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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 March 1999 Issue No. 421 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 March 1999 Issue No. 421
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Sympathy for the devil
By Gamal Nkrumah"We don't understand our youngsters," is a lament I have heard many times from middle-aged Japanese men and women. Small wonder. The youngsters in question dye their hair yellow, orange, pink and green. Many of them speak English. In a rapidly ageing society, it is easy for angry middle-aged men who have been forced into early retirement to blame the "wicked" youngsters for almost everything. The gulf between old and young here is wider than it has ever been before, and the current recession only exacerbates matters.
It is in this context that the Japanese government is planning to introduce a bill to "reform" the juvenile law. Most older people want to see the young punished more severely, while the young for their part are apparently indifferent to their fate. Most of them are apolitical.
Last year, the country was rocked by a case which highlighted many of the tensions that underlie the fast-changing face of Japan. A 14-year-old boy from the city of Kobe, who called himself "Sakakibara", killed another boy who was only 10 years old. The cruelty with which he did so shocked the country, and especially the sensibilities of the older generation.
He chose the name Sakakibara because of its meaning: "the devil spirit rose". What could have been more apt, in light of the horrors which were to come? Sakakibara strangled his victim, who was one of his schoolmates, slit his throat from ear to ear, knifed and stoned him. He then decapitated the corpse and displayed the head on the gate of their school for all to see. The job done, he telephoned and e-mailed major newspapers, radio stations and television stations to advertise his grizzly deed. In his statements, he said that he murdered his fellow student as an act of "revenge" against the ruthless school system. He was later tried in Kobe and is now incarcerated in a juvenile detention centre for the mentally ill.
The worst thing about the Sakakibara case is that one might have seen it coming. Yet neither his family -- nor Japan -- heeded the tell-tale signs. Japanese children are confronted with an extremely difficult examination at the tender age of six. Their performance effectively determines their whole future, for it decides whether they will go to a good elementary school, or one of the despised state schools. Parents have no faith in the state system, and Sakakibara's mother was no exception. She pressured her first-born to excel at school, even though social workers warned her that her son was mentally unstable. He was already torturing and killing young animals as a "hobby". Soon after, he began physically attacking girls as he walked to school. But the worst thing about Sakakibara's case, perhaps, is that he was in no way unique. Children are murdering other children in Japan.
The United Nations Committee on Children's Rights (UNCCR) recently issued a warning to the Japanese government over the tremendous pressure children are placed under here by a hyper-competitive education system. The UNCCR described Japanese children as frustrated and highly-stressed. Yet the government's answer has simply been to build up the stick and further neglect the carrot, by introducing tougher juvenile laws. Currently there are no prosecutors in juvenile courts in Japan -- just the judge, the child, sometimes his parents, a social worker and a lawyer. This system is due to be replaced with a more properly "penal" set-up, if the planned reforms go ahead.
"Serious crime cannot be prevented by juvenile law reform," warned Professor Osamu Niikura, the Secretary-General of the Japanese Lawyers International Solidarity Association. Niikura told Al-Ahram Weekly that many leftist political groups are fighting to thwart the government's reform plans, and stressed that the problem must be seen in perspective. Niikura -- who is also a leading opponent of the death penalty -- said that in comparison with Western countries, Japan is relatively crime-free. Gun ownership is strictly controlled. Only guns for hunting are permitted, and it is illegal to own a lethal weapon for any other reason, even self-defence.
This policy of prohibition seems to work. "The murder rate is one-twentieth of what it is in America," Niikura told the Weekly. What holds for adults would also, at first glance, appear to be true of children. According to the 1996 US Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 2,982 murders were committed by children in the United States in 1994. In Japan, the figure for the comparable period is less than one-hundredth of that. The US has also witnessed a sharp rise in juvenile gun homicides since 1985, and non-gun homicides are also on the increase. In Japan, there are simply no gun homicides at all.
But despite these reassuring statistics, crime is on the rise in Japan. "The dreaded Boryokudan, our Mafia-equivalent, has become a powerful force in Japan," Niikura told the Weekly. "Regional Yakuza -- or, 'Good for Nothing' -- groups have come together to form the powerful Yamaguchi Gumi organisation, based in the Osaka/Kobe region. The Yamaguchi Gumi approach big businesses to extort money and blackmail them. Many right-wing politicians have close connections with the Yamaguchi Gumi," he added. The Yamaguchi Gumi also control gambling -- which is illegal in Japan -- and the equally illegal trade in small weapons, along with many bars, nightclubs, "love hotels" and sex shops.
Japan has a well-armed police force of some 270,000 men and women -- a comparatively small number for a country of 125 million people. And they too are widely believed to have close connections with Boryokudan, especially in the Osaka/Kobe area.
Japan's latest bullet train (photo:AFP)
Niikura, who teaches criminal law at Kokugakuin University, told the Weekly that according to recent surveys some 60 per cent of Japanese people want to see the death penalty remain in force. There are some 50 people on death row in Japan at present. Between three and six people are hanged until dead every year. A Japanese death row inmate will spend an average of twenty years in gaol awaiting execution.
The recession has but pressure on the government to introduce tougher anti-crime measures. But this solution seems unlikely to work even in present conditions. And social problems continue to multiply rapidly. There are an estimated 10,000 homeless people in Tokyo. The Weekly, however, was assured that most are not badly fed, since they congregate around fashionable restaurants, for example in the Shinju-ku district of Tokyo, where they can eat quite well off the rubbish dumps. Alcoholism and drug addiction are also on the rise, even though narcotics are prohibitively expensive.
Faced with such widespread breakdown of social traditions, a growing number of people are turning to religion. Sects like the notorious Aum Supreme Truth Cult, whose leader Shoko Asahara is currently in gaol charged with multiple murder after releasing poisoned gas into the Tokyo subway four years ago, are mushrooming. Another "religion" that is flourishing is Sokagakkai, which has a following of at least one million people. Sokagakkai members have their own political party, Komeito, and have also infiltrated all the major political parties as well as the biggest commercial corporations. Many Japanese fear that the group may have sinister motives, and talk about it in hushed tones.
Komeito, in fact, means "fair and square" in Japanese. Sokagakkai is not actually a religion in the Western sense, but rather a fraternity -- a Buddhist association, whose founding dates back to the 17th century. It is now an international organisation, run rather along the lines of a Masonic federation, with many members overseas in North and South America, and East Asia.
Taken as a whole, Japanese society is neither secular nor religious. In many respects, it is extremely difficult for people raised in the monotheistic traditions to understand Japanese attitudes to religion. There is no single national consensus, each individual having instead his or her own unique approach. Most people here do not "belong" to any particular religion, and many believe in a number of different religious concepts simultaneously. Yet although the majority are either agnostic or atheist -- in surveys, only 35 per cent of people profess a religious faith -- yet they continue to make regular visits to the traditional temples and shrines.
There are also one million Christians in Japan. Preaching the gospel to the homeless in Ueno Park, Tokyo, has become a common-place activity. And some of Japan's most prestigious private schools and institutions of higher learning are Christian missionary foundations, such as the prestigious Kyoto Catholic University.
What is clear today is that the Japanese recession has polarised Japanese society, accentuating the differences between the haves and the have-nots. In doing so, it is not only challenging many long-held traditions, but is also alienating many important segments of what was once one of the most disciplined and integrated societies in the world.
