I've heard Japanese people complain that Japan (and Tokyo) is becoming much more dangerous and so on. They cited the amount of crime they see on television news and so on. But the truth is, in the US, most of these crimes wouldn't even make it onto TV because they're too common. In Japan a murder is still a big enough thing to let the entire nation know about that it happened.
Recently, this chart of crime in my neighborhood was posted in the lobby of my apartment building.
As I explain the chart, there are 2 things to keep in mind.
1) This is the amount of reported crime for all of 2006, virtually an entire year, for 15 large, some major, streets in central Tokyo.
2) This is a city with 12 million people surrounded by the burbs making greater Tokyo a population of about 30 million people.
The numbers are the number of cases reported. Orange/red is something stolen from a house or apartment when nobody was home. Dark blue is theft of something from inside a car. Green is stolen or missing bicycle.
The one large spike of 52 for bicycle, I suspect, partly involves that the NEC headquarters is on that street, and salarymen that are drunk at night and miss the last train home grab a bicycle from the street to make their way home. Add that to the NEC and school bicycle parking areas there, and that probably makes up a good sum, so they're not really stolen as more temporarily displaced, and the police do their duty of checking bicycle registrations (numbers on the bicycle) so it's possible to get the bicycle back pretty painlessly (or buy a used one for $40).
No comments:
Post a Comment