No. of crimes involving foreigners in 2003 tops 40,000

TOKYO � The number of criminal cases involving foreign nationals, excluding those with permanent resident status, rose to 40,615 last year, up 16.9% from the previous year and topping the 40,000 line for the first time, the National Police Agency (NPA) said Thursday.

The police arrested or sent papers to prosecutors on 20,007 foreign nationals in 2003. Foreigners were involved in 27,258 serious criminal cases. Sixty-one were charged with murder, 369 with robbery, and 13,357 were charged with offenses such as prostitution, illegal possession of weapons, or overstaying their visas. (Kyodo News)


Naturally, foreigner does not say where they are from. Numbers are too pell-mell to be relevant. Among the "13,357 were charged with offenses such as prostitution, illegal possession of weapons, or overstaying their visas", what is the percentage of people overstaying their visa, even for a single day ? That is bascially a crime that Japanese cannot be charged with. Prostitution is almost limited to Chinese, Filipinas, Thai and a few other East-Asian countries.

69 murders and 369 robberies in a country of 126.000.000 people, among which more than 1 million foreigners, that is not so bad. I'd like to compare the average crime rate per capita among each nationality, including Japanese. I am almost certain that Westerners (living in Japan) have a much lower crime rate than the Japanese. Unfortunately, even if the authorities know it, they are never going to acknowledge it. That is probably why they always refer to "foreigners", rather than talk of nationalities or regional groups (South-East Asian, Africans, Middle-Easterners, Europeans, North Americans...)