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Beware of Bad Foreigners!
Imagine opening the newspaper and reading this headline: Crimes by Japanese Abroad Skyrocket: Murder, Robbery, Theft Up 50%. If you are Japanese, your first reaction may be anger: We Japanese are no criminals! Second may be disbelief: Where did they get these numbers?
Don’t worry. Even though the numbers are straight from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the years 1995 to 2000, you will never see this headline in Japan. This is because it would be irresponsible to report on the number of crimes by Japanese abroad without looking at changes in the number of Japanese people abroad. It would also be irresponsible to include murder, without noting that murders, taken separately, rose but then returned to their previous level. It would be irresponsible not to mention that figures had actually fallen by fifteen percent from 1999 to 2000, the most recent year.
And it would be downright negligent to draw broad conclusions from the meager 276 crimes that make up the data. Sadly, in reporting crimes by foreigners, the Japanese media commit all of the above kinds of mistakes. No wonder, then, that foreigners in Japan are perceived as dangerous - even though Japanese have a higher crime rate. No, that’s not a misprint: The crime rate is higher for Japanese.
Far higher, according to Ryogo Mabuchi, an associate professor of sociology at Nara University. Mr. Mabuchi says the crime rate among Japanese is roughly double that among non-permanent foreign residents including U.S. military personnel. For the number of heinous crimes, the rates for Japanese and foreigners are roughly equal, although for the number of violent criminals, the rate for Japanese is about five times that for foreigners.
Mr. Mabuchi says his students are surprised to hear such figures, which fly in the face of common perceptions. He blames this perception gap on the media, although he also believes the National Police Agency could do a better job of framing their statistics.
“I don’t think the police are prejudiced against foreigners,” he says. “I think the police are reporting accurately on the frequency of crime occurrence. However, their crime statistics do not compare the ratio of non-Japanese criminals residing in Japan - that is, the number of arrested per 100,000 of such residents - with that of Japanese criminals. So these statistics don’t accurately show the relative danger of foreigners and Japanese.” He thinks the media should provide more balance rather than simply reporting the statistics announced by the police. “They should report in a way that avoids the appearance of anti-foreign bias.”
Mr. Mabuchi’s research has shown that crimes by foreigners are greatly over-represented in the press. He compared the number of people arrested for Penal Code violations (robbery, theft, extortion, murder and the like) with the number of people appearing in 2,579 articles on arrests published in the Asahi Shimbun for the first half of 1998. He found that fewer than 2 in 100 arrested Japanese made the crime pages, versus more than 7 in 100 arrested non-Japanese. In fact, an arrested foreigner was almost five times more likely than an arrested Japanese to be written up.
This is particularly alarming given the Asahi’s reputation for being more racially sophisticated than most Japanese newspapers. But perhaps it is not surprising, when one examines journalistic ethics in Japan.
LOOSE CANON
In most countries, even those not known as paragons of human rights, the media have established sensible ethical guidelines on race. Here’s a typical example from The Daily Press of Hampton Roads, Virginia (U.S.A.): “Identify a person or group by race only when such identification is relevant or is an essential element of the story; introduce race to a story only when it is an issue of relevance to the story.” In Japan, such guidelines are conspicuously absent. The Canon of Journalism of The Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association never once mentions race.
Some North American and European journalists believe that racial sensitivity in Western media has gone too far, mutating into an unhealthy hypersensitivity. William McGowan made this indictment in Coloring the News (Encounter Books, 2001). As one example of hypersensitivity, he cited the case of a serial rapist in New York whose police description included his race. The New York Times omitted printing the race of the minority perpetrator, even though he was still at large and the description could have led to his arrest. Mr. McGowan argued that racial details are sometimes very relevant: When a dangerous criminal has not been apprehended, public safety trumps any concern for bruised racial feelings, and a full description should be given.
The following stories from the Japanese media, however, fail to meet sensible standards.
