“Crime and Punishment in Japan: From Re-integrative Shaming to Popular Punitivism”

The title of this post is the title of this interesting piece from The Asian-Pacific Journal, which describes notable developments in criminal justice trends in Japan.  The piece is a few years old, but just showed up on line and still seems timely.  Here is how the piece begins and ends:

Since the Second World War, Japan has avoided the correlation between rising crime and increased affluence that has afflicted other comparable advanced democratic economies.  This has prompted other countries to investigate to famous koban ‘community policing’ principle and to look at notions of re-integrative shaming, which were seen as prevalent in dealing with Japanese offenders.  However, since the late 1990s, the Japanese press and public have lost confidence in their public safety and the effectiveness of the criminal justice system.  Public opinion surveys show that fear of crime among the Japanese has risen. This perceived rise in crime, which is reflected in a 44% increase in recorded crime between 1995 and 2004, is generally associated in the Japanese press with the economic slump during this period, and a subsequent collapse of traditional community-based society.  A major watershed was the way in which police investigative competence was questioned by the press at the end of the 1990s, and the early 2000s, also saw a heavy press focus on a rising tide of youth violence and mass killing sprees….

Western scholars have generally focused on the role of apology and forgiveness in everyday life and in criminal justice in Japan.  However, the questions posed above beg further research into whether Japan has started to resemble other developed countries, such as the US and UK, in moving towards popular punitivism, or whether, at least to some extent, the Japanese public were always more punitive than they were perceived to be.