Watchful Cops : Japan’s Police Also Mediators, Neighborhood Caretakers

With a gun in his holster and a parakeet chirping behind him, the man in blue surveys the busy street from his corner police booth. The door is open, as always, and his patrol bicycle is parked outside.

As much a neighborhood caretaker as an enforcer of the law, the Japanese police officer keeps watch from one of the 15,000 such koban across the country. The police officer is an important figure in the community, with influence reaching well beyond that of his colleagues in most other countries.

“I’ve heard that in the United States, police officers or sheriffs are called law enforcement officers because their duty is mainly to enforce the law,” says Shiro Hirohata, a senior criminal investigator in the National Police Agency.

But in Japan, where crime rates are only a fraction of those in the United States, the police officer is expected to be a “balancer, a conflict mediator, or adviser for domestic quarrels,” says Hirohata, who last year visited the United States for six months to compare the two police systems.

Tarnished by Scandals

Recently, however, Japan’s 217,000 police officers have found themselves in an unaccustomed--and uncomfortable--public spotlight, their reputation for rectitude and efficiency tarnished by internal scandals and other problems.

Most embarrassing to the proud agency has been the brazen “Man With 21 Faces” gang, which has tried for a year to extort money from Japanese confectionery makers by leaving cyanide-laced candies in stores.

While nobody has been poisoned, the police are rankled by a stream of letters to newspapers in which the gang ridicules them for failing to solve the case.

After a top candy company executive resigned, the gang implied that it would stop planting the poison. But police officials say they won’t be satisfied until they catch the culprits and clear the department’s reputation.

Japan has long laid claim to having the lowest crime rates and one of the highest rates of criminal arrests among industrialized nations.

In 1984, for example, National Police Agency figures showed 1,762 murders committed in a country whose population of 120 million is about half that of the United States. In 1983, the year for which the most recent FBI statistics were available here, the United States recorded 19,310 murders.

The police agency said that in 1983, 97.3% of Japan’s murder cases were cleared from the books, compared with 75.9% in the United States.

Whatever the figures, Japan’s reputation as a law-abiding society can scarcely be challenged.

In Tokyo and other cities, subway crime is virtually unknown. Women walk dark streets without fear of being attacked. Although burglary is the most common felony, many people don’t bother to lock their doors. Among the worst menaces are flashers and obstreperous drunks on trains and railroad platforms.

One recent crime study by the Paris-based Insurance Center for Documentation and Information said Tokyo had 23.4 crime victims per 1,000 people, New York 97 per 1,000 and Paris 185.7 per 1,000.

Japanese police cite two factors as limiting violent crime. One is a culturally ingrained respect for authority and abhorrence of antisocial behavior. The other is a strict gun-control law, under which only police may carry a handgun.

The underlying assumption of the gun law is that “police defend citizens--citizens do not defend themselves,” says Toshio Ishiyama of the police agency’s safety department.

“Most Japanese people have never even touched a gun,” Hirohata says.

The handgun law carries a penalty of up to 10 years in jail and a $4,000 fine. Enforcement is so strict that in the Japanese underworld, Hirohata says, “It is said that one handgun is equal in value to 10 gangsters.”

Police records show that of the 1,762 murders in Japan in 1984, only 113 cases involved guns, and most of those belonged to gangsters.

Replacing the samurai warriors who kept the peace in Japan’s feudal era, the first police force was organized during the Meiji Restoration of the late 19th Century. It was then that the koban system was established.

Given powers ranging well beyond law enforcement, the police by 1937 were issuing building permits and health citations, inspecting factories, even regulating movies and political meetings.

Reconstituted in 1954

During the U.S. occupation after World War II, the koban system survived proposals that it be abolished as a militarist-era hangover that smacked of government surveillance. However, the national police force was decentralized--forcing every city of 5,000 or more to organize its own department. Under a 1954 law, the National Police Agency was reconstituted.

Operating like America’s state and local police, National Guard and FBI rolled into one, the Tokyo-based police agency oversees seven regional headquarters responsible for 47 prefectural (state) police units, which in turn supervise district forces.

There also are eight city police forces, with the largest, Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department, enjoying a sort of elite status. Its superintendent, appointed by the prime minister, ranks second only to the National Police Agency’s commissioner general.

Police careers in Japan attract a high caliber of candidates. According to Yutaka Takehana of the police agency’s personnel division, half of all recruits in the last decade were graduates of four-year universities, and only one of every eight applicants passed the entrance exam.

The 8,000 yearly recruits spend nine months to a year at the police academy, learning various subjects, including martial arts.

Regardless of any later specialization, nearly every policeman will spend some time on duty in a koban , which police agency official Kikuchi Masahachi, a 32-year koban veteran, calls “the base of the Japanese police.”

From these mini-stations at key intersections, in railroad stations or tucked away in residential areas, officers perform myriad functions--giving directions, helping people in need and even making hotel reservations for visitors--and staying alert for anything out of the ordinary.

“Many people have good feelings about the koban officer, believing that he’s a friend of ours, of the neighborhood,” says the criminal investigator.

Signs of this relationship are the vases of flowers and bird cages to be seen in many koban .