Article: Grisly crimes spark rethink of 'safe' Japan

[Mikawa Ossan]

Quoted from www.japantimes.co.jp

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Grisly crimes spark rethink of 'safe' Japan
Beheading, shootout among recent mayhem

By HANS GREIMEL
The Associated Press

A mother beheaded by her son. A baby who suffocated after being stuffed by his parents in the baggage compartment of a motorbike while they played pachinko. A murderous shooting spree during a hostage standoff.

An outbreak of violent crime in the past week has triggered soul-searching and outrage in a country that has long prided itself on its safe streets and tight communal bonds.

The "appalling destruction" of traditional values ― as one lawmaker put it ― climaxed Friday, when a former gangster killed a police officer and wounded his son and daughter during a shooting rampage at his Nagakute, Aichi Prefecture , home where he had held his ex-wife hostage for 23 hours. It was the first time an on-duty police officer was shot to death since 2001.

The standoff capped a week of mayhem and mistreatment.

On Tuesday, a teenager strolled into a police station with his mother's severed head in a bag. The same day, a 3-year-old child was abandoned by his father at an anonymous drop box meant for unwanted infants.

On Thursday, a couple was arrested after their 1-year-old son's body was found wrapped in a plastic bag and dumped in a gutter. The baby died after his parents allegedly left him in the baggage compartment of a motorbike while they were in a pachinko parlor.

"We are witnessing the deterioration of Japanese society," Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker Tsuneo Suzuki said in the Diet on Thursday. "We must stem this appalling destruction of family and community morals."

While this is still a relatively safe country by international standards, crime is on the rise as society grapples with a widening gap between rich and poor and other social ills.

A tide of corporate layoffs amid widespread restructuring, the fragmentation of extended families and a creeping sense of urban alienation all contribute to the erosion of mores, experts say.

Japan, a country of 127 million people, had just 1,391 homicides in 2005, compared with 16,692 in the United States. But overall crime jumped to 2.27 million cases that year, from 1.81 million in 1996, and violent offenses nearly doubled to 73,772 cases, according to the National Police Agency.

"Anxiety is mounting in Japan about the increase of high-profile crimes. Due to rapid globalization, the traditional rules and social order are changing dramatically," said Jun Ayukawa, an expert on criminal psychology at Kwansei Gakuin University in Hyogo Prefecture.

"While families used to act as brakes, there is an increase in crimes where people feel lost in despair and no longer care what happens to their families," he said.

Indeed, fractured families figured prominently in last week's grisly headlines.

Motoki Tamiya and his wife, Mika, both 21, were arrested Thursday after DNA tests of the dead 1-year-old linked the boy to his mother. The baby's body was found last month on a remote road in Nose, Osaka Prefecture.

On Tuesday, Japan's only anonymous drop box for unwanted infants triggered a wave of anger after it was discovered that a 3-year-old preschooler ― and not a newborn ― was left by his father on the service's first day.

The dropoff, known as "Stork's Cradle," was begun by a Roman Catholic-run hospital in the city of Kumamoto to stem a wave of abandonments of newborns in unsafe public places.

The same day, there were more shocking headlines. A teenage boy carrying a severed head walked into a police station in Aizuwakamatsu , Fukushima Prefecture , saying he killed his mother ― the latest in a series of dismemberments.

News reports said the 17-year-old suspect hacked off his mother's head as she slept, then went to an Internet cafe to watch music videos ― with the head ― before turning himself into police in the morning.

In January, Tokyo was on edge after a woman confessed to cutting up her husband with a saw and dumping the body parts around the capital.

The recent surge in high-profile violent crime has spurred debate over tougher gun control rules, calls for strengthening the moral fiber of younger generations at the nation's schools, as well as recriminations about the state of modern parenting.

Calls for more stringent gun control intensified last month when Nagasaki Mayor Itcho Ito was shot and killed by an organized crime boss. Days later, police stormed an apartment and seized another gangster who allegedly gunned down a rival outside a Tokyo convenience store.

The use of guns is still relatively alien to the Japanese public. Handguns are strictly banned, and only police officers and other professionals, such as shooting instructors, are permitted to own them.

Friday's standoff ended when the gunman, Hisato Obayashi, 50, surrendered to police 29 hours after the standoff began.

 

[Goldiegirl]

That article mad me sad. It's not even my country. I guess were used to murder here more than Japan. It seems that everyday the morning news starts out with the murder report in Milwaukee....I kinda just tune it out. It's expected. I suppose that's just as sad.

 

[KirinMan]

That article mad me sad. It's not even my country. I guess were used to murder here more than Japan. It seems that everyday the morning news starts out with the murder report in Milwaukee....I kinda just tune it out. It's expected. I suppose that's just as sad.

I am afraid that people here will get numb from hearing about these types of crimes here in Japan as well.

The "traditional" family structure and social responsibility that Japanese society relied on to help keep crimes like this in check is rapidly deteriorating. What will happen now?

 

[pipokun]

After police included a bag-snatching theft as one of violent offenses, Japan statistically turned to be dangerous.
If a bike theft were included, media would claim we'd live in the end of the world.

I think this is more important and a darker side of Japan than a psycho killer or an ex-yakuza shooter.

Autopsy rate lowest in developed world
The Yomiuri Shimbun
Only about 9 percent of bodies of people who died of unnatural causes unknown reasons handled by the nation's police in 2005 underwent autopsies, with the remaining 134,905 bodies only examined by sight and noninvasive means, it was learned Wednesday.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070517TDY02010.htm

 

[Mars Man]

It is sad, most indeed that anything such thing could and does happen. Of course, it does not happen only in Japan--never has, and never will.

I don't trust the media quite enough here to feel as though I can get all the pertinant facts on every crime. For that reason I always try to look behind the emotional, tear-jerking-like news presentation that I so often see.

I did read that juvenile crime has been on the decrease--an eccentric, and extreme crime will push that totally out of the public consciousness. Other crimes that occured, we'd have to reason in the long run (I'd bet), were simply random events that all met at this relative time frame. I would not bemoan the future of this country or the world yet.

It is really a sad thing, yes, but is not really new.

Thanks for the share. (I wonder why there was so much repetition in that article. . .)

 

[maushan3]

I was gonna post this same article until I came across this thread, haha.

Well, from what I read, Japan has nearly doubled crimes, ok, they say this has to do with Japan's present economic problems, the smaller gap between rich and poor classes. This is just an excuse by the government of all the rise in violent crimes because Japan's bubble period is finally coming to an end and there's nothing but good things that will happen to the country economically (except that the population will decrease sharply.)

I am more shocked with the beheaded mom. This is very, very rare, it happens in every culture. It is so rare, that it makes big-time headliner on national newspapers;
Psychological problems attack regardless of culture, creed, age, or race. But the thing is that these can be treated. This is what happens when parents are not up-to-date with their sons. When instead of having quality time wth the children, the father goes out drinking and this is when kids start to have many doubts about things, like the hormonal changes, they are disoriented, they don't know what to do, they are in emotional chaos.

These people need to focus more on having Emotional Intelligence, know how to behave with other people, etc.

Mauricio

 

[pipokun]

Situation of Juvenile Delinquency in Japan in 2006
This is what the violent kids did here in 2006.

Some kids were arrested after uploading a manga magazine with the infamous P2P software, Winny, this year. No kids 50 years ago did such a horrible crime, but I don't think it is violent. Of course, they must pay what they did.

 

[ArmandV]

The Los Angeles Times covered the story today:

Grisly crimes alarming Japan
A series of killings in which the bodies were dismembered has unleashed a frenzy of self-examination.
By Bruce Wallace, Times Staff Writer
May 27, 2007


TOKYO — It's not so much the news of a 17-year-old boy stabbing his mother to death that has shocked Japan, dominating chatter on tabloid TV for the last two weeks and sending shudders through a nation that prides itself on a low homicide rate.

The greater horror lies with what he did afterward. Having killed his mother as she slept, police say, the boy cut off her arm and head with a saw. Spray-painted her arm white and stuck it in a potted plant. Put her head in a sports bag and carried it with him to an Internet cafe, where he spent two hours watching rap music videos in a private booth.

He then took a taxi to a police station in his town in northern Japan, where he surrendered the head and told the officers, "It didn't matter who I killed."

Step by gruesome step, it's hard to imagine a more grisly crime.

Yet what unsettles many Japanese is that dismembering the body of a slaying victim, known here as barabara jiken or "scattered pieces incidents," no longer seems like such an aberration. Over the last several months, there has been a series of killings in which the bodies have been cut up or disposed of in sickening ways.

The disturbing crimes have unleashed a national frenzy of self-examination, with criminologists, politicians and anyone else with an opinion asking whether some macabre virus has infected contemporary Japanese society. It has given rise to suggestions that the killers were mimicking dismemberment scenes in best-selling novels and that the cause is the increasing divide between rich and poor in a society that once prided itself on egalitarianism.

These theories, based on little more than speculation but amplified by entranced media, have contributed to a sense that a country once bound by tight family and community ties is splintering into something alien.

"These recent murders are about self-validation: people murdering someone in order to fulfill an 'empty self,' " said Jinsuke Kageyama, a criminal psychologist. "The murderers recover their lost power by killing."

The recent savagery began in December, when a Tokyo woman confessed to killing her allegedly adulterous husband with a blow from a wine bottle and then cutting his body into pieces. The parts were found scattered across two city wards; his head was buried in a suburban park.

Less than a month later, a 21-year-old Tokyo man was accused of killing his younger sister. He claimed he lashed out violently after she belittled him for his failure to win acceptance to dental school. Police said he hacked her body into pieces and stuffed the parts into four garbage bags.

In March, the strangled body of a young, female English-language teacher from Britain was discovered buried in a sand-filled bathtub in a university student's Tokyo apartment. The suspect eluded a police raid and is still on the run.

The incident occurred around the time a verdict was reached in the trial of another Japanese man in the slaying of Lucie Blackman. The British woman, who was working as a Tokyo bar hostess, disappeared in July 2000. Authorities found her remains in 2001. The body had been dismembered and the head encased in concrete. Judges acquitted real estate developer Joji Obara in her death and dismemberment, saying there was no physical evidence linking him to Blackman's body.

And these aren't the only stories dominating media coverage. They have been accompanied by what seems to some a deluge of shocking crimes, from the random stabbing of a 2-year-old child by a woman in a Yokohama shopping mall, to a couple accused of dumping their toddler son's body on a mountainside after he suffocated in the helmet compartment of their motorcycle.

The recent mayhem in a country with a low homicide rate, which has been falling, has commentators scrambling for explanations. Some criminologists argue that socially dysfunctional students go unnoticed in a school system in which docility and acute shyness are regarded as normal.

Others see a copycat syndrome, pointing to novels such as the 1998 bestseller "Out," in which a wife kills her abusive husband and then conscripts three female co-workers to help dismember the body for easier disposal.

Corporate restructuring that ended the jobs-for-life era also has been cited as a possible cause. So too the tunnel vision produced by playing violent video games. Some ruling party politicians said the burst of gore underscored the legitimacy of their campaign to restore what they say are lost Japanese values: love of family and love of country.

"We are witnessing the deterioration of Japanese society," lawmaker Tsuneo Suzuki told parliament. "We must stem this appalling destruction of family and community morals."

Yet the record shows that dismembering bodies is neither unique to Japan nor a newly arrived phenomenon. Dismemberment took place in the Edo period (1603-1868), said Mark Schreiber, an American who is a longtime resident of Japan and the author of two books on the history of sensational crime in the country. He said random slashings of innocent passersby occurred regularly during the Showa era (1926-89) and that the Taisho period (1912-26) had its record of sadistic, gory crimes.

Even the national tabloid-induced panic is nothing new. Ten years ago, a 14-year-old killer deposited the severed head of an 11-year-old child at the gates of an elementary school in Kobe, and taunted police and citizens with threats to kill again before he was finally caught.

Nor is dismemberment unknown outside Japan. The savage 1947 slaying of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles, the Black Dahlia case, remains one of America's most infamous, and both Canada and Britain were scandalized by multiple dismemberment killings in the 1990s.

The conflict in the Middle East also has produced a numbing abundance of political and religiously inspired beheadings, many recorded and available for viewing on the Internet.

"There's a lot of mindless mayhem out there all over the world, and I don't know what you can really read into it," Schreiber said. "People are just freaking out. And they are using whatever they can get their hands on that's lethal."

Individual motives in the recent Japanese killings vary widely. The British teacher appears to have been stalked and her killer was trying to hide the evidence of his crime. The 17-year-old who killed his mother allegedly claimed any victim would do, and made no attempt to evade capture. The Tokyo wife told police that her husband was abusing her; she cut up his body, the media reported, because she simply couldn't physically dispose of him all at once.

Even if culture was the cause, the fault may not rest solely with Japan. Violence and sadism are not unique to this nation: American pop culture, from Bret Easton Ellis to "The Sopranos," also includes scenes of dismemberment.

"Sure you have Japanese kids who pour themselves into the fantasies of their computers," said Jimmy Sakoda, 71, a former Los Angeles Police Department homicide investigator who had close ties to Japanese police during his career. "But because of the Internet, these kids are just as likely to be influenced by American movies or rap lyrics as by homegrown stuff."

That's why many observers are reluctant to lay blame for such extreme cases on Japan's social ills.

"When someone dismembers a body, that's total hatred," Sakoda said. "That's when killing's not enough. It's hate beyond reason."