Content area
Full Text
In February 1999, the Japanese consul-general in Vancouver was questioned by police and charged with assaulting his wife. When I contacted the Vancouver police for information, Sergeant Doug LePard, in charge of the Vancouver Police Department's Domestic Violence and Criminal Harassment Units, told me, "...the accused pleaded guilty to the charge of assault. I believe he is alleged...to have said that beating one's wife is not a crime in Japan." The charge was subsequently dismissed, but the story did not end there. Accounts of this high-profile Japanese diplomat being arrested for assaulting his wife were widely reported in Japan, leading to some public discussion of the nature and extent of domestic violence.
A study conducted in the late 1970s by Japanese sociologist Kumagai Fumie found a lower rate of reported domestic violence involving couples in Japan compared with couples in the United States. The researcher attributed this to the differences between the two cultures-the "quiet, non-expressive Japanese culture as opposed to a verbal expressive American culture."
Data from social and legal sources, however, paint quite a different picture. Results of studies by independent researchers and government organizations, and statistics on homicides and divorces suggest that domestic violence is frequent in Japan. National Police Agency statistics indicate that approximately onethird of women murdered in Japan each year are killed by their partners. This is similar to the proportion in the United States. Further, husbands, including common-law husbands, are identified as the assailants in one-third of all the assault and battery cases reported within families in Japan each year.
Family law specifies that if one spouse objects to the other's wish for divorce, the partner seeking divorce must petition for court-supervised conciliation. Although more than 90 percent of the divorces initiated in Japan are filed by mutual consent, more than 39,000 conciliation petitions were filed by wives in 1997, compared with 15,400 filed by husbands. Many of the petitions were filed by women at least 40 years old. Among the reasons cited in the petitions filed by wives, physical violence by the husband was second. Ranking fifth was emotional abuse, including verbal taunts and humiliation. Other reasons often cited were frequent bouts of drinking and a tendency to be violent when drunk, squandering money and abandonment.
A...