One of the things that has striked me the most since living in Japan is the general feeling of safety. I can’t remember the last time I felt so safe in an urban environment.

It’s a commonly remarked and commented upon facet of Japanese society, yet it strikes you quite strongly once you actually experience it on a daily basis. Since the turn of WW2 Japan has been a pretty safe society as far as developed nations go, with a pretty low average crime rate, traditionally one of the lowest in the world.

Now talking about Tokyo in particular, the differences with other metropolis such as London or Paris is striking. In Tokyo it’s pretty safe to walk the streets at any time of the day or night, whether you’re a man or woman. This doesn’t mean that nothing happens, but if you live in London for example you know full well that past a certain time and in certain places you best keep your wits about you if you dont’ want anything funny to happen. In Tokyo that’s not the case at all. It’s true that women are warned to be more aware, especially on public transports where cases of groping and other weird sexual antics do happen, but by and large Tokyo is a safe city to be in. Which is more than can be said for a lot of metropolitan centres in Europe.

This sense of safety is omnipresent - after a few months, I’ve found myself doing things I never would back home. I’ll go to the shops and leave my bike unlocked. I’ll even leave my shopping in the basket while I go somewhere. The other day I forgot my house keys on my bike, realised about 40 minutes later whilst in the gym and after a minute of panic decided that I could rush out in the hope they would still be there or I could finish exercising, have a shower and walk out to find them still there. Which I did. It felt quite odd telling myself it would actually be ok.

I still myself being quite paranoid about burglaries, something I was horribly aware of in London, especially after having been robbed once. But as much as I worry the chances of something happening are incredibly slim.

And so I’m finding myself to be more and more relaxed and in a sense becoming a lot more like the Japanese. One of the main reasons for the low crime rate in Japan is the social attitude towards crime. This is a country where everyone is part of a greater group, be it family, work or other. People in Japan are not individuals as such, and don’t consider themselves to be individuals as such in most situations. You only have to ask someone what they do to be given the typical answer of ‘I belong to company X’. And so committing a crime is a sure way to ostracize yourself from said groups, and put yourself in a situation of exclusion. A fact that is considered by many to contribute to the sense of safety and low crime in the country.

And which also contributes to Japanese people going abroad and behaving as if everywhere was as safe as back home - and turning themselves into easy targets.

Again this is not to say that loners, or lone standing figures, don’t exist in Japanese society. Crime does exist, crime syndicates such as the Yakuza are legendary, and homelessness is also an increasing problem. Though in both cases, the outward impacts of both situations seems to be much less than in most Western countries. Homeless people aren’t as in your face or overbearing as they can be in most European countries, instead most will be out of the way, standing out mainly because of their appearance. And crime also seems to be quite inward. Not so surprising in a country will a long standing history of keeping itself to itself and shutting itself from the rest of the world.

Take the recent news for example - in the first instance the gruesome story of a kid who killed his mom and chopped her head off before handing himself to the cops with said head in a bag, and the other story about an ongoing hostage situation where a man took his ex-wife hostage and wounded his two kids, as well as a policeman and killed another officer. Both stories are pretty grim, but as with most grim crime stories in this country it seems (with the few exceptions of those involving foreign women generally) they always involve someone doing something to their own family. A member of the group, turning against the group if you will.

Which as an outsider, someone who is unlikely to ever be considered to be ‘in’ the society doesn’t make you feel too threatened. Don’t get me wrong a lot of these crimes are totally twisted by all accounts (take the one of the teenager and his mom’s head) but they don’t seem to affect how safe you feel living in this country. Where as in the UK for example, I can’t say I ever felt too good after reading stories of gun crimes or murder in the areas I lived in. I remember once there was a spate of knifings where I lived, and it was a pretty tense feeling walking home at night, or just answering the door unexpectedly. Crime seems to induce a greater sense of insecurity back home, whereas here it seems to me to come across more as a symptom of Japanese society’s many repressed tendencies and unchecked excesses.

In a society where suicide levels are amongst the world’s highest, stress is rampant, where standing and order are valued, and where even teenagers are worked like crazy it seems hardly surprising when people snap and do things which are deeply frightening to a ‘normal’ person.

While crime rates have generally been low, they have been increasing in recent years - especially gun crime. And while a lot of the more gruesome stories generally involve Japanese people, there are always those prone to claim that crime in Japan is always a result of foreigners. Again not that odd considering the general way in which foreigners are regarded by Japanese society. Their numbers might be increasing, but they are still gaijins. They are others, they don’t quite belong.

Far right groups and nationalists are always happy to proclaim that foreigners are the main source of crime in Japan, and cops are only to happy it seems to propagate the stereotype by randomly stopping, and harrasing to various degrees, foreigners who just go about their business. That’s the thing with living in a society with a low immigration rate - if you don’t look Japanese, you stand out like a sore thumb. Cases of foreigners being arrested for various crimes are common, though again if you look at statistics it seems the greater majority of those are visa violations and petty crimes. By and large crime in Japan is commited by Japanese, no matter how much the Japanese themselves might not want to admit it.

And while this crime might make the same Japanese people feel unsafe or question the way in which parts of their society are developing (such as teenagers), as a foreigner Japan really is a safe haven. And this in turn has an effect on how you end up behaving - I remember in London the amounts of times I’ve been in a train or a public place when someone has behaved in a way that is threatening towards others but since being here I can’t think of a single instance. Bar the few times where pissed up business man have been a bit loud or unsteady on the train home or in the streets.

It’s definitely a nice feeling.

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written by Laurent \\ tags: crime, Japan, safety, Tokyo