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KEYWORDS: Japan, crime trend, pooled time-series analysis
Japan has long been recognized for its low rates of violent crime, rates that usually seem to be declining. The most common explanation for postwar rates links unique cultural characteristics to a system of exceptionally effective informal social controls that, at the macro level, suggest low levels of social disorganization. Other common explanations include low levels of economic stress, a small proportion of young males and a criminal justice system that delivers a high certainty of punishment. In this paper we test these four explanations for Japanese trends using both an annual time-series national analysis (1951 to 2000) and a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis of the 47 Japanese prefectures from 1955 to 2000 (at 5-year intervals). The results from the two analyses are largely congruent. They show that measures of economic stress, certainty of punishment and age structure are-compared to common social disorganization measures-more consistent predictors of Japanese postwar violent crime trends. Our results suggest that the remarkable strength of the postwar Japanese economy may play a larger role in explaining Japanese violent crime rates than is usually recognized.
Japan's low rates of violent crime began to attract the attention of researchers and policy makers as early as the mid-1970s (Clifford, 1976; Vogel, 1979; Adler, 1983). More recent research (Fujimoto and Park, 1994; LaFree and Drass, 2002) has shown that Japanese violent crime rates have steadily declined since World War II. The most common explanation of low and declining Japanese postwar crime rates links unique Japanese cultural characteristics to a system of exceptionally effective informal social controls that suggest, at the aggregate level, low levels of social disorganization (Clifford, 1976; Vogel, 1979; Braithwaite, 1989; Bayley, 1991; Westermann and Burfeind, 1991; Komiya, 1999). Other explanations emphasize the strength of the postwar Japanese economy, the steady aging of the Japanese population and the high certainty of detection and arrest in the Japanese criminal justice system (Park, 1992; Tsushima, 1996; Roberts and LaFree, 2001). In this paper, we use a time-series analysis of annual national data (1951 to 2000) and a pooled time-series analysis of Japanese prefectures (1955 to 2000) to test these four social-structural explanations of Japanese violent crime trends.
SOCIAL-STRUCTURAL EXPLANATIONS
CULTURE AND SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION
Most explanations for...