Asian Topics on Asia for Educators || Contemporary Japan: Urban & Rural Life

CONTEMPORARY JAPAN:
URBAN & RURAL LIFE
Neighborhoods, Crime, and Police

The Japanese archipelago — with more than one thousand islands in all — spans diverse living environments: snowy mountains in the northern island of Hokkaido; bustling cities such as Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka; tropical rice paddies in southern Kyushu. In this video series, Harvard University professors Theodore Bestor and Helen Hardacre describe the character of both urban and rural life in Japan.

Theodore Bestor :: One of the social consequences, social benefits, of the fact that Tokyo and other Japanese cities have such reasonably strong neighborhood associations and sense of neighborhood place, is that it contributes to a very low crime rate in Japan, for a couple of different reasons.

One of them is that, to the extent that there are strong local organizations and a strong sense of consciousness of “I am a resident of such-and-such a place,” people simply take responsibility for the area that they live in. They pay attention to what’s going on. They have a sense of belonging to the place, and they also have a sense of mutual obligation to the other people who live there. So, people tend to watch out for one another, and they tend to watch out for what’s happening in the area that they’re living.

Another factor that contributes to relatively low crime rates in urban Japan is an institution called koban, which literally is a police box. The way that the Japanese police system is set up, in most neighborhoods, or in clusters of several neighborhoods, there’s usually a small police box that’s staffed by perhaps two or three police officers, usually twenty-four hours a day, and those police officers are responsible for circulating throughout the neighborhood. You often come across them at night riding a bicycle down a back street, just sort of checking out to see what’s going on. And of course, in the process of being assigned to a police box that covers perhaps an area of twenty or thirty square blocks, of course they get to know residents; they get to know what’s going on in the neighborhood. They try (to) be approachable, so that they’re not viewed by residents as sort of distant police officers, but rather “our friendly cop on the corner.” And indeed, that’s what it used to be — that’s the way police systems used to work in other countries as well. Some critics of American police argue that the worst thing to happen to American cities was when police officers started riding around in patrol cars rather than walking a beat, because they were then isolated and stopped interacting with local residents.