There was an article this morning in the Yomiuri Shimbun about abused children being separated from their parents:

• 2007/06/21 Abused kids increasingly placed in care, The Yomiuri Shimbun.

At first I couldn’t make sense of certain parts of the article.
Read the rest of this entry »

Most people in Japan have heard of Lindsay Ann Hawker and Lucie Blackman, but I don’t think many people have heard of Annette Langston.

Her story was recently reported by Sarah Foster in The Northern Echo:

The Dark Side of Japan

Langston was brutally attacked in her house by a Japanese acquaintance. She was knocked unconscious and woke up with her lower half unclothed. Unsure of what had happened, she immediately fled her home. She was attacked again, knocked unconscious again, and then woke up in an ambulance. Fortunately in her case someone saw what was happening and helped out. Her assaulter is now in jail for ten years.

This is a gripping story, and it makes me wonder how many other stories are out there that haven’t been reported at all. This doesn’t just happen to foreign women.

The article concludes:

Annette believes that our perception of Japan, not helped by Japanese resistance to reporting general crime, can give a false sense of the truth. Above all else, she urges vigilance. “I think Japan is made out as this mystical, magical place and a lot of it is fascinating, but really it’s just like any other country,” she says. “There’s crime, there’s terrorism and a lot of seedy things like the porn industry. I think people think ‘it won’t happen to me’, but it might.”

Right.

Operating out of Japan using an Internet homepage, Skype, and PayPal, Yoshi Kojima bought and sold endangered butterflies throughout the world. He did most of this from his home in Kyoto, Japan.

He was nabbed by an undercover U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent who lured Kojima to America for a sexual encounter.

Listen the story at NPR here.

According to a recent article in the Japan Times:

The Tochigi Prefectural Government received a court order Thursday to pay 47 million yen in damages to two families for giving a gun permit to a man who shot their relatives, one fatally. Presiding Judge Setsuo Fukushima of the Utsunomiya District Court said giving the gun license to the man was illegal because the shooting had been “predictable,” especially by police officers who had intervened in disputes between the two female victims and the man, who were neighbors.

I’m sure I could find many examples of this in other countries as well, in particular, America. But I’m not entirely sure I see the reasoning behind suing the government here.

Basically, the 47 million will be paid by tax payers, right? It’s perfectly acceptable to tax people as the government needs money. It’s also perfectly acceptable for the government to use coercion in order to make sure people pay their taxes.

However, should it be the case that when the government makes mistakes taxes should be increased to pay financial compensation? Some people may not like to hear this, but this amounts to the government using coercion to make tax payers cough up money to pay for the government’s errors. Is this a good idea?

Maybe. I do feel genuinely sorry for the victims in this case. I can imagine some arguments that the victims deserve the compensation and as there’s no one else to hold responsible, the government has to pay. Indeed, perhaps that is so. I’m not really sure. A case like this certainly seems worthy of closer investigation. I’d guess both in Japan and elsewhere this is a common practice now?

But what I’d like to know is who will be held accountable next time the people go to vote for their local officials? Will this be a campaign issue? My guess is it won’t be, and there’s the real problem. The more compensation is paid for issues like this, the less motivation there is to fix the problem through the electorate.

Therefore I think the practice needs to be viewed in that vein and with caution.

I don’t want to keep going on about the topic of guns, but stumbled aross the following facts this morning:

• It is estimated that there are 50,000 illegal guns in Japan.
• All guns are held by crime-syndicates. (Yakuza)
• While the number of guns is increasing, the number confiscated by police is decreasing. In 2006, the number was 458. In 1995, the number was 1880.
• It is getting harder to find guns, many gangs now strictly prohibit their members from talking with investigators.
• The above took place after the introduction of a 1992 anti-ganster law. According to the law, police can crack down on organized crime syndicates when the percentage of their members with criminal records surpasses a specified amount. (So, so long as the gang is mostly clean, you can’t crack down on them.)
• In 1993 gun possession became a serious crime. Since then crime syndicates use those without obvious associations with their syndicates to hold their guns.
• A Smith & Wesson is typically sold for about 700,000 yen with five to 10 bullets.
• Yamaguchi-gumi has been selling more guns as an attempt to increase revenue. This created a conflict with Sumiyoshi-kai, based in Tokyo. Now, all Sumiyoshi-kai are required to carry a gun.
• The Yamaguchi-gumi has 39,700 members and accounts for half of Japan’s gangster population.

All of these facts are from the following article:
Illegal guns flourish, say befuddled police

This is a follow up to a blog entry I made a few days ago about the Virginia Tech Massacre.

I want to post and comment on two editorials that appeared in the Asahi Shimbun regarding the Virginia Tech Massacre and gun control.

As I’ve stated before, I am not a gun enthusiast, but do support the right to bear arms. I am open to reasonable restrictions on gun ownership.

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Comments included, here is the Asahi Shimbun’s leading editorial on this topic:

The mass shooting on the idyllic Virginia Tech campus on Monday, the deadliest in modern American history, reminded us once again how disturbingly common gun fatalities are in the United States.

I just hate to get dragged into this debate, but this position is so lopsided, I feel compelled to take up the other end of the argument.

Gun rights activists claim that accidental deaths have been decreasing, and conservative newspapers argue that while gun ownership is at a relative high, violent crime is at a near twenty year low. (I saw this argued on CNN by gun rights advocates. Here is one recent example and two older ones: WSJ, Shooting Industry, Jewish World Review.)

Consider this, if we’d had just had America’s worst multi-car pile up resulting in numerous bloody deaths, would we be debating American car culture? Would we be calling for greater car restrictions? Would we be reminded just how common cars are in America?

Is it false that North Korea is absolutely crime free? I bet it’s gun free as well.

Is it laughable and only an embarrassment these days to suggest that gun ownership and self-government might be related? Perhaps this is a thought that might be too uncomfortable for some to bear.

Watching TV footage of bloodied students and other victims being carried away, our first reaction was anger, and the anguished question: Why? The shooter, a Virginia Tech student from South Korea, has killed himself. His motive remains unknown, but police doubt the rampage was an act of political terrorism. If they are right, then what could have made the student kill more than 30 people at random?

Fyodor Dostoevsky once said: “Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

The question posed by the Asahi Shimbun’s editors can be rephrased this way: “What are the central controls we can put in place so that no person will ever conceive and feel motivated to enact evil.”

I would guess countries like North Korea are perhaps exemplary in this regards.

We should note that Japan, itself, has not escaped madmen (or women) doing mad things. We’ve had the curry poisonings, the Osaka School Massacre, The Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, and Sakakibara.

Indeed, what form of central control would have most allowed us to manage these people so they could not have hatched such malevolent schemes?

The horror is reminiscent of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, where 12 students and one teacher were gunned down by two schoolmates. It was said at the time that the two gun-toting teens could have thought they were merely acting out a scene of a videogame.

Ban video games. Ban adult content as well. I don’t see what good that stuff is anyway.

We are disturbed by the fact that the killer at Virginia Tech was from South Korea.

Why?

There is speculation that he may have had trouble in a personal relationship. We just hope the incident will not invite racial ugliness toward ethnic Asians in the United States.

Oh.

Hm. Well, we know how dangerous things can be in a heterogeneous society. Japan is homogenous, so fortunately we don’t have to deal with concerns like this.

One thing we keep wondering is why the United States cannot reduce gun-related crimes. Humans become enraged and desperate, and a gun in the hands of an enraged or desperate individual could be a sure recipe of disaster or tragedy. There are about 30,000 gun fatalities in the United States every year. While many are suicides, more than 10,000 cases are murders.

First, some more relevant statistics would be useful here. How about starting here:

Bureau of Justice Statistics: Firearms and Crime Statistics

Certainly, a more complex picture emerges. Violent crimes with firearms had been decreasing until 2005, when they began to increase again, slightly. Currently, American crime rates are near 20 year lows.

Moreover, the number of suicides in Japan has exceeded 30,000 for the last eight years in a row.

I can not find a reliable source here, but I believe that the number of suicides in America over that same period has been about 30,000 per year (link). This is despite America’s significantly higher population.

Note, that by saying guns cause suicide, the Asahi editors are indicting Japan. After all, America’s rate of suicide is already lower than Japan. How much lower would it be if guns were more properly controlled?

The United States is a nation that won its independence by taking up arms, and the old American frontier spirit was rooted in the belief in self-defense.

The “belief” mind you, not the reality.

Moves were made in the 1920s to counter Mafia violence with gun control, but not much was achieved in practical terms.
In 1993, the U.S. Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act to control gun purchases, but this was still a far cry from any law that would seriously regulate the circulation of guns. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed into law a 10-year ban on the production and sale of semi-automatic assault weapons. However, President George W. Bush had no plan to extend the law, and the ban expired in 2004.

I think some people have blamed the slight spark in crimes with firearms to Bush not extending Clinton’s ban on semi-automatic assault weapons. I frankly don’t know. It might be a valid point. But it wouldn’t have made a difference in the Virginia Tech Massacre.

Lobbying by the National Rifle Association is said to be the primary reason for the absence of progress in gun control. With a membership of 3 million well-to-do gun lovers, the NRA is a powerful organization that can determine election results.

If the gun control lobbies are not as well organized or financed, why is that? Is the implication that gun enthusiasts are mostly rich?

A safer U.S. society is a shared hope of people around the world who frequently travel to the United States.

Completely and utterly and irresponsibly ignoring the fact that violent crime is nearly at twenty year lows in America. Can the same be said of Japan.

And it is obviously not a convenient situation for Americans, who are proud their society is a model of freedom and democracy, to have to worry about the threat of guns.

Maybe it is precisely because America is a model for freedom and democracy that Americans have to deal with issues like this.

We hope the Bush administration, Congress and citizens of the United States will have greater drive in gun control.

Not much chance of that. The democrats took a beating in 2000 and their scared of the topic now.

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Here is a second editorial that appeared in the Asahi Shimbun:

Pro-gun mantra continues cycle of violence
In the United States, they have what are called “equalizers,” things that bring about equality.

The writer is not talking about stereo-equipment but perhaps something like this.

For a Japanese person, it is hard to imagine that they are actually talking about guns when they say “equalizers.” In the American mind-set, this goes back to the self-defense mentality of their pioneering days, that no matter how strong your opponent may be, the stakes will be equal if you have a gun.

Right. It’s a mentality. It’s got nothing to do with real issues. Americans are deluded. They’re sick with gun fantasies. They actually like guns.

When I was in the United States five years ago, a southern town was being terrorized by a serial killer targeting women. When I went to cover the story, I found out that one gun shop had sold 300 handguns after the murders. Ninety percent of those who had bought them were women. The shopowner said, “When there’s fear in the society, the weaker people tend to buy guns.” Those words were seared in my memory.

Hard to comment on this. Women and guns. Is the fact that even women obtain guns and use them for defense somehow disturbing?

Every time a heinous crime is committed using guns, even those who had nothing to do with guns up to that point go and buy guns for themselves. This futile circle keeps turning and turning.

Gun rights advocates can rattle off strings of impressive statistics showing guns protect people. But I guess we’re not going to look at any of that, right?

Now in the United States, there are as many as 200 million guns in circulation. This means that apart from the high rate of crimes that involve guns, there is no end to incidents where family members or friends are killed or injured. Minor troubles escalate into major tragedies just because guns were close at hand.

Accidents can usually be prevented through greater training and knowledge. Some statistics here would be nice, by the way. I would guess far more people die from car ownership than gun ownership.

The mass murder on Monday at Virginia Tech, where 32 people were shot, was the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history (The gunman committed suicide.). There are still many unclear points. But if a gun had not been used as a weapon, there would not have been so many victims. President George W. Bush made a plaintive statement, but he has always upheld the right of the American people to bear arms. The pro-gun proponents always repeat the mantra, “Guns don’t kill, people do.” But I cannot help but think it is indeed guns that kill people when you look at the university shooting.

I think the mantra is basically correct though. I mean it makes a good point. Guns are dangerous because people are dangerous. But if people are dangerous, how should we defend ourselves?

Pro-gun proponents also say, “We have a right to shoot before we get shot.” I hear that even with the latest shooting, some are regretfully saying, “If only someone else also had a gun.” Is this what they mean by being “equal?” I feel as if I am seeing the extent of the deep, heavy darkness underlying American society, with its 200 million guns in daily life.

This sounds borderline racists. At best it’s hysterical, and I don’t mean funny.

I’m curious about what people think concering the media coverage in Japan of the Virginia Tech massacre.

Would anyone care to comment on this?

While I’m looking for serious comments and not vents, I’d really like to hear what people think of the coverage. So you’re welcome to skip my own comments here and go right ahead and post your own in the comment box.

I have not yet had time to review any of the editorials written in the Japanese papers, but I have noticed *some* of the following on TV:

1. Initially the focus of the coverage was on gun ownership in America being common place. Various statistics showing America to be dangerous because of gun ownership were used. I saw it stated by various media commentators that America is a gun culture, and that this is something that Japanese just can’t understand because Japanese culture is different.

2. Once it was discovered that the perpetrator of the shootings was a South Korean National, the emphasis switched from America being a gun culture to America being a diverse place. Here being a diverse place means racial tensions and problems, and that this sometimes manifests itself in violence. The perpetrator of the crime was bullied for being Asian, and as a result he couldn’t fit in. Wow, how dangerous heterogeneous societies can become!

So to the limited extent I’ve seen the coverage in Japan, I’ve been really disheartened. It seems to me that the message is clear. Japan is safe and good, because Japanese unlike Americans don’t possess an irrational desire to protect themselves with guns, and because Japan is a homogenous society it doesn’t have the problems inherent in a heterogeneous society.

I’m not at all convinced that race was a major factor in the shootings. In fact, while I recognize that people may have bullied the perpetrator of the crime for being Asian, they could have easily just as well bullied him for something else. Moreover, the bullying didn’t in any way, shape or form, *justify* his actions.

While I’m sure there are those who find the debate over guns very easy to resolve, I’ve always been genuinely perplexed by it. I don’t like guns, have never had one, and do not want one. People who enjoy collecting guns make me at least a little nervous. Nevertheless, I’m not one to decide issues like this on a kind of subjective taste score or raw emotion, but instead on the weights of the various pros and cons. My personal view is that this is a very hard issue. At different points in my life I’ve leaned both ways on the issue, and right at this moment probably lean towards some form of limited gun ownership.

(By the way, guns are legal in Japan. Hunting rifles and so on. All one needs is a license. However, I’m fairly certain hand guns are completely illegal, but the Yakuza obviously have them.)

Japanese who quickly dismiss the need for private ownership of guns need to ask themselves why after about 60 years, America still has military bases in Japan? Has or has not America been facilitating the liberty of Japanese nationals to at least some extent? But then who has been facilitating the liberty of American nationals? Excuse me for saying so, but self-governance is indeed a bitch.

Taking the above into consideration, perhaps the debate over gun ownership should not be so readily dismissed as idiosyncratic American culture, and instead, both sides of the debate should be aired more accurately. What you get in Japan is a kind of anti-gun snow job, reaffirming the essential goodness of the Japanese. This message is complete with bloody bodies, fleeing students, and scary visages of the gun man.

Honestly, I’m not at this point convinced that random shootings even provide a good litmus test for gun policy. Though we should note that Viginia Tech has a gun free policy, while Virginia State doesn’t.

Just a few links:

• A gun ban and the gunman
• Cato Institute: 2nd Amendment (right to bear arms, gun control)
• Million Mom March: Learn about the Issue
• Gun Control vs. Gun Rights
• Jurist: Gun Laws, Gun Control & Gun Rights

I want to sort of think aloud about an article that appeared in the Japan Times, entitled Bullying caused boy’s suicide, high court rules

Bullying caused boy’s suicide, high court rules
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By JUN HONGO
Staff writer
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The Tokyo High Court on Wednesday expanded a lower court ruling and ordered Tochigi Prefecture and the city of Kanuma to pay a combined 8.6 million yen in compensation to the parents of a 15-year-old boy who committed suicide after being bullied at school.

That’s the equivalent of about $73,000.

It is the first time a court has acknowledged that depression caused by bullying resulted in suicide, according to the lawyers for Katsuji and Haruyo Usui.
The Utsunomiya District Court ruled in September 2005 that Takehito Usui was bullied at school and ordered Kanuma’s board of education, Tochigi Prefecture and the victim’s classmates to pay a combined 2.4 million yen in compensation.

So the lower court stated that there should be compensation for the bullying. They ordered compensation by the school district *and* the victim’s classmates because of the bullying. The amount was about $20,000.

But the district court did not agree that the bullying was the cause of the November 1999 suicide.

Why is it the courts job to determine why the boy committed suicide? Note, motivation is important in murder cases, because it helps establish blame, but we know who is to blame for the boy’s suicide in a literal sense. The boy is. Trying to look at various factors that influenced the boy’s decision and assign blame there is similar to saying criminals commit crimes because they were brought up poorly and are therefore not responsible.

The law isn’t suppose to work this way nor should it.

This prompted the parents to appeal.
The parents claimed the board of education and the prefecture could have prevented the suicide, which they say was directly caused by the bullying in class and had asked for 110 million yen from the two defendants for not doing their duty to protect their son.

I’m sorry, but the parents are simply wrong here. The bullying that took place at the school was wrong. There are not ifs, buts or ands about it, it was horrendously wrong. But to the extent that human beings are legally responsible for their own actions, it does not make sense to assign the blame for the suicide on anyone else but the boy.

Saying the bullying caused the suicide is saying something along these lines:

1. The boy was a machine, such that when certain things happened, suicide became inevitable. The people who set off this chain of events was the school board, therefore they are responsible.
-or-
2. Suicide was the only solution available to the boy for the problem of bullying. That is, when school boards fail to act against bullies, such as those involved here, students have no recourse but to take their own lives.

Presiding Judge Hiromu Emi said Usui’s suicide was caused by the bullying, and agreed the boy had been bullied in class and “the teachers did not provide the required protection for Takehito.” He said the boy was harassed for a long time, causing him to become depressed.

There is no known medical (physical) test for depression. It’s true that some people can take certain popular drugs and these drugs make some feel better. Prozac for example. If people wish to do this, then that seems fine to me. For some it might even be a good idea. However, just because a drug made someone feel better, can we really say they were diseased in the absence of any hard criteria?

Note, we have to be very clear here. The claim of depression is not being used in a passing way, they are claiming the boy had a (mental) disease. They are saying he had a disease and that this disease was caused by the school board. And they want the court to legally acknowledge this. But then why not say that the parents failed because they did not get the boy medicine for his disease?

The parents said they were satisfied that Wednesday’s verdict included the acknowledgment that the bullying was the direct cause of the suicide…

Sorry to be so coarse here, but the direct cause of the suicide was the decision of the boy to take his own life. To argue otherwise is to argue against the notion that humans are responsible for their own actions.

… but said they would appeal the case to the Supreme Court because the high court did not hold the board of education directly responsible for the suicide — only for the bullying — ruling there was insufficient evidence to support the claim.
“The court ruled that bullying caused the suicide but denied that the school was responsible for what happened on its property. It doesn’t make sense,” Katsuji Usui, 54, told reporters.

This just sounds confused to me. The bullying was responsible for the suicide, but the board of education was not responsible for the bullying? It should be just the opposite.

According to the court, Usui’s classmates began harassing him autumn 1998 when he was an eighth-grader at Kitainukai Junior High School. The other children physically attacked him, forced him to expose his genitals in the classroom and stole his belongings.

School is compulsory. You are legally obligated to go. So the boy was legally obligated to go to a place where he was forced to show his genitals and physically attacked. There should be criminal charges here. For the minors, I would suggest they be treated however the law treats minors. For the school officials involved, they should be arrested for negligence. But apparently none of this has happened.

Instead, we have the parents wanting to say the school board caused the death of the boy by not correcting his tormentors, who by tormenting the boy gave him a sort of terminal disease.

The problem is clearly that the law is lax, and the parents *correctly* feel justice has not been served. They are looking for some way to show the suffering brought upon their son by the bullying that took place, and have for various reason latched on to the idea that the suicide was caused by the school board in some scientific sense.

While causality might be easy to establish for a physical law of science, even attempting to establish the same for human behavior undermines the notion of human responsibility, which is necessary if the legal system is to work at all. Here I’m basically a student of Thomas Szasz.

He began refusing to go to school in November 1999 and was found hanged at his home on Nov. 26.
The suit was originally filed in July 2001 against Kanuma and Tochigi Prefecture and two of Usui’s classmates, who cannot be named because they are minors.
The two classmates and their parents reached an out-of-court settlement last July for 1.2 million yen each and an apology to Katsuji and Haruyo Usui for having bullied their son.
Kanuma and the prefecture have continued to fight the lawsuit.

The two boys should have been criminally charged, at least in so much as a minor can be criminally charged, or at the very minimum they should have been given a stern warning by the police the first time an incident like this arose.

What would have happened if all those involved had been adults and the incident had happened at a major Japanese company? Would there have been speedier intervention by the relevant authorities? Are children less important in some way?

The Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, is reported as saying, Thursday of this week, the following:

There has been debate over the question of whether there was coercion . . . but the fact is, there was no evidence to prove there was coercion as initially suggested. That largely changes what constitutes the definition of coercion, and we have to take it from there.

Compare this to Jan Ruff O’Herne’s testimony before the Committee of Foreign Affairs at the U.S. House of Representatives:

We were a very innocent generation. I knew nothing about sex. The horrific memories of “opening night” of the brothel have tortured my mind all my life. We were told to go to the dining room, and we huddled together in fear, as we saw the house filling up with military. I got out my prayer book, and led the girls in prayer, in the hope that this would help us. Then they started to drag us away, one by one. I could hear the screaming coming from the bedrooms. I hid under the table, but was soon found. I fought him. I kicked him with all my might. The Japanese officer became very angry because I would not give myself to him. He took his sword out of its scabbard and pointed it at me, threatening me with it, that he would kill me if I did not give into him. I curled myself into a corner, like a hunted animal that could not escape. I made him understand that I was not afraid to die. I pleaded with him to allow me to say some prayers. While I was praying he started to undress himself. He had no intention of killing me. I would have been no good to him dead.
 
He then threw me on the bed and ripped off all my clothes. He ran his sword all over my naked body, and played with me as a cat would with a mouse. I still tried to fight him, but he thrust himself on top of me, pinning me down under his heavy body. The tears were streaming down my face as he raped me in a most brutal way. I thought he would never stop.

Well, someone’s certainly wrong.

Here are some more links to some the other testimonies made before the the Committee of Foreign Affairs at the U.S. House of Representatives, recently.

http://www.internationalrelations.house.gov/110/hon021507.htm
http://www.internationalrelations.house.gov/110/lee021507.htm
http://www.internationalrelations.house.gov/110/kim021507.htm
http://www.internationalrelations.house.gov/110/kot021507.htm
http://www.internationalrelations.house.gov/110/soh021507.htm

Article:
‘I Just Didn’t Do It’ questions court system

Author:
Setsuko Kamiya

Source:
The Japan Times

Notes:

1. A new film out called “Soredemo Boku wa Yattenai” challenges the legal system.

2. “The film is about a man accused of being a “chikan,” or groper, a common problem on crowded commuter trains.”

3. ” … the story of a young man arrested for groping a schoolgirl on a crowded commuter train. Though he protests his innocence, the authorities try to force him to sign a confession that would ensure his release once he pays compensation to the victim. The hero’s resolute refusal eventually leads to his tough fight in the criminal court system, with its astonishing 99 percent conviction rate. Carefully depicting criminal case procedure, Suo reveals how in Japan one is generally presumed guilty till proven innocent.”

4. Film is based on a true story.

Comment:

This movie is by a very popular and famous director (Masayuki Suo). I’m very happy to see that someone has taken on the legal system here. I hope a lot of people see this movie and it has a positive impact. I’m not sure how widely it is showing, but if I have a chance I will see it.