clearly, it's dangerous to take media statistics at face value.

Nevertheless, we're hearing too much about foreign crime. The governor of Kanagawa Prefecture recently declared that all Chinese exchange students were "sneaking thieves." He later apologized, but the damage was done.

Perhaps worse, the Immigration Bureau has recently been vigorously deporting long-term foreign residents for visa violations - even to the point of tearing apart families with children born in Japan. While most illegals do need to be sent home, it's not in the interest of anybody to split families and deport people who have lived here for years and are gainfully employed.

Japan's future depends on a society that lives peacefully with a foreign minority. The xenophobic officials and institutions here need to learn how to read the numbers a little better.

Shukan ST: Nov. 28, 2003

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