In the wee hours one morning in November, I was woken by the sound of a police car siren. Living downtown, disturbances in the middle of the night are not uncommon, but this night was different. The police car sounded as if it driving slowly up and down the streets around my building, siren blaring on and off.

 

Unable to sleep, I got out of bed to see what the commotion was all about.

 

I stepped out onto the balcony and looked down at the street below, but couldn't find anything amiss. But then came wail of the siren again. This time from the west and only a block away. I went to the living room and looked out the window in the direction the sound had come, but was still unable to see anything.

 

What on earth was going on? I wondered. The siren had sounded so close.

 

Ah, there it was again. This time, I hurried out the front door to get a better look. The siren was growing louder.

 

Standing on the stairwell and looking down the narrow road that passed the rear of my building, I discovered a young man on a bicycle. He was riding one of those electric bikes with the fat tires that look more like off-road motorcycles than your typical mamachari. He headed down the road in my direction. A patrol car, its lights flashing, came around the corner in leisurely pursuit.

 

Judging by the way the bicycle was weaving, the rider was slightly drunk. When he turned onto a wider road, the patrol car pulled up even with the cyclist.

 

"Please stop!" the police officer called politely over the PA system.

 

The patrol car then pulled ahead, attempting to cut the cyclist’s off.



 

"Please stop!"

 

Did the guy on the bike stop?

 

Nope, he just pedaled around the front of the police car, then turned down a narrow alley and continued on his merry way. With its lights flashing, the patrol car sped down the road and was about to turn off onto a side road but ended up getting blocked by a taxi. 



 

I have no idea what happened after that, but judging by the silence, the drunk cyclist probably managed to slip away.

 

I couldn’t help but chuckle.

 

As long as I have lived here—thirty years and counting—the Japanese have been wringing their hands and fretting about the alarming trends the see on daytime wide shows and in the evening news. Perhaps it’s just part of the national character. But, you know, from my perspective, things are pretty darn good here.

 

Despite how people may feel about crime, the police’s own statistics paint a very different picture: “the total number of known cases of penal code offenses has decreased consistently since 2003. In 2021, the number was 568,104, the lowest since the end of the Second World War . . . In 2021, the rate of decrease was 7.5% over the previous year, which was lower than the level in 2020 when COVID-19 broke out.” (National Police Agency: “Crime Situation in 2021”)

 

Did the pandemic influence those numbers? Probably, but crime had already been on the decline since peaking in 2002. It was in the years leading up to 2002 that the “Dankai Juniors”, the cohort of Japanese born in the seventies were in their twenties and unemployment was over 5% — the Employment Ice Age (Shūshoku Hyōgaki), as it was known.

 

As for violent crime, why it’s so rare here that when it does on occasion happen, the more shocking cases tend to get ruminated on in nation's news shows for days if not weeks. On that sleepless morning back in November, America recorded its 500th mass shooting of the year. By comparison, there was only one shooting death in Japan in 2021. Murders, and violent crime in general, have fallen steadily since the sixties. There were 213 murders that same year, compared to over 21,000 in America. I know, apples and oranges. Then, consider England and Wales which has a population about half that of Japan’s and fairly strict gun laws. In the 2022/23 reporting year, 602 homicides were recorded, down from 697 in the previous year.

 

You don’t see homeless people camped out on the streets like I did all over California last spring. LA alone has some 50,000 people sleeping rough and over half a million (582,000) nationwide. In the UK, there are 365,000 homeless; in Germany, 263,000; and in Canada, 235,000. Among Japan’s neighbors, China has over 2.5 million homeless; Korea, over 11,000. In Japan, there are only 3,065, down 11.1% from last year. My adopted home of Fukuoka prefecture has just over 213 homeless, but you’d be hard pressed to actually spot any of them.

 

Although marijuana use among university “American football” players has been a hot topic in the news since last summer, the fact remains that drugs haven’t really been a serious problem in Japan since the end of WWII. There were, for instance, only a handful of arrests (3) in the most recent data related to heroin. Compare that to the opioid crisis in the US which has claimed over 645,000 lives due to overdoses and, well, there just is no comparison.

 

And because it’s so safe, stores in Japan needn’t worry about getting cleaned out by shoplifters or opportunistic rioters like they do in the US and last September in France. Cars rarely get stolen. (Bicycles, do, but if you report it to the police, they might find it in a few months just like they found my son’s bike, god bless ‘em.) Homes seldom get broken into. But, when they do, the culprits are usually found, occasionally perp-walked on national TV, then prosecuted and punished fairly swiftly.

 

No, Japan has the kinds of problems other nations wish they had.

 

Stepping back into my apartment, I discovered my wife at the genkan.

 

What happened, she asked sleepily. When I told her about the drunk cyclist playing cat and mouse with a patrol car, she laughed and said, “Nihon wa heiwa desu ne.” Japan’s a peaceful country, isn’t it.



 

“Ain’ it?”

 

And with that, I went back to bed and fell fast asleep.