Seventeen becomes an age to fear in Japan

Seventeen becomes an age to fear in Japan
REUTERS

TOKYO, JAN 4: A wave of mindless crime by Japanese teenagers, many of them 17-year-olds, has shocked the country and drawn intense media scrutiny because of the cruelty of the acts and their bizarre motives.

One 17-year-old boy bludgeoned passengers at a Tokyo subway station with a baseball bat after a fight with his father, another hurled a bomb into a video store just to see people torn apart while a third stabbed an elderly neighbour to death because he wanted to know what it felt like to kill.

Another 17-year-old got into a fight with members of his High School baseball club over haircuts and then went home and beat his mother to death with a baseball bat because she would not give him pocket money, police said.

In the latest case, a pair of 16-year-old lovers was arrested in December for stabbing a taxi driver to death. They were quoted as telling police they wanted to steal the driver's money so that they could live together.

Crime among teenagers was rated the top story of the year 2000 by the Kyodo news agency. The law even had to be changed in an attempt to deal with violent teenage crime in a land renowned for its safety.

Overall youth crime numbers were up only slightly for the first six months of last year -- to 1,063 incidents compared with 1,042 in the same period in 1999. But the number of murders doubled to 53.

And the headline-grabbing nature of the crimes has convinced many Japanese that teenage crime is one of the country's most pressing social problems.

"In today's society, with its stress on everyone following the same course and pursuing the same goals, there are so few chances to recover your footing once you've stumbled -- if you've been bullied, for example, or if you've failed an entrance exam," Keigo Okonogi, professor of psychiatric medicine at Tokyo International University, wrote in the Asahi Shimbun.

The pressure faced by young people, combined with a changing psychology among the young, has made them more narcissistic than previous generations, which could be a reason for the increase in youth crime, Okonogi said .

"Young people today...recognise no controlling principle beyond themselves. Desire is to be satisfied, not controlled, and nowadays the urge to fill any desire finds external support, either from friends or from the media," he said.

The crimes have been cruel, unpredictable and often deadly. In one incident last May, a 17-year-old boy brandishing a knife commandeered a bus, stabbed a 68-year-old woman to death, wounded three passengers and used a six-year-old girl as a human shield in a 15-hour stand-off broadcast live on television.

As he stalked through the bus, the youth snapped photographs of his hostages and threatened to carve circles around their necks with a knife.

There was no demand for money, none of the political motives usually associated with a hostage crisis. There was just a 17-year-old boy who had been bullied and treated for mental illness after dropping out of school.

One group that has found itself the subject of much fingerpointing is the "hikikomori," or "those who shut themselves in."

The hikikomori are youngsters who have fallen through the cracks of society, including victims of bullying, and end up shutting themselves away in their rooms.

Estimates published in the media have put the number of hikikomori at between 500,000 and one million.

The busjacking suspect as well as the youth suspected of setting off the nail bomb were both seen as hikikomori.

Criminal experts said years of pent-up anger against society could result in terrifying acts of retaliation.

The government has set up a task force to look into youth crime and an advisory panel called for sweeping education reform to cultivate creativity and strengthen moral values.

The current law bans the courts from sending youths aged 15 or younger to prosecutors even if they are suspected of serious crimes, such as murder. The courts usually send such young suspects to reformatories instead.