Yeah, I hate these things, just thinly veiled racism. They have to blend the visa-overstaying with other crimes to hide the fact that the largest part of all those crimes are immigration-related. Visa crimes are inapplicable to Japanese citizens, and are always used as a way to make foreigners seem more violent and dangerous.

You can download the report (Japanese only) here. The relavant information about foreigners is in charts 8 and 9 (pages 40-43), but those pages only break down the total of foreign crimes by prefecture. When breaking down by the types of crimes, lo and behold immigration violations are not included. But the crimes they do list include:

61 murders
369 burglaries
13 arsons
34 rapes
7 kidnappings
42 吐orced obscenity� charges
704 trespassing
155 car thefts
52 purse snatchings
81 pickpockets

For a grand total of 1518 arrests. So those numbers start to become incredibly suspicious--consider:

27,258 "serious" cases, of which:
1,518 were those specifically listed above
13,357 were offenses "such as" prostitution, illegal possession of weapons, or overstaying their visas

Which leaves 12,383 "serious" cases left out. What were they? And why were only 1518 of the total 40,615 crimes (less than 4%) clearly enumerated? Where can a more complete list be found?

I'd be willing to bet that a very large portion of the crimes were nothing more than visa overstays--and that it is no accident at all that the vast majority of crimes by foreigners in Japan were left ambiguous.

And then there's the fact that these are arrests, not convictions--and foreigners are more often suspected of crimes, in part because of blatantly racist reports such as these.

I think I'll blog about this....