"If it bleeds, it leads” goes the old newsroom adage. In these days of unprecedented financial pressure on media outlets, this may never have been truer. It’s hardly any wonder, then, that blood and gore – for which many readers and viewers appear to have an almost insatiable appetite anyway – fills more column inches and screen time than ever.

Can the media justify “giving people what they want” in terms of salacious crime reporting even when – as in remarkably non-violent Japan – this includes creating the almost entirely erroneous perception that the country is becoming increasingly dangerous?

Earlier this year, the news “trickled out” that in 2009 there were a total of 1,097 murders, attempted murders and conspiracies to murder combined, as recorded by the National Police Agency (NPA). This was down around 200 on the previous year, and to around a third of the number recorded in 1954, when the population was about 40 million lower than it is today. Although there are questions about the low rates of autopsies carried out, and no doubt there are some staged suicides, as allegedly occurred in the recent Saitama “black widow” case, this is still an astonishingly low number. In fact, it’s the lowest figure recorded in the postwar era – in the middle of the worst recession during that period.

Yet anywhere between 50 percent and 85 percent of the population think the country is becoming more dangerous, and a recent poll showed a record-high 86 percent of people support capital punishment.

Meanwhile, late last year, Financial Services Minister Shizuka Kamei launched a scathing attack on Japan Inc., accusing it of raising the murder rate within families by laying off workers to increase profits. Although Kamei spouting nonsense is hardly newsworthy in itself – and he was criticized for laying the blame at the door of corporations – the media was almost silent on the fact that he was also totally inaccurate in his statement that murders were increasing among family members.

Although there has been a recent increase in people killing elderly parents, overall, murders involving families, and people who know each other – which, of course, account for the majority of cases – have seen the biggest falls. Child murders fell by almost half last year.

The long-term trend for homicides among people who have close relationships is also down. The NPA said that grudges were the motivation for 466 murders in 1985, but only 194 by 2008. Similarly, murders involving work-related troubles fell from 104 to 61 over the same period, while those among friends and acquaintances fell from 317 to 254.

It is not only murder, but most types of crime that have become scarcer across Japan. The overall crime rate also logged its seventh straight fall in 2009. Contrary to popular – read media-created – perception, youth crime has also been dropping. In fact, one of the few areas that is getting worse is offenses by the elderly.

Professor Koichi Hamai, a prominent criminologist at Kyoto’s Ryukoku University Corrections and Rehabilitation Research Center, has done a great deal of research into the contradiction between the increasing panic about crime and the reality of the falling rate.

One of his studies tracked crime reporting in the Asahi Shimbun – which, being an ostensibly “liberal” newspaper, one might think would not indulge so readily in the “moral panic” brand of reporting – from 1985 to 2004. Hamai found that even as homicide rates trended downward, the frequency of articles that contained the words “heinous” and “murder” had increased exponentially, inevitably leading many to get the entirely mistaken impression that the nation was in the grip of a serious crime wave.

“The media coverage of murder cases has changed over the years; it’s much more sensationalist, it portrays offenders as monsters, and focuses in much greater detail on the victims and the cruelest elements of crimes,” says Hamai, who previously spent many years working in the Ministry of Justice. “It’s very different to the way it was 30 or 40 years ago.

“In other research I carried out, I found that 50 percent of people thought that crime had greatly increased in Japan, but only 4 percent felt it had in their neighborhood. That’s a huge gap. There are differences between those figures in other countries too, but not on that scale,” he says.

One reason for the huge impact the media has is that the population has a very high level of trust in it.

“People believe what is reported in the media in Japan,” says Hamai. “Around 90 percent trust newspapers and 80 percent TV. This is way higher than in other countries. For comparison, the figure for the U.K. is about 15%.”

Our own Jake Adelstein, who worked for 12 years on the crime beat of the Yomiuri Shimbun, believes that the reasons for the increase in the body count in the media are legal and financial.

“The Personal Privacy Laws have made investigative journalism very burdensome and expensive, and a flood of court decisions against the media in libel cases further put a damper on edgy articles,” says Adelstein. “Articles on crime fill the gaps, and mistakes
can be blamed on the police … thus, safe and cheap…. It’s economics at work.”

Adelstein also speculates that the true murder rate maybe somewhat higher, as the low percentages of autopsies carried out on suspicious deaths mean that some intentional killings are bound to go undetected. “And the yakuza are experts at making hits look like suicides.”

Despite this, the level of violence remains very low in Japanese society and is even dropping, despite the tough economic times. There has been remarkably little analysis of this in the domestic media, though the Yomiuri did run one story along such lines. It would certainly be difficult for the newspapers and television programs that spend so much of their time telling people how dangerous things are getting to suddenly explain that the opposite is actually true.

One reason for the drop in murders may actually be weakening interpersonal relationships. Some commentators have suggested that in an increasingly impersonal
society, fewer people actually appear to care enough about others to kill them.

Nobuko Sago, who helps run a telephone counseling service in Tokyo for people facing difficulties in their lives, believes there has been a weakening of ties, particularly between younger people in recent years.

Another cause is demographics, says Hamai. “One reason for the fall is the aging society, the number of people in their 20s – which is the peak age for murder – is falling, and with it, the murder rate is falling steadily.”

Some older Japanese people like to reminisce about how people used to leave their doors unlocked in their neighborhoods back in the “good old days.” The truth is they are probably safer doing that these days – though don’t expect the media to let them know it. ❶