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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

We know from Xi's visit to San Fran that it's possible to clean up the streets if there is political will. The same could be said for El Salvador.

Why the lack of political will?

I think part of the answer is that it's easier to be tough on crime when there isn't a lot of crime.

Something like 1/3 of all adult black men have felony convictions in the USA. That means that probably almost every single black person is one or at most two degrees removed from a felon. The criminal class isn't some "other" that is distinct from the society and you can do what you will with them. They are cousins and nephews and sons.

Even El Salvador got around this by basically declaring people with tattoos an "other", which worked for much the same way it works in Japan (only criminals get tattoos).

By contrast since the Japanese are so law abiding there is a really strong separation between the criminals and the citizens. If the cops are harsh on criminals the citizens aren't worried about it affecting them.

In the USA, especially with blacks, the citizens identify with the criminals to some degree. In the USA OJ Simpsons recently died, and they had interviews with the jurors and others. Many admitted that they knew OJ murdered those people, but they supported the fact that a black man had killed two white people and wanted him to get away with it! People would just say this on national television. Could you imagine this in Japan?

Another reason is that Japan's criminal caste are generally high IQ asians. They also "behave" within the context of being criminals. Violence is purposeful rather than random, most of the time.

Finally, the use of hard drugs in a recreational setting by UMC and above creates a constituency that doesn't want drug laws enforced too harshly. But hard drugs fuck up the lives of most people who take them. Japan doesn't have this problem.

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Kitsune, Maskless Crusader.'s avatar

Here is the response I sent in. It was published Nov 4. 2013.

No safe country for foreign women: the debate

“Japan: no safe country for foreign women (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2013/10/23/voices/japan-no-safe-country-for-foreign-women/),” Holly Lanasolyluna’s article published in the new Foreign Agenda slot on Oct. 23, attracted an unprecedented number of online comments. More than 5,000 people also answered the accompanying poll about safety in Japan. Here are just some of the mails and comments.

Not a strictly foreign problem

Yes, Japanese women are also victims. I teach at university and have had the following stories related to me by students.

While at a birthday party for a classmate, a friend of two of my students received a phone call from her boss at her part-time job. She worked for a dentist in Shinjuku. He said he needed to meet with her about something work-related.

It was around 10 p.m. on Tuesday night and she didn’t want to meet him, and asked if it could wait until the next time she was at work. He insisted, and said that he would drive out to where the party was and pick her up. Her friends — my students — overheard the conversation and joked that he was going to profess his love for her. She responded that she would not like that at all.

He called again around 11 p.m. to tell her he had arrived. Expressing disgust, she told her friends that she would be “right back” and left the party, leaving her book bag, club gear and purse behind. Her friends have not seen nor heard from her since.

After weeks of searching (they didn’t go to the police out of fear of “making it worse”) they found a friend of a friend of her family. All they were able to learn was that she was alive. They got her home address to send her purse and other belongings to her. A month later, all the students in the same year as her were called together and told that she dropped out of school and that they should not try to contact her. That was October 2010.

One of the girls who used to know her said that four other of her friends have also been raped. Only one went to the police, and after her experience with them, she said that if ever she was raped again, she would not report it. The police at the kōban [police box] where she reported the attack made her show them what he did to her and where he touched her. She felt as if she had been raped a second time by the intrusive questions and contact by the male police officers taking her report.

The second attack was on a longtime student of mine. She related her experiences during our discussion class, made up of a small group of close friends, all of whom were my longtime students. As she was walking home from her station in downtown Tokyo late at night, a man grabbed her from behind and, with his hand over her mouth, carried her between two office buildings and raped her.

Afterwards, she immediately ran to the kōban to report it. The officer on duty there cautioned her that if she filed a report the police would have to inform her parents, even through she was of adult age. Voicing her desire not to have her family, especially her father, know, and yet afraid of being attacked again, the police officer told her, “Don’t worry, this is a safe area.” She left for home without filing the report.

Later, she would tell her family, except for her father. Once her father did learn of it, he became infuriated and did not speak or even look at her for a month. Getting over his anger at her, he and the rest of her family then urged her to file a report. It was then at least a couple of months since the attack. I haven’t had contact with her since so I do not know the outcome. I do know that I have read about neither in the newspapers nor heard about them via any other news media.

A few years ago my wife was given the following warning from a member of a group we were members of. The speaker was a police officer assigned to the labor ministry to investigate workplace crime. She told all the female members of the group not to go into any bathrooms in

any of the department stores in Shinjuku alone. She was investigating reported rapes numbering in the hundreds. Men would either follow a victim into the restroom or be waiting for them inside.

Whenever I try to tell anyone about any of this, the first thing they ask is always, “Are [the rapists] Japanese?” Second is, “In Japan?” Most of the Japanese men I tell this to get very angry, call me a “lying Japan-basher,” and disassociate themselves from me. Several Japanese women have responded the same way. Others are shocked and outraged. Some just look down in silence.”

I will add here that the story of the rapes in Shinjuku restrooms infuriated my wife as these rapes were obviously reported, otherwise, how could our friend be investigating them. I leave that to be pondered.

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