A Nation Weeps

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Monday, June. 11, 2001 This week people in Japan woke up in a very different country. Last Friday's grisly massacre of eight schoolchildren in Osaka has prompted the expected cycle of reactions and human emotions. First, there was the numbness, the disbelief that such a barbaric act had occurred. Then the pain and grieving over the innocents, the children who died at the hands of a madman. As details about the suspect and reports of his chilling confession emerged, mournfulness turned to anger. And now, inevitably, the question of why: Why did such a thing happen?

This is where the pop psychology and national hand-wringing takes over. In Japan, the cultural mythology holds that such incomprehensible crimes don't happen here, that these are peculiarly American transgressions. That argument doesn't hold much water any longer, as the country wakes up almost daily to read details of some sordid crime. The number of serious offenses has doubled over the past decade; there were 1,391 murders last year, 8% more than five years ago.

All crime is bad, of course, but some of the incidents have been particularly gruesome: A 15-year-old newspaper delivery boy stabbed six of his sleeping neighbors, killing three of them; a 17-year-old clubbed his mother to death with a baseball bat. And, over the weekend, while parents of those killed in Ikeda, outside Osaka, were making their painful way to funeral homes to say goodbye to their little ones, an 11-year-old boy in Fukuoka Prefecture was taken into police custody, accused of stabbing a classmate 11 times with kitchen cutlery. This kind of stuff isn't even front-page news anymore: it happens with such regularity, and with such a depressing sense of familiarity.

This wasn't supposed to happen in Japan. For a long time, the country seemed to have found a magic pill against criminal behavior. Sure there were occasional gangland murders, but while the rest of the developed world -- and the United States in particular -- was busy mugging and killing each other, the Japanese seemed to have figured out how to live in one of the world's most congested cities and get along with each other. How? Was it the neighborhood policing? Was it gun control? Was it some mystical Asian value, the homogeneity of the population, or a renunciation of violence after the murderous attacks of World War II? The sushi, perhaps?

In truth, no one really knew. There were broad hints from the Japanese over the years that their culture somehow was more refined, more developed. That deeply held mythology is what makes coming to terms with the Osaka killings all the more difficult. And it's why a national therapy session is probably a good thing: because more important than figuring out how Japan avoided crime in the past is figuring out why it's headed down a darker, more dangerous path now.

Already, questions are being asked about the lack of treatment and punishment of criminals who suffer a mental illness. Under the current law, if a perpetrator of a crime is determined to be mentally unstable, then he or she won't be prosecuted. He or she may or may not spend time in a mental health institution. The suspect in the Osaka case, Mamoru Takuma, was accused of poisoning four teachers at a different school, where he worked as a janitor, in 1999. He wasn't even indicted. He spent less than a month in a mental hospital. He was involved in other run-ins. Could last week's crime have been stopped? Can the next one?

Japan needs to get serious about figuring how what has gone wrong here. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who is proving adept at tapping into what his countrymen are thinking, asked last week: "How can we deal with the fact that our safe society is beginning to collapse?" People will be tempted to find an easy answer: it's the economy, plummeting back into recession; it's the influence of American culture (always an easy target); it's the erosion of moral values. Or it's the bad example set by corrupt politicians and criminal elder statesmen, like the judge last week charged with picking up and having sex with a 14-year-old prostitute. Or, it's the fast-food, convenience-store culture.

In the end, there will be no easy answer, just as Americans find no easy answer to their rash of school violence. Yet a searing incident like the Osaka tragedy makes it impossible not to demand some conclusion, particularly when the incident is viewed with the kind of heartrending images we saw on our TV screens last week. The blood-soaked school uniforms. Terrified children running to safety across a dirt playground. Child survivors placing white lilies at the school gates. A mother, not knowing what had happened to her child, running frantically, eyes wide with fear, desperately looking for her child.

That look of fear will remain seared into the consciousness of many Japanese. This week, people are waking up to realize they can't assume their homeland is the safe, secure place of their childhood. They can no longer send off their kiddies to school without a momentary pause, a breathless, heart-stopping thought that something could go horribly wrong that day. They're putting locks on the front gates of schools across Japan this week. They're hiring security guards. Life in Japan will never be the same.