From the Melbourne, Aus. "The Age". I think this was covered earlier, but this is from a newspaper closer to the scene. A good article to show those who talk of "crime free" Japan and it's gun control. Bold italics mine.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000517/A304-2000May16.html (There will be a fee to retrieve this after today)
Journey to hell
By MICHAEL MILLETT
Wednesday 17 May 2000
"YOU are not going to Tenjin, you are on a journey to hell." Those words proved to be a chillingly accurate prediction for the passengers cowering in the back of the Kyushu Expressway bus.
What was supposed to be a routine commuter trip on the southern Japan island of Kyushu was transformed into a terrifying ordeal by a youth armed with a 40-centimetre blade who hijacked the bus and ordered it to head towards Tokyo, more than 1000 kilometres away.
It would be a ride that none of the passengers, nor the millions of Japanese TV viewers transfixed by the bus's slow progress across the country this month, are likely to forget in a long time.
Pursuing a perverse wish to "live a hero-like existence" (as he later told police), the 17-year-old tormented his hostages for 15 hours and 300 kilometres.
An elderly grandmother was stabbed repeatedly, and later died of her wounds in hospital. "Please come forward. You'll be the next to die," the youth taunted another women huddled in the back seats while he took photographs of the bloodied victim.
Five people were hurt, some of them as they fled the moving vehicle. For most of the journey, a six-year-old girl served as the main hostage, as the hijacker held her at knifepoint to dissuade police attacks.
The nightmare ended only after the teenager dropped his guard, allowing police to storm the parked bus and disarm him. The hijacker, who had a history of mental problems, said later he had planned to kill all 20 passengers.
By itself, the incident was horrifying enough. The Japanese are used to travelling cheek to jowl on the nation's crowded but efficient public transport system. Random murderous attacks on its many arteries are the stuff of nightmares.
But what really jolted the nation out of its Golden Week holiday languor was the combination of that crime and the brutal murder of a 64-year-old Aichi housewife four days earlier. That crime was also committed by a 17-year-old and also for seemingly inexplicable reasons. The arrested teenager, supposedly a model student despite a broken family background, is believed to have told police he wanted to "know what it's like to kill another person".
"I understand that murder is socially unforgivable, but I perceived it differently - as an experience it was necessary for me to have," the unrepentant youth allegedly said.
The two callous incidents have inevitably become hot talking points in a new debate about a perceived "moral crisis" confronting Japan as it moves into the 21st century.
To most outsiders, Japan seems a model of stability. Its crime rate is remarkably low by international standards; its homogenous population is hard-working and has one of the highest standards of living in the world. But many Japanese fear their country is sinking into a social morass, failing to develop a code to replace the rigid group and family-based structure that guided it the past. The warning signs are seen in a sharply rising crime rate, the splintering of the family unit due to financial and other pressures and the emergence of problems such as drug and child abuse.
The education system is struggling to cope with new imperatives such as the demand that it shift its emphasis from group rote learning to individual, creative thinking.
The two Golden Week crimes appear to have struck a particularly sensitive chord. The background of the offenders has thrown up other issues - such as the apparently endemic bullying in schools and the country's inability to deal with its disaffected, disengaged youth.
"Teen violence shocks the nation", the Mainichi Shimbun thundered this week before editorialising: "We are left wondering if our society, which we have put great efforts into building, has somehow drifted away."
In an example of uncanny timing, the debate coincided with the release of the findings of a government survey into juvenile delinquency. It found an alarming acceptance of violence among high school students, with many admitting they had thought about, but refrained from, hitting parents or teachers. Almost half of those quizzed were willing to turn a blind eye to school bullying.
The findings reinforced the view among many Japanese that the nation is cultivating a generation that lacks motivation and direction and, as one Tokyo government publication put it, "is becoming excessively self-centred and unable to get along harmoniously in groups or society".
The central government, alert to the public clamoring for action, will hurry legislation through the Diet to toughen Japan's notoriously flawed laws on juvenile crime. It has also announced it will set up a taskforce and a panel of experts to look at the spate of recent "heinous crimes" committed by minors.
However, the Education Ministry announced a similar move after a 1997 beheading in Kobe by a deranged 14-year-old boy. The same knee-jerk response this time suggests authorities are still floundering for solutions.
Bullying, or "ijime", appears to be an ongoing problem, despite numerous government crackdowns. The Japanese media have latched on to it as a related cause, pointing out that the Kyushu hijacker was a victim of repeated bullying at school.
Former classmates told the Asahi newspaper he had been taunted into jumping from a school building while at junior high and seriously injured his spine. He dropped out of high school after attending classes on only 10 days in one year.
Sadly, that is not an extreme case. Last month police were called in after a group of junior high school students in Nagoya, in central Japan, were found to have extorted a staggering 50 million yen from a classmate over an extended period.
The school suspected ijime but teachers conbfessed later they felt powerless to intervene, especially after the victim's mother pleaded for them not to do anything. The hapless youth was accosted 70 to 80 times over nine months, at one stage being wrapped in tape and left at an abandoned building site. His tormenters used the steady flow of cash to buy designer clothes and frequent local brothels - often during school hours.
Ijime is one of the reasons behind Japan's rising school drop-out rate.
Social experts have also cited the fraying of the family unit as a factor in rising youth crime. The director-general of the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, Hayao Kawai, told Gendai magazine this month that a common thread in many perverse crimes was "their tendency to occur in families where the father is absent or plays no role in the home".
"The contemporary Japanese family exhibits close bonding only between mother and children, and it needs a stern father," he wrote. "We Japanese ought to do further research on this. What should the model for the father really be?
"One thing that can be stated confidently is that the father must be a strict disciplinarian who, after children are born, sets them straight on what they must do in their particular family - and what they absolutely must not do."
Kawai told The Age that Japan's problem stemmed from its forced adoption of democracy after World WarII. While the country had adopted a democratic political system, it had failed to develop a "social backbone" to go with it.
Takeo Mori, a professor in criminal psychology at Senshu University, is unwilling to point the finger at any one factor, although he concedes a worrying trend is emerging. While the number of murders and other violent crimes committed by minors (those aged under 20) has actually fallen since the war, it has spiked over the past few years.
"What is most noticeable is the number of perverse cases, such as a minor killing someone else just for the sake of it," Mori says.
"In postwar society, juvenile delinquency was generally confined to broken families with problems, such as poverty. Recently, however, there have been a number of conspicuous cases involving juveniles growing up in wealthy, intact families.
"Some blame declining educational and family values, others blame greed. As far as education is concerned, there is a tendency to promote not real freedom with responsibility but mere selfishness."
An expert in juvenile law at Senshu University, Professor Yoshiko Iwai, also blames multiple factors.
"The social environment in which children are now growing up has changed dramatically,'' she says.
Low fertility rates mean one-child families are now commonplace, while children are bombarded with unreal, often graphic, images in video games and other forms of modern entertainment.
"We researchers need to analyse this problem properly and convey our findings to society," Iwai says. "It isn't appropriate to blame all the problems on the education system."
According to Police Agency figures, minors committed 117 murders, 1566 robberies and 1847 "acts of violence" in 1998. This was a slight fall on the previous year, but arrest numbers have certainly jumped over the past three years. Arrests for minor offences are surging.
Criminologists say it isn't only juvenile crime that is emerging as a new Japanese problem. Overall crime rates are rising, with a marked increase in "serious crimes" such as homicide, arson, rape and indecent assault.
By international standards, Japan still rates low in the crime stakes. Its homicide rate is half that of Australia and eight times lower than in the United States. Drug-related crime is not the rampant problem it is in many Western nations.
Comparative figures on juvenile crime are hard to come by, given differences in age and crime classifications. But in 1997 Japan's National Police Agency reported 2263 juvenile arrests for serious crimes. Victoria, with a population 4per cent of Japan's, had 1947 arrests for similar offences in 1995-96.
The Police Agency certainly believes there is a problem, referring to Japan approaching a fourth postwar "wave" of juvenile crime.
"In addition to the increase in crimes of brutality, there has also been a rise in the incidence of juveniles inflicting bodily injuries and threatening violence," educational expert Jun'ichi Seto wrote in a 1988 background paper on juvenile crime. "A large number of these cases apparently involve otherwise 'normal' senior and junior high school students. Police officials are reacting with alarm to what they see as a trend towards a new era of `crimes of the moment', in which students with essentially no history of problems suddenly turn to acts of brutality and violence.
"Indeed, the proportions of all crimes of brutality and violence committed by juveniles have risen to 34.1 per cent and 44.5 per cent respectively. These figures approach the highest such percentages ever recorded."
Copyright © The Age Company Ltd 2000.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000517/A304-2000May16.html (There will be a fee to retrieve this after today)
Journey to hell
By MICHAEL MILLETT
Wednesday 17 May 2000
"YOU are not going to Tenjin, you are on a journey to hell." Those words proved to be a chillingly accurate prediction for the passengers cowering in the back of the Kyushu Expressway bus.
What was supposed to be a routine commuter trip on the southern Japan island of Kyushu was transformed into a terrifying ordeal by a youth armed with a 40-centimetre blade who hijacked the bus and ordered it to head towards Tokyo, more than 1000 kilometres away.
It would be a ride that none of the passengers, nor the millions of Japanese TV viewers transfixed by the bus's slow progress across the country this month, are likely to forget in a long time.
Pursuing a perverse wish to "live a hero-like existence" (as he later told police), the 17-year-old tormented his hostages for 15 hours and 300 kilometres.
An elderly grandmother was stabbed repeatedly, and later died of her wounds in hospital. "Please come forward. You'll be the next to die," the youth taunted another women huddled in the back seats while he took photographs of the bloodied victim.
Five people were hurt, some of them as they fled the moving vehicle. For most of the journey, a six-year-old girl served as the main hostage, as the hijacker held her at knifepoint to dissuade police attacks.
The nightmare ended only after the teenager dropped his guard, allowing police to storm the parked bus and disarm him. The hijacker, who had a history of mental problems, said later he had planned to kill all 20 passengers.
By itself, the incident was horrifying enough. The Japanese are used to travelling cheek to jowl on the nation's crowded but efficient public transport system. Random murderous attacks on its many arteries are the stuff of nightmares.
But what really jolted the nation out of its Golden Week holiday languor was the combination of that crime and the brutal murder of a 64-year-old Aichi housewife four days earlier. That crime was also committed by a 17-year-old and also for seemingly inexplicable reasons. The arrested teenager, supposedly a model student despite a broken family background, is believed to have told police he wanted to "know what it's like to kill another person".
"I understand that murder is socially unforgivable, but I perceived it differently - as an experience it was necessary for me to have," the unrepentant youth allegedly said.
The two callous incidents have inevitably become hot talking points in a new debate about a perceived "moral crisis" confronting Japan as it moves into the 21st century.
To most outsiders, Japan seems a model of stability. Its crime rate is remarkably low by international standards; its homogenous population is hard-working and has one of the highest standards of living in the world. But many Japanese fear their country is sinking into a social morass, failing to develop a code to replace the rigid group and family-based structure that guided it the past. The warning signs are seen in a sharply rising crime rate, the splintering of the family unit due to financial and other pressures and the emergence of problems such as drug and child abuse.
The education system is struggling to cope with new imperatives such as the demand that it shift its emphasis from group rote learning to individual, creative thinking.
The two Golden Week crimes appear to have struck a particularly sensitive chord. The background of the offenders has thrown up other issues - such as the apparently endemic bullying in schools and the country's inability to deal with its disaffected, disengaged youth.
"Teen violence shocks the nation", the Mainichi Shimbun thundered this week before editorialising: "We are left wondering if our society, which we have put great efforts into building, has somehow drifted away."
In an example of uncanny timing, the debate coincided with the release of the findings of a government survey into juvenile delinquency. It found an alarming acceptance of violence among high school students, with many admitting they had thought about, but refrained from, hitting parents or teachers. Almost half of those quizzed were willing to turn a blind eye to school bullying.
The findings reinforced the view among many Japanese that the nation is cultivating a generation that lacks motivation and direction and, as one Tokyo government publication put it, "is becoming excessively self-centred and unable to get along harmoniously in groups or society".
The central government, alert to the public clamoring for action, will hurry legislation through the Diet to toughen Japan's notoriously flawed laws on juvenile crime. It has also announced it will set up a taskforce and a panel of experts to look at the spate of recent "heinous crimes" committed by minors.
However, the Education Ministry announced a similar move after a 1997 beheading in Kobe by a deranged 14-year-old boy. The same knee-jerk response this time suggests authorities are still floundering for solutions.
Bullying, or "ijime", appears to be an ongoing problem, despite numerous government crackdowns. The Japanese media have latched on to it as a related cause, pointing out that the Kyushu hijacker was a victim of repeated bullying at school.
Former classmates told the Asahi newspaper he had been taunted into jumping from a school building while at junior high and seriously injured his spine. He dropped out of high school after attending classes on only 10 days in one year.
Sadly, that is not an extreme case. Last month police were called in after a group of junior high school students in Nagoya, in central Japan, were found to have extorted a staggering 50 million yen from a classmate over an extended period.
The school suspected ijime but teachers conbfessed later they felt powerless to intervene, especially after the victim's mother pleaded for them not to do anything. The hapless youth was accosted 70 to 80 times over nine months, at one stage being wrapped in tape and left at an abandoned building site. His tormenters used the steady flow of cash to buy designer clothes and frequent local brothels - often during school hours.
Ijime is one of the reasons behind Japan's rising school drop-out rate.
Social experts have also cited the fraying of the family unit as a factor in rising youth crime. The director-general of the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, Hayao Kawai, told Gendai magazine this month that a common thread in many perverse crimes was "their tendency to occur in families where the father is absent or plays no role in the home".
"The contemporary Japanese family exhibits close bonding only between mother and children, and it needs a stern father," he wrote. "We Japanese ought to do further research on this. What should the model for the father really be?
"One thing that can be stated confidently is that the father must be a strict disciplinarian who, after children are born, sets them straight on what they must do in their particular family - and what they absolutely must not do."
Kawai told The Age that Japan's problem stemmed from its forced adoption of democracy after World WarII. While the country had adopted a democratic political system, it had failed to develop a "social backbone" to go with it.
Takeo Mori, a professor in criminal psychology at Senshu University, is unwilling to point the finger at any one factor, although he concedes a worrying trend is emerging. While the number of murders and other violent crimes committed by minors (those aged under 20) has actually fallen since the war, it has spiked over the past few years.
"What is most noticeable is the number of perverse cases, such as a minor killing someone else just for the sake of it," Mori says.
"In postwar society, juvenile delinquency was generally confined to broken families with problems, such as poverty. Recently, however, there have been a number of conspicuous cases involving juveniles growing up in wealthy, intact families.
"Some blame declining educational and family values, others blame greed. As far as education is concerned, there is a tendency to promote not real freedom with responsibility but mere selfishness."
An expert in juvenile law at Senshu University, Professor Yoshiko Iwai, also blames multiple factors.
"The social environment in which children are now growing up has changed dramatically,'' she says.
Low fertility rates mean one-child families are now commonplace, while children are bombarded with unreal, often graphic, images in video games and other forms of modern entertainment.
"We researchers need to analyse this problem properly and convey our findings to society," Iwai says. "It isn't appropriate to blame all the problems on the education system."
According to Police Agency figures, minors committed 117 murders, 1566 robberies and 1847 "acts of violence" in 1998. This was a slight fall on the previous year, but arrest numbers have certainly jumped over the past three years. Arrests for minor offences are surging.
Criminologists say it isn't only juvenile crime that is emerging as a new Japanese problem. Overall crime rates are rising, with a marked increase in "serious crimes" such as homicide, arson, rape and indecent assault.
By international standards, Japan still rates low in the crime stakes. Its homicide rate is half that of Australia and eight times lower than in the United States. Drug-related crime is not the rampant problem it is in many Western nations.
Comparative figures on juvenile crime are hard to come by, given differences in age and crime classifications. But in 1997 Japan's National Police Agency reported 2263 juvenile arrests for serious crimes. Victoria, with a population 4per cent of Japan's, had 1947 arrests for similar offences in 1995-96.
The Police Agency certainly believes there is a problem, referring to Japan approaching a fourth postwar "wave" of juvenile crime.
"In addition to the increase in crimes of brutality, there has also been a rise in the incidence of juveniles inflicting bodily injuries and threatening violence," educational expert Jun'ichi Seto wrote in a 1988 background paper on juvenile crime. "A large number of these cases apparently involve otherwise 'normal' senior and junior high school students. Police officials are reacting with alarm to what they see as a trend towards a new era of `crimes of the moment', in which students with essentially no history of problems suddenly turn to acts of brutality and violence.
"Indeed, the proportions of all crimes of brutality and violence committed by juveniles have risen to 34.1 per cent and 44.5 per cent respectively. These figures approach the highest such percentages ever recorded."
Copyright © The Age Company Ltd 2000.
