Travel&Vacation

A little over a year ago, an attractive young British woman named Lindsay Hawker was murdered in Tokyo. Her body was found, half-covered with sand in an attempt to hide it, in the tub of an apartment owned by a young Japanese man. This young man had been pursuing Ms. Hawker as an English instructor and had persuaded her to come to his home, presumably for an English lesson.

As a great many police searched her alleged murderer’s apartment, they allowed the suspect to slip away. They didn’t even attempt to restrain him, and he has not yet been found. Their casual approach and sloppy police work has caused Ms. Hawker’s family to despair of ever seeing justice done for her murder.

Lindsay Hawker is one of the more noted victims of the generally held conception that Japan is a safe place to live. Any time you speak to a Japanese person and ask about why they prefer to live in Japan rather than abroad, you will invariably receive the (grammatically incorrect) answer, “Japan is a safety country.” This mantra is repeated by those who were born here, as well as by those who live here, and is supported by low crime statistics.

While it is true that Japan is a safer place than other countries, particularly when comparing urban areas in Western countries to those of Japan, it is by no means “safe.” Buying into the idea that Japan is an almost crime-free society where people can freely roam city streets late into the night, as the Japanese people are peaceful, non-violent, and trustworthy, is a recipe for personal tragedy.

Lindsay Hawker not only went home with a young Japanese man she didn’t know very well, she also let him into her home at one point. If she hadn’t believed the myth that Japanese people are somehow less likely to commit crimes and exercised the same level of caution in Tokyo as she would have exercised with a man in similar circumstances back home in her native England, she would probably be alive today.

She was convinced, as are other victims of various crimes in Japan, that she had chosen to come to a safe place with gentle people who were unlikely to do her any harm. This is part of the diet PR Western folks are regularly fed back home and they welcome it.

The lie about Japan being safe is the product of a variety of factors. One of them is the need of the Japanese to sell their country as idyllic and superior in many ways to other countries and the companion compulsion among Western folks being sold such stories to buy wholesale into this notion.

When reading about how lost wallets are returned and bikes are left unlocked yet are not stolen, Western people don’t question the veracity of these assertions, but simply nod their heads in agreement and wistfully consider how they’d like to live in such a society, too.

They don’t know bikes that appear unlocked and unchained actually have small, hard-to-see barrier locks on their front or back wheels. They don’t know bikes are regularly stolen and police frequently stop cyclists to see if their serial numbers correspond to stolen bikes’ numbers. Such searches wouldn’t be necessary if there weren’t a goodly number of stolen bicycles to track.

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