Japan Shaken by Rise in Juvenile Crime

The attacker buzzes down these peaceful suburban streets on a bicycle, and when he sees a child, he slashes.

In the past three weeks, the cyclist, described as a young man with dyed hair who is perhaps of high school age, has descended on seven children in Soka, a pleasant bedroom town about 10 miles north of Tokyo. Three elementary school pupils were stabbed with a knife-like object, and a fourth girl was punched in the face. Three children escaped unharmed.

Soka’s parents are in panic over the random slash-and-run attacks, which some term “American-style” crime.

“I’ve always felt that Japan was a safe place,” Rina Kawasaki, the mother of a second-grader, said recently. “I’m scared now.”

Her son and all his classmates were being met at school by their parents or escorted home in groups by their teachers, while watchful PTA members patrolled the streets. “Nothing like this has ever happened here before,” a school official said.

Japan’s minuscule crime rate remains the envy of the industrialized world. Young women walk alone at night, and unescorted children are often seen on the Tokyo subways. Japan’s murder rate is only one-ninth that of the United States.

But this year, this nation has been deeply shaken by a wave of heinous and bizarre crimes and, especially, a surge in unsettling offenses by youths. In the first six months of 1997, the number of minors arrested for murder, rape, arson or robbery soared 59%, the National Police Agency reports. That follows a 16% rise in 1996. Almost half of all people arrested in Japan are younger than 20.

While sociologists debate whether dysfunctional families or Japan’s rigid educational system are to blame for the trend of youth criminality, public calls for a tougher juvenile justice system are increasing.

In the wake of a shocking child-beheading case in Kobe, politicians are taking heed, and a parliamentary committee of Liberal Democratic Party members is now considering the issue.

Ironically, despite the recent surge, juvenile crime is still much lower than it was in the 1960s. But it is the nature of the crimes, not the number, that has so unnerved the public.

Japan was stunned in June by the arrest of a 14-year-old Kobe boy, who confessed in court last week to beheading an 11-year-old boy and leaving the head at his school gates with a note in the mouth daring police to “catch me if you can.” The boy also admitted killing a 10-year-old girl and wounding another girl, 9.

Meanwhile, newspaper headlines continue to pound readers with tales of the kind of carnage and mayhem that Japanese have long associated with the United States: a pregnant woman stabbed in the belly on the street; a shootout between yakuza gangsters in broad daylight; a man’s body found encased in concrete; a housewife charged with dismembering her husband and leaving him to rot in a bathtub.

Then there are the weird crimes, peculiar to Japan, which are seen as disturbing indicators of an unraveling of Japanese values and the communitarian social structure.

These include a steady increase in oyaji-gari or “uncle hunting” attacks in which bands of teenage boys pounce on drunken, middle-aged “salary men” on their way home and steal their wallets.

An old Japanese rhyme used to place “uncles,” meaning neighborhood men who would scold errant youngsters, on the list of things that scared children, along with earthquakes, lightning and fires. That “uncles” are now targets of today’s errant youngsters indicates the gulf between Japan’s Confucian values and its new realities.

“The Japanese are losing their ethical moorings,” said psychiatrist Masaaki Noda.

Then there are the pedal-by attacks. Since October 1996, 37 women from Tokyo and nearby Saitama prefecture have been smashed in the face or body with bricks, sticks or other objects by a male cyclist.

A 20-year-old unemployed man confessed to about 30 attacks in August, explaining to police that he was “stressed out.” But he has since retracted his confession, which in any case did not match some of the crime details, according to press reports.

Officials in Soka said they do not know whether the seven attacks on children there are copycats of the 37 assaults on women. Nor do they know whether more than one person is responsible, said Koichiro Yamamoto, vice principal of Takasago Elementary School.

“These kinds of unprovoked attacks seem very American, don’t they?” Yamamoto said. “We take it extremely seriously because we have never had this kind of thing before.”

PTA President Tatsuo Ito added: “To have one boy attacked was bad enough, but now there are serial attacks. We used to have a close community, but now many mothers feel very insecure. People are panicking.”

Soka parents are likely to be even more disturbed if it turns out that the bicycle slasher is a local boy. Already, some legal experts argue that Japan’s juvenile justice system--shaped by the American occupation--coddles young criminals and shuts out their victims.

The law does not specify sentences for juvenile offenders, but Justice Ministry guidelines in effect until last month stated that minors had to be released within two years, with a one-year extension for special cases. Critics say authorities had to release even youths deemed to still pose a danger to society.

Last month, the Justice Ministry amended the rules and did away with the limit on the length of juvenile incarceration. Those deemed to have “uncorrected criminal tendencies” can now be held until age 23, and those with mental disturbances can be held until age 26. (The age of majority is 20 in Japan.)

But the new guidelines will not stem serious juvenile crime because in practice, even minors who commit violent crimes average just 1.2 years in detention, said Yoshiro Ito, a lawyer who defends youth offenders.

Moreover, the juvenile halls are so short-staffed that troubled youths receive little counseling or treatment before release, said Ito, who believes that family therapy is the best defense against recidivism.

Victims and their families, who are becoming more vocal than in the past, also complain that the system set up to protect the privacy of minor offenders shuts them out. A Mainichi newspaper series on the debate over juvenile justice highlighted the rage and sorrow of several such families.

“Those boys whose faces I don’t even know are returning to their daily lives somewhere in this town, but neither they nor their families have ever spoken a word of apology,” said Aiko Fujimoto, whose 15-year-old son was beaten to death two years ago by a group of teenagers while out skateboarding in Saitama prefecture. Because juvenile court sessions are private, his family has never learned why he died--or what punishment was meted out to his killers, the paper said.

What scares Japanese most is that the youths committing the crimes often appear to be children from “good” families with a moral screw loose, in contrast to the impoverished, orphaned or abused young who were seen as primarily responsible for the larger number of crimes committed in the difficult decades that followed World War II.

“That’s why it’s become harder to apprehend criminals,” Noda argued in a discussion in Bungei Shunju magazine on whether the Kobe killer is “an abnormal person or a child of his times.”

“It’s always assumed that the perpetrator must be some loner who’s manifestly abnormal, but very often that isn’t the case.”

Makiko Inoue of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.