2023-11-07
The following is from an essay by Yoshitaka Fukui, a professor at Aoyama Gakuin University, published in the Sankei Shimbun on November 7, 2023.
Essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.
The Increase in Foreign Workers and Japan’s Future
The State’s First Duty
The number of residents and tourists from abroad is increasing, and friction is arising in various places.
This newspaper, too, has covered various problems caused by Kurdish people.
Meanwhile, one Kurdish person, pointing out that some Japanese people also do bad things, argues, “Why single out only the Kurds?”
(This newspaper, August 13.)
However, addressing social issues requires a perspective that considers the overall picture.
Although many women are taller than the average man, social life is organized on the premise that, overall, men are taller than women.
A look at the range of clothing available, for example, should make this readily apparent.
Maintaining social order, the primary task we expect the state to perform, also varies according to the general characteristics of society’s members.
Fortunately, countries with as little crime and as safe a living environment as Japan are rare.
Let us look at specific figures from data compiled and published by the United Nations.
The countries for comparison are the United States; Switzerland, synonymous with public safety and a high standard of living; Brazil, which sends many workers to Japan; and Turkey, the homeland of the Kurds.
The comparison shows how many times higher than Japan’s the per capita figures were in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, with some figures from 2016 and 2018.
First, the homicide rate was twenty times Japan’s in the United States, twice Japan’s in Switzerland, eighty-three times Japan’s in Brazil, and ten times Japan’s in Turkey.
For robbery, the “gap” becomes even wider: sixty-one times Japan’s in the United States, fourteen times Japan’s in Switzerland, 493 times Japan’s in Brazil, and twenty-four times Japan’s in Turkey.
Japan is, quite literally, a country whose safety is on a different order of magnitude.
Consequently, its number of prisoners per capita is also remarkably low: the United States has sixteen times Japan’s figure, Switzerland twice its figure, and Brazil and Turkey nine times its figure.
In fact, there is another country in Asia that is about as safe as Japan.
It is Singapore.
However, its number of prisoners per capita is five times Japan’s, suggesting that it maintains public safety through severe punishment.
By contrast, it is fair to say that an orderly society is maintained voluntarily in Japan without the state having to exercise coercive power.
Yet because all crime-control costs are added to gross domestic product (GDP), other countries’ GDP figures are inflated relative to Japan’s, where such costs are low.
Bus Fare Evasion in the United States
Japan has less everyday crime than other countries, not just fewer serious crimes such as homicide and robbery.
Of course, shoplifting and fare evasion occur in Japan, too.
However, these remain exceptional occurrences, which is precisely why fare evasion on public transportation by foreigners is regarded as a problem.
Meanwhile, in Washington, the capital of the United States, one-third of bus passengers ride without paying.
Social order has been maintained without the state having to exercise coercive power indiscriminately because, until now, almost everyone living here has been Japanese.
Japanese people often use expressions such as “it happened naturally” or “doing so is natural.”
However, what Japanese people call “natural” is an achievement of civilization far removed from nature; in reality, Japanese society is an extremely artificial society.
What would happen if people arrived from societies far harsher and more crime-ridden than Japan, societies closer to the state of nature that the seventeenth-century English philosopher Hobbes described as “the war of all against all”?
Below, drawing on research by Professor Raymond Fisman of Boston University and others, I introduce an unintended social experiment that offers clues for considering Japan’s future.
Illegal Parking by Diplomats in New York
New York, home to United Nations headquarters and a gathering place for diplomats, faced the same problem as Tokyo.
It was illegal parking through the abuse of diplomatic immunity and refusal to pay fines.
However, the number of unpaid parking violations differed greatly by country.
From 1997 to 2002, the annual average number of violations per diplomat was 249 for Kuwait, forty-one for Egypt, and twenty-six for Chad, with Middle Eastern and African countries prominent among those with many violations.
By contrast, developed countries generally had few, and Japan was one of the small number of countries with zero violations.
Because the diplomats were protected by diplomatic immunity, whether to violate the rules was truly a matter of conscience.
This was a rare opportunity to compare, under identical conditions, the morals of people from different countries—and elite diplomats at that—and the inverse relationship between the number of violations and how orderly their home societies were is clear.
Furthermore, the diplomats’ patterns of behavior offer a warning concerning Japan’s “hospitality” toward foreigners.
As their postings grew longer, they learned that those who broke the rules benefited, and they committed still more violations.
Having lost patience with this situation, then-Mayor Bloomberg took strong action in 2002 with the State Department’s approval.
He decided to confiscate diplomatic license plates with more than three unpaid violations.
As a result, the number of violations fell by ninety-eight percent.
There is much to learn from New York’s experience in maintaining an orderly society, which is the prerequisite for everything else.