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Opinion

Foreign crime: the big lie

By Scott T. Hards


外国人犯罪に対する誤解を生む報道

日本のマスコミ報道は外国人の犯罪を 不当にクローズアップしている。 少子化の進む日本が必然的に行き着く 「国際化」の必要性を考えると、 こうした姿勢は決してプラスにはならない。

Driving through Tokyo recently, I spotted a banner hanging from a pedestrian overpass: "Fatal traffic accidents increasing rapidly!" That struck me as rather odd, since the last time I got my license renewed, I sat through a lecture that explained, among other things, how traffic fatalities had decreased in Japan over the last eight years.

After thinking about it, I realized that the banner was probably a lie, but since the idea was to get people to drive carefully, it was probably a harmless one.

Recently, however, there's been another lie, or a misinterpretation of the truth, that is not so harmless: That's the media reports and statements by public officials about foreign crime in Japan.

To hear these people, one would think that Japan was being overrun by foreign criminals. There are endless news reports of crimes by suspects who "sounded foreign" or used techniques typical of foreign criminals, such as lock-picking. The horrible killing of an entire family in Kyushu by Chinese certainly hasn't helped the image of foreigners in Japan.

But is there really a foreign crime wave here? According to statistics published by the National Police Agency in early September, although the number of crimes by foreigners are up by about 20 percent, they still are estimated at just 1.39 percent of all crimes committed. Since non-Japanese make up about 1.5 percent of Japan's population, that means that the crime rate for foreigners is roughly the same, or even slightly lower, than the crime rate for Japanese.

Keep in mind that there has been a roughly 4 percent increase in registered foreigners in Japan during 2002. Also keep in mind that of the crimes committed by foreigners, almost one-third of them are visa-related (overstays, or doing things not allowed on a particular visa), and therefore non-violent victimless crimes that cannot be committed by Japanese.

Perhaps more interesting, while the media give one the impression of a large increase in illegal visa overstays here, according to statistics from the Immigration Bureau, that number has dropped every year since 1993.

While there are certainly some very "bad apples" in the bunch of foreigners residing in Japan, the current atmosphere suggests unfairly that foreigners are somehow more unlawful than Japanese as a whole, and that's wrong. It's important for people to look at the statistics objectively and make their own conclusions; the mass media have a way of making just about anything look like bad news.

Foreign crime in Japan will no doubt continue to climb. That's because the number of foreigners in Japan is going to continue to climb. Japan's aging population is barely growing, and in the next 10 to 20 years, the country is going to run out of people who are able to care for its senior citizens. Controlled immigration of care-givers and other skilled labor from countries like the Philippines, India and other countries will become essential.

We need to lay the ground work now to insure that mistaken impressions about the morals of non-Japanese don't make Japan's inevitable internationalization any harder than it has to be.



Shukan ST: Oct. 17, 2003

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