Are the Yakuza an Easy Mark or What?

Japanese electoral politics has been boiled down to one thing—the Ozawa deathwatch. All else, barring unforeseen events, has become trivialized. In the meantime…

According to a couple of media reports, on July 7 last year, the day of the Japanese Star Festival Tanabata, a heartless plumber and four of his meanie drinking pals ganged up on a senior official in the yakuza group Kyokuto-kai and a couple of his assistants who were peacefully working a food stall at—where else?—a Tanabata Festival. Armed with a fake 8-inch sword, a cooking knife, and two police batons, the amateur gang of five took only two hours to convince the yakuza to hand over 800,000 yen in sales and sign a note promising to pay another 500,00 yen. They believed that a yakuza would never file a complaint with the police and continued harassing him, issuing threats of harm to his family. The pressure apparently got so great that the yakuza did go to the police later in the month. Today, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Agency announced that it had finally cracked the case and arrested the five men.

It took almost ten months, but justice has come, once again, to the rescue of the weak and downtrodden. Hooray.

Why Pirates Are Losing to Cruise Ships

My experience with cruise ships is limited. And when I say limited, I mean limited. But I do have enough experience as a human being to know that lots of strangers with too much time on their hands on one hand and lots of booze on the other is a combustible combination. Imagine spring break for grownups. Without cops. On second thought, don’t. So, unlike a cargo ship, there must be a security team on board, and since this is not Japan, it will be armed.

But why are the pirates always losing? Two words: risk management. Pirates are businessmen, not soldiers. Their mission is to make money, not war. Taking life doesn’t make sense; losing it, even less. It is instructive that the revenge spree that some feared after the U.S. snipers shot three pirates never emerged.

Italian Cruise Ship Repels Pirates with Gunfire

That’s what the NYT headline to this Reuters wire says. Now it quotes Andrew Mwangura of the Mombasa-based East African Sea Farers Assistance Programme, whoever and whatever that is:

”Having weapons on a passenger or merchant ship is dangerous. They should have used other means to shake off the pirates, like a loud acoustic device," said Andrew Mwangura of the Mombasa-based East African Sea Farers Assistance Programme.”

“Only military ships should have weapons on board.”

Perhaps. But wasn’t that so...Italian? And before you have time to second-guess the captain’s decision, NYT goes on to note:

It is not the first time that pirates have tried to seize a cruise ship, but they have always been fended off.

It works. So who needs GeorgeStephen Seagal?

The real question, of course, is: What the hell are these cruise ships and private yachts doing here? This isn’t a Disneyland theme park.

Weekend Digression on an Oppressed Minority—the Gaijin

I should be telling you how the Public Prosecutors Office has been going after Toshihiro Nikai, the METI Minister, and how his case looks at least as bad as Ozawa’s and what I think that means and how that ties into the pox-on-both-houses public opinions polls that we’ve been seeing recently. I should then be comparing them to Elliot Spitzer and Thomas Dewey and other crusading, elected prosecutorial officials in the United Sates and what that means to governance. In short, adding to the greater debate. Alas, I do not have the time. And I am already drunk. So instead, I’m going to post an email response of mine, edited partly to protect the guilty, mostly...oh, enjoy.

But first, for those who are not permanent residents of Japan and do not follow the Japanese gaijin scene with slavish devotion, Arudo Debito is a naturalized citizen of Japan born in the United States who has devoted much of his public life to exposing and lobbying against what the gross mistreatment of foreigners in Japan. He achieved public reknown when he exposed heinous Hokkaido bathhouses who imposed a blanket ban on gaijin in an ostensive attempt to keep out Russian sailors who repeatedly failed to observe house rules (such as washing yourself before you plop into the communal tub). Okay, there’s more to this story. But you get the idea.

Now, fast forward to 27 March 2009. I receive an email from a cross-dressing, heterosexual, lambada dancer NTTIAWWT that carries a report alleged to be the work of said Mr. Debito entitled: Punishing foreigners, exonerating Japanese. The essence of the report:

“So let's summarize: If you're a foreigner facing Japan's criminal justice system, you can be questioned without probable cause on the street by police, apprehended for ‘voluntary questioning’ in a foreign language, incarcerated perpetually while in litigation, and treated differently in jurisprudence than a Japanese.

Statistics bear this out. According to [Professor David T.] Johnson, 10 percent of all trials in Japan had foreign defendants in 2000. Considering that non-Japanese residents back then were 1.3 percent of the Japanese population, and foreign crime (depending on how you calculate it) ranged between 1 and 4 percent of the total, you have a disproportionate number of foreigners behind bars in Japan.”

Maybe, maybe not. But the facts and claims that the report attributes to Mr. Debito appear to be open to some question. And this is where my email, somewhat edited, comes in:

The report claims that in “the case of Lindsay Ann Hawker, who was allegedly murdered by Tatsuya Ichihashi in 2007[, Ichihashi] is just accused of “abandonment of a corpse”. Yet in the, Ichihashi is being sought by the Chiba Police for, you wouldn’t guess, murder (and abandoning a corpse).

Mr. Debito also refers to other

“other crimes against non-Japanese women, like those of convicted serial rapist Joji Obara. His connection with the Lucie Blackman murder has been well-reported, particularly the botched police investigation despite ample material evidence—even videotapes of his rapes. Regardless, in 2007 Obara was acquitted of Blackman's murder due to ‘lack of evidence.’

“Obara did get life imprisonment (not death), since he was only charged with ‘rape leading to death’ of nine other women (one of them foreign). But only after strenuous appeals from Blackman's family was the acquittal overturned in 2008. Obara became guilty of ‘dismembering and abandoning’ her corpse. Again, guilty of crimes to their dead bodies, not of making them dead.”

Leaving aside the magic by which one corpse—one too many, I hasten to add—becomes “dead bodies”, the report neglects to add that there was compelling evidence to cast at least a reasonable doubt that Obara had no intent of causing physical injury to at least one of his two dead victims—the other six (not seven?) survived—and fails to make any claims regarding such intent towards Ms. Blackman. In fact, the facts of the Obara case as asserted by the report itself suggest that his punishment, a life sentence, was about as far as it could possibly have gone, since it is next to impossible for a Japanese court to impose the death penalty in a homicide case without a finding—again beyond a reasonable doubt—of such intent (unless you want to claim that Obara actually got a disproportionately heavy sentence—after all, the courts found only one death attributable beyond a reasonable doubt—only because he was a naturalized citizen, an ethnic Korean, who everyone knows has the hardest time of it). And the following doesn’t even make the faintest of sense:

Generally, in these situations the survivor goes down for "too much self-defense" (kajo boei), regardless of intent. That precedent was set in the 1980s by Steve Bellamy, a British martial artist who intervened in a drunken altercation and killed someone. Bellamy was acquitted of wrongdoing, then convicted on appeal, then acquitted again.

I have nothing to say about the other specific cases because I don’t seen anything hese except allegations and assertions. The gaijin may or may not have been wronged. But it does them little benefit to have their cases lumped together with the other allegations.

As for the statistics cited in the opening quote, gross prosecution numbers are greatly distorted by the large number of immigration law infractions, which are naturally mostly committed in Japanese jurisdiction by non-Japanese. Subtract them, and you can actually argue that Japanese courts go easy on gaijin, who are significantly more likely to get suspended sentences than Japanese citizens for regular crimes. But I won’t, because you have to look closely at the data and as variety of circumstances and conditions before coming to conclusions either way with any degree of confidence. A careful examination of the data available here may tell us whether there is or is not a meaningful bias one way or the other.

I’d be happy to do a more thorough investigation of this matter, and I suspect that it will turn out to be a total takedown of the report. Actually, there is nothing that I’d like to do more, since, as all my acquaintances know, I am naturally mean and enjoy nothing more than... life, however, is so short; so many flowers to pluck, so many nuns to kick. In the meantime, though, will someone please tell whoever wrote that report that I do heavy-duty fact-checking for $200/hr.

Sanctioning a General, Hazing, and Other Matters

I placed a comment on the Shisaku blog regarding sanctions (or lack thereof) on General Tamogami, the hazing deaths in a sumo stable and the Maritime Self-Defense Force, and other matters. Since it’s a pretty long one and some thought went into writing it, I’ll let it double as my post of the day and spend the rest of the day celebrating the good fortune of being a longtime Celtics fan.

I do have something more to say about Ret. General Tamogami, but it’s fairly trivial. Rather, one of these days, I’ll try to write up my thoughts on an aspect of the intellectual comportment of Prime Minister Aso before it becomes irrelevant. But not today. Merry Christmas.

They Say Every Shark Has Its Suckerfish

Or they should. Anyhow, at least Madoff worked his ass off doing his grift. But this Jacob Merkin? Basically, he passed his clients’ money along to Madoff and skimmed off 1.5% for doing nothing. In fact, he does not appear to be the only one doing so. Amazing how easily trust can be exploited.

Follow-Up on Gaijin Crime

Yesterday, I wrote a post trying to explain how the Tokyo bid for the 2016 Olympics is making Governor Shintaro Ishihara less emotionally distressful to behold for non-Japanese in Japan and elsewhere. I received several interesting comments, to which I wound up writing in effect two rather long responses. Since this effort took up so much of my time and goes well beyond the scope of the original post, I’ve decided to exercise my prerogative as the blogger and post it separately. That way, I can satisfy my bloglust for the day without thinking up a completely new one. But you'll have to read the comments to the original post to fully understand what I'm talking about. I’m sorry about that. It won’t happen very often.

So here you are:

Darin, Janne, Michael:

The FY2007 Annual Criminal Statistics lists the criminal violations which are included in its statistics. It does not include visa and other immigration law violations. (It also excludes traffic violation-related crimes under the Criminal Code.) According to the FY2007 Annual Criminal Statistics on Crime, which I linked to, 365,577 criminals were apprehended, who committed a total of 605,358 between them in FY2007 (table 5-7). The numbers for gaijin are 7,528 and 25,730 respectively (table 5-17). In other words, gaijin accounted for 2.1% of criminals apprehended and 4.3% of crimes attributable to apprehended criminals. Since the number of gaijin crime has been going down in recent years, the “2-3%” range cited in the article appears to be reasonable. Sorry, I don’t have conviction figures, but I understand that it is in the high 90-percentile range overall, and have no reason to think that it is otherwise for gaijin defendants.

There’s more. The Annual Criminal Statistics notes on page 112 that of the crimes attributable to gaijin criminals, 63.3% were committed by two or more criminals, in contrast to 16.5% for crimes where Japanese criminals were apprehended. This is particularly true in the case of theft, which comprise an astonishing 83% of gaijin crime. In contrast, the overall figures are more or less uniform across the categories of crimes, with slight variations. It is interesting that the respective percentages for violent crimes excluding forcible burglary are very similar. The Annual Criminal Statistics does not give statistical figures for crimes committed jointly by Japanese and gaijin, but it is nevertheless clear from this and the figures in the previous paragraph that statistically speaking gaijin are not only twice as more prone to being apprehended for crimes but to do so in groups (or at least pairs) to commit crimes for economic gain. This indicates a higher level of professionalism among gaijin criminals than the criminal population in general. Given the relative ease for gaijin criminals to slip in and out of the country—the example of South Korean pickpocket groups come to mind—there was some justification beyond the public clamor over highly-celebrated cases to focus on this specific category from time to time as one of maybe a dozen issues in drafting a White Paper on Crime.

The lower rates cited by Janne are likely the result of taking the overall number of crimes reported—1,908,836—as the denominator. Since it is reasonable to assume that a proportionate number of those crimes to gaijin criminals (unless one assumes that gaijin criminals are stupider than Japanese criminals and are thus more prone to be apprehended), such lower rates are meaningless. But yes, age and gender also matter too. That was what I was referring to when I wrote of the demographics.

The gaijin numbers have not been inflated by the disproportionate representation (if Robert Whiting’s Tokyo Underworld, for example, is to be believed) of permanent-resident Koreans among yakuza members. Permanent residents as well as the U.S. military and related personnel have been excluded from the Annual Criminal Statistics statistics as far as gaijin crimes are concerned. Note though that any yakuza-zainichi relationship has nothing to do with any criminal tendencies among the zainichi, and everything to do with the fact, which I believe that I’ve noted elsewhere, that the yakuza industry was one of the few categories of Japanese businesses that were equal-opportunity employers throughout the post-WW II years.

Finally, I don’t think that Governor Ishihara was talking about all this for electoral purposes. In any case, you won’t hear him talking about it while the Tokyo bid for the 2016 Olympics is alive. He may be ornery, but he ain’t dumb. So root for Tokyo, hear?

I hope that I’ve covered all your points, Darin, Janne, Michael.

Now it’s your turn, anonymous. Sorry about that. Your anonymity, that is. You sound reasonably intelligent and are obviously able to read Japanese. Moreover, I've seen views similar to yours expressed elsewhere, so I see no reason for you to hide behind the cloak of anonymity, unless you want to avoid defending your anecdotes with facts.

Let’s take you seriously though and consider what appears to be the main thrust of your arguments, that “racist ‘J cops’ (is that ‘g slang’?)” are the reason for the higher gaijin crime rate. You say:

“Crime stats show gaijin are arrested for violent crime at a rate proportionate to the population, EVEN THOUGH the racist J cops pay extra special attention to us. I assume that if we all looked Japanese, the rate would be significantly lower.”

Let me elaborate your assertion as follows: the crime statistics greatly exaggerate the magnitude of gaijin crime because it includes “resolved cases”, i.e. criminal cases that have been found to lack the necessary conditions to constitute crimes, but excludes the people apprehended with regard to those “resolved cases”. To back up your assertion, you should have referred to the low number of apprehended gaijin relative to the number of apprehended crimes attributed to gaijin in comparison to the overall statistics. This is a plausible argument; but convincing? I think not. As I’ve already pointed out in my response to the first three comments, the vast majority of gaijin crimes appear to have been committed by professional criminal groups seeking economic gain. That, and not handcuff-happy “racist J cops”, accounts for the disproportionately large number of “g crimes” relative to the number of apprehended gaijin.

Your anecdote regarding a friend of a friend is just that: an anecdote regarding a friend of a friend. Disregarding the inevitable ambiguities in hearsay once removed for the moment, I never accept claims from one side of a criminal case as the irrefutable truth. Not only do otherwise upright citizens lie or omit some relevant facts to protect themselves or put themselves in a better light, they also genuinely misremember.

As for the bar fight anecdotes, has anyone bothered to put the stories together in a verifiable manner and plead the case in public? Note though that the gaijin/general-population discrepancy in crimes/criminals ratio does not exist for violent non-economic crime.

Something similar must be said for the atariya anecdotes. Do you know of any comparisons between the overall success rate of the atariya? I can give you accounts of how the police are believed to come down harshly on drivers in general, but pitting anecdotes against anecdotes is meaningless, and will more often than not wind up in putting the antagonists back in their respective echo chambers.

As for hiding inconvenient evidence, I assume that it happens, though how large a problem it is, or whether it is any more serious than it is Stateside (where I assume you come from), I do not know. I say this because there have been documented cases to that effect.

Finally, and this is my personal observation: The police do go by looks. They will react to your manner of speech, your body language, your clothes, and presumably other clues about your past actions or future intent. I’ve noticed this same phenomenon among taxi drivers. I think that the common thread between the two occupations is that the professionals must make split-second decisions regarding people they come into contact with that may have life-or-death implications. I assume that this is the same the world over. Moreover, in the case of policemen, Japanese public opinion comes down harshly on any use of guns. I try to keep these things in mind when I deal with the police. I assure you, it makes my experience in asking for directions that much more pleasant. I know that none of what I’ve written here is likely to serve in any way to induce you to reconsider your preconceptions, but I do think that I owe you this practical tip of sorts as a token of appreciation for your comment.

Why Gaijin Crime Has Dropped off Governor Ishihara’s Radar Screen

Have any of you been wondering why we’re hearing so little lately from Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara about gaijin criminals and undesirable sangokujin? Look no further than his trip to Beijing to attend the opening ceremonies.

Yes, it certainly helps that violent crime committed by gaijin has been dropping precipitously from its 2004 peak at 345 to 270 in 2007 (though murders committed by gaijin have remained relatively stable, going from 40 to 41 during that same period*). But where Mr. Ishihara is concerned, I’m sure that his reticence has far more to do with what he hopes will be his last great act as Governor, Tokyo’s candidacy for the 2016 Olympics**.

So my advice to you, MTC if you want some peace and quiet for the next eight years is to pray to your god or whatever moves you for Tokyo to prevail. You don’t want an angry Mr. Ishihara hunting for gaijin scalp.

* Media-wise, the number of murders is less relevant than the number of Japanese victims. Gaijin-on-gaijin crime will not attract much attention unless it is part of a larger pattern involving, say, a turf fight between Iranian drug-dealer groups. This has nothing to do with racism; witness the near-absolute US indifference to Iraqi casualties over the last five years.

** The official website is available in English, Chinese (national Olympic Committees: China, Hong Kong, Singapore) and Korean (…North and South Korea), but not in Arabic (…Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Jordan…), French (…France, Belgium, Senegal, Cote D’Ivoire…) or Spanish (…Spain, Mexico, Argentina…), three other languages that would be widely appreciated. Too late to drop Chinese and Korean, but someone should alert Mr. Ishihara.

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Incidentally, I found this old article on gaijin crime while I was searching for data on this issue. To quote:

Over the past two decades, crimes committed by foreigners have never exceeded about 4% of all crime in Japan, and typically the yearly average has been between 2% and 3%. Foreigners currently make up just over 1% of Japan's total population, so they are only slightly over-represented in the figures. Despite this, the police, lawmakers and the media have focused on foreign crime as if it were one of the most serious issues facing Japan. For example, five of the 16 annual Police White Paper policy reports published between 1987 and 2003 took crimes committed by foreigners as their main theme.

Double, triple the overall crime rate? Sounds pretty high to me. Actually, much if not most of it should be explained away by the different demographics. Still, this is sloppy scholarship. More deceptively, yes, Police White Papers during this period did take up gaijin crime several times—as one of a dozen or so topics, not “main theme”, each year.

Intellectual fraud, or honest mistake? I report, you decide.

What’s Up with US Military Criminal Suspects Now?

Nothing, really. Last week, CNN reports, the U.S. Military in Japan charged “Staff Sgt. Tyrone Luther Hadnott, 38,… with the rape of a child under 16, abusive sexual contact with a child, making a false official statement, adultery and kidnapping.*” Today, there’s aReuters report on a groping charge against a member of the US Air Force. And you know what? Life goes on, and the US military bases remain. Why?

Well, part of the reason may be that the crime rate for the US military and their dependents is noticeably lower than the Japanese population as a whole. That’s true for Okinawa, for sure. At least that’s what a Japanese website that linked to relevant crime statistics said. Rough, back-of-the-envelope calculations confirmed the website’s conclusions**. So I let the matter go, thinking that the issue would die down, until the next tabloid-worthy accusations. And here we are.

The low incidence of US military crimes in Japan is not that surprising. I’m sure that the average Okinawan is not any more criminally inclined than me, or the rest of the Japanese population. But US soldiers are by definition gainfully employed in a physically and psychologically demanding, highly regimented, workplace. Fulltime. Criminal records, until very recently, would have seriously hampered US citizens and citizenship-seeking residents in getting jobs in the US military. In other words, the US military tends to attract law-abiding men and women who are generally not in a situation to commit serious crimes. Moreover, there are no stressful battlefield situations in Okinawa to make you snap. Recidivism won’t be a problem either, unless US military personnel convicted of crimes are released back into the Okinawa population.

Then what was the meaning of all that attention to the military crime epidemic? Mainly because it was about Okinawa, where there’s a history that stretches back to its experience with the imperial army. And also because it was about the US military—it’s the “shark attack epidemic” effect. A rash of felonies, and the entire media forgets the law of averages.

Do not worry, Ambassador Shieffer, though; it’s not just your soldiers whose crimes catch the attention of the Japanese media. Any crime by any man (rarely if ever woman) in uniform is vastly more newsworthy than a crime of similar proportions by a run-of-the-mill civilian. A policeman leaves the force after five years of duty, kills a guy fifteen years later, he’s identified as an ex-cop: little else that he’s done since then matters. The same holds true for the Self-Defense Force.

Moreover, there’s another, related category of people who receive the same treatment—bureaucrats. Fifteen years from now, if I am arrested for criminal defamation, you can be sure that I’ll be identified not as an inveterate blogger but as an ex-METI official***. Which is why I double-check every single fact on this blog. Trust me.

As I said, life goes on. We haven’t gotten rid of the police. We haven’t gotten rid of the Self-Defense Forces. And the last time I looked, METI was alive and kicking. I don’t think we’ll be demanding that the Yankees go home any time soon. Not while North Korea or, for many people here, an authoritarian China is around.

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Speaking of sex offender bureaucrats, this AP report says that a Kinokawa official was demoted for accessing porn sites more than 780,000 times over a period of nine months. The Kinokawa official making the announcement said that the disgraced official accessed porn sites 170,000 times last July alone.

Assuming that the official worked heroic 80-hour weeks and spent them solely on accessing porn sites, a conservative estimate says that the (obviously) guy had to access porn sites every eight seconds that he was on the job. I’m not sure that my fingers won’t drop off after one full day of that kind of activity. Is there some kind of automatic porn-downloading software that lets you do that? And if so, how does the software know that it’s obscene when it sees it?

* Note that the photo in the report came from the original February demonstrations. Note also that the report says “under 16” and “adultery”. The first hints suggests that my conjecture that a straightforward rape charge may not be sustainable under the Japanese Criminal Code (the age of consent under that law is 14) was more likely than not correct; the second tells you that there’s more that needs updating in the US military than the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule.

** I can’t be sure where I found it, it’s been quite awhile; but I think that thispost might be it. It appears to link to the relevant statistics.

*** Teachers and professors are fair game, but I don’t see suspects and convicted criminals identified as ex-teachers…. Maybe the media lose interest in educators as criminals once they leave the profession.

National: The Political Impact of the Collision off Tokyo Bay; Multi-1,000,000,000,000 Settlement in Store on Gasoline Taxes?

I’ll return to my regular programming when I think that I have a better handle on things here, beyond the facts. In the meantime, here are a couple of memos on things that have interested me of late:

The Atago-Fishing Boat Collision and the Defense Minister

Over here, the collision between the Aegis destroyer Atago and the fishing vessel that left the latter’s two-man crew unaccounted for in the winter waters off Tokyo Bay has almost complete obscured the Okinawa rape story (alleged: I now think that there is a reasonable chance that the US Marine will be facing lesser charges; and yes, stories, but you know what sells ads?). Most importantly, it forced Prime Minister Fukuda’s hand, and, in a twist of irony, actually reinforced the position of Shigeru Ishiba, the Defense Minster*. Not nearly as good for Mr. Fukuda himself though. The accident has further undermined public confidence in his administration. And there isn’t a quick fix in sight.

The 1,000,000,000,000 Yen Giveaway － for Starters?

The ruling coalition is begging the DPJ to come to terms on a settlement for the gasoline taxes. Yesterday, on Sunday Project, Kaoru Yosano, LDP Mr. Fix-It and go-between with regard to the enigmatic DPJ chief Ichirō Ozawa, matter-of-factly lopped 10,000,000,000,000 yen off the 10-Year, 59,000,000,000,000 yen road building program by reminding viewers that public works are being reduced 3% annually in the first place so it adds up to only 49,000,000,000,000 yen. When the incredulous Sōichiro Tawara, the 2,000 year-old host, asked why then they were claiming 59,000,000,000,000, Mr. Yosano answered, “They’re probably saying that to make people feel happy for the time being.” At least that’s what I remember him saying**. In Japanese. I may be off a 1,000,000,000,000 or two.

Now fiscal conservative Mr. Yosano, strictly speaking, is speaking only for himself. But it’s important to remember that the LDP itself is committed to putting the gasoline tax revenue into the general budget under the Koizumi reform. It was always a work in progress, and the process had threatened to crawl to a near-halt under an all-out assault from the road tribe and its supporters. But as Mr. Yosano’s remarkable comment shows, the LDP itself is divided on this issue. Meanwhile, the DPJ has wisely shifted the emphasis away from cheaper gasoline to waste in government.

I’m still still convinced that a compromise will be reached by March 31. But I now believe that it will contain more substance than a simple timeout.

And, yes, it’s a lot of trouble typing twelve zeroes over and over. But it’s fun.

* I hope to have more time later to elaborate on this point.

**Shisaku-san (that’ll have to do until I find out what the non-honorific form of address is in *********ian) should have the video.