Juvenile Delinquency in Japan: Reconsidering the "Crisis" (review)

This is a collection of essays by 14 scholars addressing various aspects of juvenile delinquency in Japan. The contributors are mostly quantitative sociologists and liberal educationalists, and though interesting in places, the collection ultimately demonstrates the dangers of social research that has drifted away from encounters with real people, leaving the sociologists enmeshed in statistical issues and the educationalists distracted by their own political preoccupations.

The book's title, with "crisis" in quotation marks, suggests that in fact there is no crisis in Japanese youth behavior. Certainly that is the line taken by Gesine Foljanty-Jost and Manuel Metzler in the opening chapter, which finds that recorded violent crime by juveniles is far higher in Germany than in Japan, where delinquency actually decreases with increasing age (p. 13). That position is supported by some contributors, notably Annette Erbe (pp. 51–73) and Hideo Tokuoka (pp. 103–14). Erber sets out to criticize dubious official crime statistics and sensationalist media that find new social trends in a handful of shocking incidents. Tokuoka accuses the Japanese media of succumbing to periodic moral panics (p. 110) and suggests that belief in these scare stories could morph into "self-fulfilling prophecy" (p. 113). These critiques of media sensationalism are broadly persuasive and are further backed by Christian Schwarzenegger (pp. 173–98), whose essay includes government data showing a rising but still very low rate of violent juvenile crime in the 1990s (p. 188).

I am somewhat less convinced by Chisaki Toyama-Bialke (pp. 19–50), whose study on "the Japanese triangle" of family, school, and adolescents is based entirely on secondary sources and strays close to uncritical Nihonjinron in seeking to explain the abnormally low crime rate among Japanese teenagers. With its image of smoothly interacting social institutions, this essay is the most extreme example of the "Crisis? What crisis?" position.

In sharp contrast, other contributors in the volume appear to believe there really is a crisis in juvenile delinquency. Sometimes they even ground their arguments in the same government statistics that are criticized by other contributors. Compare, for example, the uncritical use by Hidenori Fujita (pp. 152–53) and Yoshiaki Nakano (p. 201) of bullying statistics whose unreliability has already been exposed by Erbe (p. 58). Fujita and Nakano, both strongly critical of the existing system, want to believe the alarming data undermined by Erbe.

No one would expect all contributors to have an identical perspective, and Foljanty-Jost does acknowledge some differences of opinion in the introduction (p. viii). However, the editor should at least have tried to establish a consensus on what constitutes usable data. There is even a disconcerting fuzziness as to what we are talking about: some writers focus on criminal acts by juveniles, others on classroom issues such as bullying and loss of control by teachers. The relationship between those two zones of behavior is left unexplored.

I also find problems with the methodology and argumentation in some of the chapters. Atsushi Kadowaki, for example, follows generations of sociologists in trying to define a new breed of Japanese youth, using data from the Tokyo Youth Survey to divide youth into four personality types—a doomed venture. The four types are "steadily achieving," "malcontent," "non-confrontational," and "autonomous" (p. 81). How the survey selected these apparently random adjectives is not explained, and they are not mutually exclusive—in fact, I think at least three of them apply to myself. Kadowaki uses such unconvincing survey data to argue for the emergence of a new breed of listless malcontents who cannot hold down a steady job and do not trust the older generation, but lack the will to revolt.

Mitsuru Taki (pp. 91–101) focuses on "problem behavior," defined as bullying, absenteeism, and school violence, saying "all of them have been urgent problems with no sign of improvement for the last twenty years" (p. 91). That contradicts abundant data elsewhere in the book showing numerous fluctuations, at least in official statistics...