The White Peril 白禍

Joji Obara, accused of murdering hostess Lucie Blackman in 2000, has now been tried and sentenced:

A Tokyo court on Tuesday sentenced businessman Joji Obara to life in prison for drugging and raping nine women, including an Australian who died, but acquitted him in the death of Briton Lucie Blackman.

The Tokyo District Court said prosecutors failed to provide evidence that proves Obara, 54, was responsible for the death of the 21-year-old British hostess whose dismembered body was found in Kanagawa Prefecture in 2001.

...

Prosecutors used as evidence videotapes seized from Obara's home that showed him attacking the nine victims.

But there was no such footage of Blackman on the tapes.

In fact, prosecutors' arguments concerning the Blackman case were based largely on circumstantial evidence.

Even the cause of her death has not been established.

Prosecutors argued that Obara was seen with Blackman just before she went missing, and that the same type of cement used to encase her head was found in Obara's room.

But the judge said these pieces of evidence do not show to what degree Obara was involved in Blackman's death.

...

The judge concluded, "Doubts remain over whether the criminal actions were carried out solely by the defendant."

I can see how the Blackman family would be unsatisfied with the verdict, but it doesn't seem unjustified. Obara's story (the Mainichi has a Japanese report here) is that an acquaintance of his, now conveniently dead, was the one who assaulted and killed Blackman and disposed of her corpse. I don't buy it, but it certainly could have happened that way.

Of course, one can imagine political reasons for the verdict. There were widely-aired accusations that the police had been slow to investigate and, once on the case, slow and slipshod. The court's decision doesn't disprove that, but it makes it possible to take a position along the lines of, "See? Even when the police were forced to investigate thoroughly, they didn't find enough evidence to convict Obara, so perhaps their original judgment calls weren't so baseless after all."

Michael has caught some flak (so to speak) over his posting about gun control and how to compare the shootings of students at Virginia Tech and of the mayor of Nagasaki here in Japan. I think he's absolutely right. (Hey, it happens sometimes.)

If guns were completely illegal in the U.S., and the government did everything possible to collect all of the guns, the VA Tech student would still have found a way to get a gun and shoot up the campus.

All right, yes, that's speculative, and it's phrased a bit sententiously. But it has the ring of truth because we know now that Cho was planning this kind of thing for a long time and was obsessed with the military. Henry Lewis may no more know how to get an illegal gun than I know how to get drugs in Roppongi, in the sense that neither of us is interested or would know where to begin. But people who are interested figure out a way to find out.

Does gun control work in Japan? Difficult to say, because there are many other factors that make society function as it does. Japan is much more homogeneous and self-policing than immigrant-rich societies such as the United States. Another thing I've definitely noticed in talking to Japanese friends is that the idea that citizens might have the right to defend themselves from agents of their own government if they get too high-handed isn't one that crosses their mind very frequently. They also don't think often about situations in which the police or other authorities may not be around to help them and they must see to their own defense. Part of that is that Japanese people are acculturated to like being under authority, part of it is that Japanese people tend to be suspicious of an individual who wants to go it alone, and part of it is that the post-war Japanese government did a lot of things the citizenry is rightfully grateful for. Japanese people--this is my narrow individual experience talking, but I don't think it's aberrant--are unusually ready to believe that the victim of a crime by a stranger is at fault for getting himself into a sticky situation rather than staying in safe, known spaces.

And let's not forget that Japan doesn't lack for lunatics who kill multiple victims. They tend to be serial killers rather than spree killers--gun control probably does have something to do with that--but their victims are just as dead.

Added later: Unsurprisingly, Connie has a thing or two to say about this, too.

Via Instapundit, Bruce Kesler at Democracy Project makes an unsettling discovery:

Wonder why so many of the news articles you read, or steam over, are lacking essential information or perspective? Wonder no longer. Knowledge and experience of the subject is only a "plus."

Would the AP advertise for a sports reporter for whom knowledge and experience with baseball, basketball, football, soccer, hockey, tennis, and so forth is only a "plus," rather than essential and primary?

So, why should the AP believe that knowledge and experience of intelligence, or medicine, or any other important and technical subject only requires a "plus"?

I love America, but we do have a tendency to believe that you can learn absolutely anything on the fly. And it's not just "technical subjects" in the hard-science sense that cause people to trip up. You'll have noticed that many of us Westerners who blog from Asia expend a lot of energy complaining about the clueless reporting of foreign correspondents here. Or not necessarily clueless, but rote and tending to default to one of a dozen or so stock perspectives on the Mysterious Far East. (Simon World is the best overall resource if you want that kind of commentary.)

It's not all the fault of the reporters themselves, I imagine, since editors like stories that are to the point and readily comprehensible. It must be difficult to write genuinely nuanced, searching analyses of cultural differences when the best way to please the boss is to turn in yet more column-inches-by-numbers about those crazy prematurely-sexualized teenagers hanging around Shibuya.

And yet, I've met Tokyo personnel for several of the major news outlets informally, and in several cases--not most, mind, but enough to be disturbing--I've been appalled at their elementary lack of understanding of the environment they're supposed to be reporting authoritatively on. It's one thing to have some learning to do; everyone has to start somewhere, after all. It's quite another not to know where your defects of knowledge lie and therefore what should set off your BS detector when you hear it from an interviewee, are fed it by your own translator, or read it in the local press. If you can read the local press without asking your Japanese sig. oth. for help, that is.

The thinking that seems to lie behind statements like this one, by the father of murdered English teacher Lindsay Hawker, disturbs me:

The killing of a British language teacher whose naked and battered body was found outside Tokyo has "brought shame" to Japan, her father said Sunday, as the British Ambassador urged the public to help the police investigation.

"My daughter loved this country. She loved meeting Japanese people and thought of Japan as an honorable society," William Hawker said in a statement read out Sunday by British Ambassador to Japan Graham Fry.

"My daughter's killer has now brought shame on your country. He must be caught," Hawker was quoted as saying.

I realize that he's grieving for his lost daughter, and if he'd made the "shame" comment during an emotional outburst under stress, it would have been very understandable. But this was a prepared statement, and it seems to hold Japan to a standard of safety that one can't imagine Hawker would dream of imposing on, say, Greater London.

Lindsay Hawker was not snatched off a busy midday street while no bystanders responded to her cries; that would be shameful. She went, alone, to the apartment of a man who'd already exhibited decidedly odd behavior:

The suspect first approached Hawker near a train station March 21, saying he wanted to learn English, and followed her to her apartment, according to police. Hawker let him in because she had a roommate and he seemed eager to learn.

The suspect drew a picture of Hawker and wrote down his name and phone number before leaving her apartment. Hawker agreed to give him an English lesson the following Sunday.

Hawker is not to blame for her own death, and her killer (it's looking as certain as it can be at this point that it was, indeed, Tatsuya Ichihashi) deserves the harshest punishment the law allows. But sometimes citizens exercise poor individual judgment, and it's no "shame" on society's part that it can't protect them from what may happen when they isolate themselves from the police or from honest citizens who might help them. Parents can, in general, feel good about their young adult children's coming to Japan to teach or study; most of the sorts of crime we worry about in Western cities--street crime and burglary--are rare. That doesn't change the fact that vigilance against nut cases is part of the price of living unmonitored in a free society, even one with a low murder rate such as Japan.