The 111 year old mummy has spawned a number of ill-thought out stories on the plight of the Japanese elderly. Here’s one that uses it to jumpstart a mostly unrelated story on Japanese singles living with their parents. Among other things, the headline takes the one mummy, clones it, and does a whackjob worthy of The Weekly World News. Also, the writer fails to give any evidence that this is unique to Japan, or that Japan is any more advanced in this direction, and if anything provides her own counterargument.
Talk about “hanging a sheep's head and selling dog meat.”
Meanwhile, Martin Fackler isn’t doing too badly. He fails to do the arithmetic, but then, the entire Japanese media seem to have missed the point. And he manages to stick to the point.
Showing posts with label Japanese society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Japanese society. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Saturday, August 14, 2010
More on the “111 Year Old” Mummy
Janne in Osaka has a long and thoughtful comment on a previous post. I responded there to the technical and administrative points. I didn’t have anything useful to add to the broader issue that he raised: in short, How much do we want Big Brother to be our keeper? As Janne says, that’s a social and cultural issue.
Also, Anonymous kindly reminds me that 15 September used to be Respect for the Elderly Day (敬老の日), which the government celebrates by giving new centenarians gifts. In 2004, the national holiday was switched to the third Monday of September, but I suppose that it still makes some sense if only to retain the old date for making year to year comparisons.
Also, Anonymous kindly reminds me that 15 September used to be Respect for the Elderly Day (敬老の日), which the government celebrates by giving new centenarians gifts. In 2004, the national holiday was switched to the third Monday of September, but I suppose that it still makes some sense if only to retain the old date for making year to year comparisons.
Friday, August 13, 2010
What the “111 Year Old” Mummy Doesn’t Tell Us
As I have stepped up my professional tracking of Japanese issues overall, I have been paying less attention to overseas media coverage of those same matters. I have been doing much less blogging and consequently have not been taking up media foibles. Just too distracted. But the missing centenarians story was irresistible.
The macabre story of the “111 year old” Tokyoite who turned out to have been dead for some 30 years while his family continued to receive his deceased wife’s public pension payments for the last six years (some English-language reports claim that they were receiving his pension payments but one Japanese story has some details that contradict this take) quickly morphed into a much bigger story about handwringing over social neglect and government incompetence as a search for the “oldest” Tokyo resident, a “113 year old” woman, ended at an empty fenced-in lot. By the end of the August 5 workday, a nationwide effort to track down the 40,399 centenarians living in Japan had uncovered 71 missing individuals. This CNN video clip picked up on the social angle—the deterioration of family and neighborhood ties—while this WaPo report carried a touch of both. But the numbers fail to tell us anything of the sort. There’s some truth to the incompetence angle, but not much. Let me explain.
The final national numbers are not in, but the city of Osaka, with 809 residents on its registries* who are or will be centenarians as of September 15**, give us a fair-sized sample. Of the 809, the Osaka municipal government decided to check on the 108 who had not received Long-Term Care Insurance benefits during the last two years, which they properly considered good cause for suspecting that those individuals may no longer resided at their places of registry, and wound up failing to locate 64, of whom 19 were foreign nationals. Now does that mean that Osaka failed to keep track of 64 out of 108, or 59.3%, of its centenarians? But that assumes that a similar proportion of the remaining 701 would, if nothing goes corrected, be suffering the same fate as the missing 64. It seems far-fetched that these 200 year old residents (give or take a couple) who left tracks in the national healthcare system in the last couple of years will somehow go missing as they move to another municipality or to that Big Nursing Home in the sky without the fact being duly recorded in the Osaka registries. Is the ultimate leakage then more like 64 out of 809, or 7.9%? Not so. Remember that there were a lot more of their age cohorts when they came into this world. That means that most of their age cohorts in Osaka had their deaths or relocations duly registered in the municipal records. To save hours of time tracking down the actual numbers, let’s take the available most recent number of Osaka newborns, 22,892 in 2007 as a surrogate. Is 0.28% (64 over 22,892) still unacceptably high? Perhaps. But this is patently wrong. The oldest missing Osaka centenarian clocked in at 127. So the fail rate for the system is actually 64 over 22,892x(27+1), or, 0.01%. And we are not accounting for the over-127 crowd, who apparently managed to be captured by the registry system on their way out, so to speak.
Are we there yet? Not quite, for there’s an interesting twist to the Osaka numbers. 45 out of the 64 missing centenarians are registered in Nishinari Ward. This should ring a bell for any self-respecting Japanese journalist, for Nishinari Ward represents the fringes of the post-WW II Japanese economy. Specifically, like Sanya, its Tokyo counterpart, it served as the place where day laborers and welfare recipients congregated in crowded, often unsanitary hostels. It was exactly the kind of place where down-and-out forty-, fifty-, sixty somethings who had lost their connections with family and friends back in the day, smack dab in the age group where people who would show up as missing centenarians today would show up. Take them out as mostly a local phenomenon and we are down to 0.03% for the percentage of the Osaka population.
But that’s not end of it. It is unlikely that the 45 Nishinarians, given their harsh living conditions, had survived nearly to the end of their first century, let alone beyond it. (For example, lethal tuberculosis thrived long after it had been brought under control in the rest of Japan.) More likely, they must have died and slipped unnoticed through the cracks in the underbelly of the registry system decades ago. Ironically, the municipal welfare authorities became aware of 48 (out of the 64) missing Osakites, including the 45 Nishinarians, when they conducted a survey when the national Long-Term Care Insurance system was launched in 2000. However, they had failed to notify the registry authorities of the fact. Embarrassing? Certainly. Administrative malfeasance? Surely. But not exactly the kind of administrative neglect towards the elderly that the reports suggest.
Going back to the social angle, the “111 year old” mummy had been in the family for over 30 years. The Nishinari examples suggest that many if not most of the other cases also go back decades. If something went wrong in Japan, it happened a long time ago. And Japanese society (and local bureaucracies) still cares enough that almost all deaths—at least in contrast to what the media reporting suggests—go duly recorded in the public records. Note also that the daughter of the “113 year old” woman had continued paying her mother’s national healthcare insurance premiums in the hopes that she would some day return.
Now I happen to suspect that there is something to be said for the conventional wisdom about the fading of family and neighborhood connections in Japan. But it is not supported by the issue of the missing centenarians. The best media stories use facts to illuminate; too often, they merely illustrate. In this case, they actually mislead.
The macabre story of the “111 year old” Tokyoite who turned out to have been dead for some 30 years while his family continued to receive his deceased wife’s public pension payments for the last six years (some English-language reports claim that they were receiving his pension payments but one Japanese story has some details that contradict this take) quickly morphed into a much bigger story about handwringing over social neglect and government incompetence as a search for the “oldest” Tokyo resident, a “113 year old” woman, ended at an empty fenced-in lot. By the end of the August 5 workday, a nationwide effort to track down the 40,399 centenarians living in Japan had uncovered 71 missing individuals. This CNN video clip picked up on the social angle—the deterioration of family and neighborhood ties—while this WaPo report carried a touch of both. But the numbers fail to tell us anything of the sort. There’s some truth to the incompetence angle, but not much. Let me explain.
The final national numbers are not in, but the city of Osaka, with 809 residents on its registries* who are or will be centenarians as of September 15**, give us a fair-sized sample. Of the 809, the Osaka municipal government decided to check on the 108 who had not received Long-Term Care Insurance benefits during the last two years, which they properly considered good cause for suspecting that those individuals may no longer resided at their places of registry, and wound up failing to locate 64, of whom 19 were foreign nationals. Now does that mean that Osaka failed to keep track of 64 out of 108, or 59.3%, of its centenarians? But that assumes that a similar proportion of the remaining 701 would, if nothing goes corrected, be suffering the same fate as the missing 64. It seems far-fetched that these 200 year old residents (give or take a couple) who left tracks in the national healthcare system in the last couple of years will somehow go missing as they move to another municipality or to that Big Nursing Home in the sky without the fact being duly recorded in the Osaka registries. Is the ultimate leakage then more like 64 out of 809, or 7.9%? Not so. Remember that there were a lot more of their age cohorts when they came into this world. That means that most of their age cohorts in Osaka had their deaths or relocations duly registered in the municipal records. To save hours of time tracking down the actual numbers, let’s take the available most recent number of Osaka newborns, 22,892 in 2007 as a surrogate. Is 0.28% (64 over 22,892) still unacceptably high? Perhaps. But this is patently wrong. The oldest missing Osaka centenarian clocked in at 127. So the fail rate for the system is actually 64 over 22,892x(27+1), or, 0.01%. And we are not accounting for the over-127 crowd, who apparently managed to be captured by the registry system on their way out, so to speak.
Are we there yet? Not quite, for there’s an interesting twist to the Osaka numbers. 45 out of the 64 missing centenarians are registered in Nishinari Ward. This should ring a bell for any self-respecting Japanese journalist, for Nishinari Ward represents the fringes of the post-WW II Japanese economy. Specifically, like Sanya, its Tokyo counterpart, it served as the place where day laborers and welfare recipients congregated in crowded, often unsanitary hostels. It was exactly the kind of place where down-and-out forty-, fifty-, sixty somethings who had lost their connections with family and friends back in the day, smack dab in the age group where people who would show up as missing centenarians today would show up. Take them out as mostly a local phenomenon and we are down to 0.03% for the percentage of the Osaka population.
But that’s not end of it. It is unlikely that the 45 Nishinarians, given their harsh living conditions, had survived nearly to the end of their first century, let alone beyond it. (For example, lethal tuberculosis thrived long after it had been brought under control in the rest of Japan.) More likely, they must have died and slipped unnoticed through the cracks in the underbelly of the registry system decades ago. Ironically, the municipal welfare authorities became aware of 48 (out of the 64) missing Osakites, including the 45 Nishinarians, when they conducted a survey when the national Long-Term Care Insurance system was launched in 2000. However, they had failed to notify the registry authorities of the fact. Embarrassing? Certainly. Administrative malfeasance? Surely. But not exactly the kind of administrative neglect towards the elderly that the reports suggest.
Going back to the social angle, the “111 year old” mummy had been in the family for over 30 years. The Nishinari examples suggest that many if not most of the other cases also go back decades. If something went wrong in Japan, it happened a long time ago. And Japanese society (and local bureaucracies) still cares enough that almost all deaths—at least in contrast to what the media reporting suggests—go duly recorded in the public records. Note also that the daughter of the “113 year old” woman had continued paying her mother’s national healthcare insurance premiums in the hopes that she would some day return.
Now I happen to suspect that there is something to be said for the conventional wisdom about the fading of family and neighborhood connections in Japan. But it is not supported by the issue of the missing centenarians. The best media stories use facts to illuminate; too often, they merely illustrate. In this case, they actually mislead.
* There are two types of residency registries in Japan, one for Japanese and another for foreigners. They are administered by cities, townships, villages and, in the case of the major cities, wards. The two sets will be merged no later than 15 July 2012.
** I don’t know why Osaka picked this date. The national census opts for zero hour October 1.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
The Ideal Boss: from the Meiji Yasuda Poll
Each year, Meiji Yasuda Life polls newly graduating corporate recruits and publishes the results on their web site. The main feature—from the media’s point of view at least—is the list of choice for the ideal boss, male and female. This year’s top ten:
Within the parameters of media visibility that determines public taste, there is a clear gender gap. Five of the top ten male bosses are vaudevillians who parlayed their comedic skills into a successful acting—mostly though not exclusively limited to comedic roles but rarely authoritative—and hosting careers. They are of course media creations but, within that world are almost exclusively genuine authority figures, sort of on-stage directors. Even active ballplayer Ichiro’s popularity can be attributed to some extent to the real-world virtual captainship of the national team that the media ascribed to him in the Japanese victories in both of the two World Baseball Classics tournaments.
Not so the women. Except for the one comedian who can credibly list show host among her credentials and the one newscaster, they are all actresses—albeit many of them highly accomplished in other performing arts—who have in recent years portrayed lawyers, doctors, cops, businesswomen and other professional roles on TV and film. It is not their public personae but the sum of the fictitious roles that each persona assumes that the new corporate recruits in the survey see as the “ideal female boss”. Their “leadership” is twice removed from reality.
I suspect that this gender gap is more a reflection of the realities of Japanese TV—the subsidiary role of women there—than the actual mindset of the new recruits who were polled. The presence on the list of one of the few prominent females among the large number of show hosting comedians and the one female newscaster, as well as the preponderance of professional roles reflected in the choice of actresses is likely telling us that young people at least are willing to accept women in leadership roles. After all, when I was growing up, these people, these roles barely existed if any. But I’ll never have any measure of certainty until there is a poll that allows only a single, gender-free choice.
On another, related track, a five-nation world youth survey just released by the Cabinet Office (yet to appear on the CAO web site) shows that of the five nations surveyed (Japan, France, South Korea, U.K., U.S.), Japanese youths scored highest in terms of their interest in politics. Given such interest, it is a sign of the times that the only two politicians who made the top 20 in the Meiji Yasuda poll were two governors (the other being Miyazaki Governor Hideo Higashikokubaru, the comedian(!) turned politician, who placed 12th) and a foreign president. (Ten more actresses rounded out the top 20 for women.) Few things better symbolize the state of Japanese politics today, don’t you think?
Male:Note that they are almost all media-generated personalities. Even Governor Hashimoto, one of the two politicians on the list, first became famous as a gabby conservative lawyer-talking head on TV before he ran for governor. President Obama’s popularity is also very much that of a media sensation, though it is bound to wane as reality catches up with it: The global and US economies as well as Iran, North Korea and an assortment of international woes will quickly erode his prominence in Japan as well.
1.Ichiro, professional baseball player
2.Shinsuke Shimada (comedian, actor, TV/radio show host)
3.Tsutomu Sekine (comedian, actor, TV/radio show host)
4.Tamori (comedian, actor, TV/radio show host)
5.George Tokoro (comedian, entertainer, TV/radio show host)
6.President Obama (has great comedic timing, host of greatest talk show on earth)
7.Tomomitsu Yamaguchi (comedian, actor, TV/radio show host)
8.Shinichi Tsutsumi (actor)
9.Atsuya Furuta (former baseball player, manager, and current commentator)
10.Toru Hashimoto (lawyer, current Osaka Governor).
Female:
1.Miki Maya (actress)
2.Miho Kanno (actress)
3.Ryoko Shinohara (actress)
4.Masami Hisamoto (comedian, actress, TV/radio show host)
5.Makiko Esumi (actress)
6.Hitomi Kuroki (actress)
7.Yuko Ando (TV newscaster)
8.Yuki Amami (actress)
9.Yukie Nakama (actress)
10.Harumi Edo (comedian, actress)
Within the parameters of media visibility that determines public taste, there is a clear gender gap. Five of the top ten male bosses are vaudevillians who parlayed their comedic skills into a successful acting—mostly though not exclusively limited to comedic roles but rarely authoritative—and hosting careers. They are of course media creations but, within that world are almost exclusively genuine authority figures, sort of on-stage directors. Even active ballplayer Ichiro’s popularity can be attributed to some extent to the real-world virtual captainship of the national team that the media ascribed to him in the Japanese victories in both of the two World Baseball Classics tournaments.
Not so the women. Except for the one comedian who can credibly list show host among her credentials and the one newscaster, they are all actresses—albeit many of them highly accomplished in other performing arts—who have in recent years portrayed lawyers, doctors, cops, businesswomen and other professional roles on TV and film. It is not their public personae but the sum of the fictitious roles that each persona assumes that the new corporate recruits in the survey see as the “ideal female boss”. Their “leadership” is twice removed from reality.
I suspect that this gender gap is more a reflection of the realities of Japanese TV—the subsidiary role of women there—than the actual mindset of the new recruits who were polled. The presence on the list of one of the few prominent females among the large number of show hosting comedians and the one female newscaster, as well as the preponderance of professional roles reflected in the choice of actresses is likely telling us that young people at least are willing to accept women in leadership roles. After all, when I was growing up, these people, these roles barely existed if any. But I’ll never have any measure of certainty until there is a poll that allows only a single, gender-free choice.
On another, related track, a five-nation world youth survey just released by the Cabinet Office (yet to appear on the CAO web site) shows that of the five nations surveyed (Japan, France, South Korea, U.K., U.S.), Japanese youths scored highest in terms of their interest in politics. Given such interest, it is a sign of the times that the only two politicians who made the top 20 in the Meiji Yasuda poll were two governors (the other being Miyazaki Governor Hideo Higashikokubaru, the comedian(!) turned politician, who placed 12th) and a foreign president. (Ten more actresses rounded out the top 20 for women.) Few things better symbolize the state of Japanese politics today, don’t you think?
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Be Careful What You Wish for: The Oita Prefecture Education Scandal
The publicly elected local boards of education, established at the prefectural and municipal levels, comprised one of the more ambitious initiatives taken by Douglas MacArthur and his General Headquarters staff in their wholesale effort to democratize Japan. But political considerations—the then-powerful national teachers’ union took a strongly pacifist-socialist stance—plus public disinterest led to legislation in the 1956 Diet to abolish the electoral system and turn the appointment of the board members over to governors and mayors. The real day-to-day power over the local public education system quickly passed into the hands of the superintendent*, one of the top posts in the local bureaucracy (the superintendent is also a member of the board), and his/her (usually his) staff. And there they toiled mostly in obscurity, barring the occasional corruption case and other isolated incidents… until the Oita bribery charges.
This 17 July Yomiuri report gives a fairly good overview of the education scandal in Oita Prefecture, where for many years top education officials had been heavily altering the results of recruitment tests in order to allow unqualified applicants to be accepted as schoolteachers**. They accepted money and other gifts from the grateful. Some promotions appear to have been similarly tainted. Political pressure also may have worked its magic. The scandal has received extended national attention, partly because little else of import is going on domestically, the Diet having shut down for the summer and no major acute disasters, anthropogenic or otherwise, assaulting the archipelago.
When the scandal first broke out, I had suspicions that irregularities in the hiring of teachers were the rule, Oita Prefecture not the exception. For I remembered hearing on more than one occasion when I was in college that it was near impossible to be hired as a fulltime schoolteacher unless you had kone, or “connections”. I refrained from blogging about the scandal, though, because many years had gone by since then, and I did not have any reliable source of information regarding the current situation beyond Oita Prefecture.
No more. According to the Yomiuri, 35 out of the 64 prefectural and special city education boards—each responsible for the recruitment exams in its area—regularly gave out individual test results to local politicians and their operatives before the applicants were notified. True, there are no accusations of influence peddling beyond the Oita case. However, the only way that I could make use of such information would be to notify successful applicants before they received the information through official channels so that they would believe that I had some influence on the results. Correct me if I’m wrong, but people do not go to such lengths just to create the illusion of importance. There may not be any more fires, but there’s certainly a lot of smoke.
How far and wide does the whiff of corruption extend beyond the education sector? I am not even close to an answer to that question. But in the meantime, let me give you one easily accessible piece of information. Seven out of the 47 governors currently in office succeeded incumbents who resigned as the result of scandals****. In fact, four of their immediate predecessors were arrested and indicted for bribery and related crimes*****. That’s an 8.5% crime rate, well above that of Cabinet Ministers and Administrative Vice-Ministers. In fact, the prefectural governor’s office must be one of the most—if not the most—crime-prone occupations in Japan.
The DPJ and reformists of many colors in the LDP want to turn more money and power over to the locals, and there’s certainly a plausible political case to be made for this. But there’s a nice bridge waiting to be sold to anyone who thinks perforce that corruption will go down and efficiency will go up as the result.
* The English-language media refers to the superintendent as “head of the board’s office” (correct; Asahi) or “head of the…board” (wrong; Yomiuri). I believe that “superintendent” best describes the role Asahi’s describes the role of kyoikucho, the top bureaucrat/administrator in the local education system.
** Other national media outlets are also reporting this extensively, but Yomiuri appears to be the most extensive and long-lived source among the English-language sources.
*** 17 cities designated by Cabinet Order assume many of the powers otherwise assumed by prefectures.
**** Akita, Aomori, Fukushima, Ibaragi, Miyazaki, Saitama, and Wakayama Prefectures.
***** Fukushima, Ibaragi, Miyazaki, and Wakayama. The reason for the resignation of the other three: sexual harassment, political financing irregularities (the governor’s daughter was arrested and indicted), and massive misuse of government funds by the bureaucracy.
This 17 July Yomiuri report gives a fairly good overview of the education scandal in Oita Prefecture, where for many years top education officials had been heavily altering the results of recruitment tests in order to allow unqualified applicants to be accepted as schoolteachers**. They accepted money and other gifts from the grateful. Some promotions appear to have been similarly tainted. Political pressure also may have worked its magic. The scandal has received extended national attention, partly because little else of import is going on domestically, the Diet having shut down for the summer and no major acute disasters, anthropogenic or otherwise, assaulting the archipelago.
When the scandal first broke out, I had suspicions that irregularities in the hiring of teachers were the rule, Oita Prefecture not the exception. For I remembered hearing on more than one occasion when I was in college that it was near impossible to be hired as a fulltime schoolteacher unless you had kone, or “connections”. I refrained from blogging about the scandal, though, because many years had gone by since then, and I did not have any reliable source of information regarding the current situation beyond Oita Prefecture.
No more. According to the Yomiuri, 35 out of the 64 prefectural and special city education boards—each responsible for the recruitment exams in its area—regularly gave out individual test results to local politicians and their operatives before the applicants were notified. True, there are no accusations of influence peddling beyond the Oita case. However, the only way that I could make use of such information would be to notify successful applicants before they received the information through official channels so that they would believe that I had some influence on the results. Correct me if I’m wrong, but people do not go to such lengths just to create the illusion of importance. There may not be any more fires, but there’s certainly a lot of smoke.
How far and wide does the whiff of corruption extend beyond the education sector? I am not even close to an answer to that question. But in the meantime, let me give you one easily accessible piece of information. Seven out of the 47 governors currently in office succeeded incumbents who resigned as the result of scandals****. In fact, four of their immediate predecessors were arrested and indicted for bribery and related crimes*****. That’s an 8.5% crime rate, well above that of Cabinet Ministers and Administrative Vice-Ministers. In fact, the prefectural governor’s office must be one of the most—if not the most—crime-prone occupations in Japan.
The DPJ and reformists of many colors in the LDP want to turn more money and power over to the locals, and there’s certainly a plausible political case to be made for this. But there’s a nice bridge waiting to be sold to anyone who thinks perforce that corruption will go down and efficiency will go up as the result.
* The English-language media refers to the superintendent as “head of the board’s office” (correct; Asahi) or “head of the…board” (wrong; Yomiuri). I believe that “superintendent” best describes the role Asahi’s describes the role of kyoikucho, the top bureaucrat/administrator in the local education system.
** Other national media outlets are also reporting this extensively, but Yomiuri appears to be the most extensive and long-lived source among the English-language sources.
*** 17 cities designated by Cabinet Order assume many of the powers otherwise assumed by prefectures.
**** Akita, Aomori, Fukushima, Ibaragi, Miyazaki, Saitama, and Wakayama Prefectures.
***** Fukushima, Ibaragi, Miyazaki, and Wakayama. The reason for the resignation of the other three: sexual harassment, political financing irregularities (the governor’s daughter was arrested and indicted), and massive misuse of government funds by the bureaucracy.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Do You Know What It's Like to Be Poor, Old, and Lonely in Japan?
But enough about me. Instead, let's talk about Norimitsu Onishi, the New York Times correspondent who has been tracking the travails and agonies of an aging society here (78 year old Okinawan pastor protests whitewash of government role in WW II mass suicide), here (52 year old losing his welfare benefits and starving to death), here (61-year old royal talks of his battle with cancer and alcoholism, family woes, and the stress of life in the troubled extended imperial family), and here (prisons adapting to aging prisoners). That's four of the eight articles he published in the past four weeks. And another story - on sumo - centers on the brutal hazing death of a 17 year old and the rebellious Yokozuna Asashōryū (and a deranged middle-aged woman who tried to crawl onto the sumo ring as a gratuitous throw-in), but "rural areas [emptying] out of young people" weighs heavily in the background.
It is not hard to see in these chronicles a society whose time has passed, where traditions wither and personal ties fade away, where only loneliness and, ultimately, death prevail; an aging nation resigned to its bleak fate. Perhaps appropriately, the characters are all men (unless you count the mad woman); where a newly-widowed Japanese woman often gain a new lease on life, widowers and bachelors run the risk of an early death.
But contrast this desolate vision with this story (Washington Post) of a 64 year old ex-cab driver, happily homeless in downtown Tokyo, homeless that is, until his pension kicks in when he turns 65. For here is a society that may lack the hands-on activism of the soup kitchens of Manhattan, but offers gentle tolerance and understated charity. It is notable that in Mr. Onishi's story on the aged prisoners, the special care and consideration that they receive in the prison system is ultimately used to illuminate a society that is unwilling to accept ex-convicts. (Has Mr. Onishi bothered to compare recidivism rates across age groups and countries?)
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