The trusting nature of my fellow man

No doubt some of you have heard rumours regarding the lack of crime in Japan. You may even have engaged in the rather dubious pursuit of self-education, reading statistics on crime on the web and discovering to your horror that the rumours are true: in fact, robbery, armed robbery and murder occur at alarmingly lower rates in this country than they do in Australia, New Zealand, England, America or in fact anywhere. The commonest response to this phenomenon by disgruntled foreigners is to say "well yes, but the police can torture a confession out of you." I have heard rumours to suggest that in fact this is not the case, but i do not engage in such bourgeois pastimes as self-education, so I am not able to confirm what the particular rules are which govern the behaviour of police over here. I think the explanation for the lack of crime over here may be simpler than police violence, lack of guns, or the conformist attitude of local Japanese (who to me seem to be on the whole rather non-conformist - about this I shall wax lyrical in subsequent posts). I think the explanation is perhaps rather more simple: the Japanese think crime is wrong, so on the whole they do not do it, even when they can do it without being caught.

This is a radical suggestion I know, one which flies in the face of everything we know about civilised people everywhere. I hear you demanding an explanation, evidence, some sort of justification for this crazy and radical view, so here I shall present it to you. Since my arrival in Tottori I have seen many examples of things which may support this view. I shall present a list now (dot points being a very important part of our power point culture). I shall start with the evidence which least supports my crazy ideas, and proceed to the most crushing and compelling evidence you can hope to find. Here, then, is my list of exhibits in defence of the claim that the Japanese simply do not think of committing crime:

1. When my friend Hiroki-san leaves his flat (which is on the main road in Tottori) to visit the supermarket across the road for, say, beer, he leaves the door unlocked. I admit, this may just be evidence of his individual foolishness. Many other Japanese do not do this (I have asked)
2. When the Japanese speakers who assist us in class need to reserve a seat in the university cafeteria while they queue for food, one of them goes and dumps her stuff on a chair before returning to the queue. Everyone does this. After dumping their gear, they spend 10 minutes in line, completely out of view of their bag, while 200 people swirl past the chair. Admittedly, crime is never actually a common event anywhere in the world, so it could be that one could get away with this in Australia without any trouble
3. There are no anti-armed-robbery screens in the bank. There is not even any glass, just a nice little desk on one side of which the staff sit. The only concession to the risk of crime is the presence of 3 security cameras at the far end of the room. Perhaps this means nothing - perhaps no Japanese gangster would ever consider wearing a ski-mask (Japanese gangsters dress very well, from what I have seen), so the cameras are sufficient deterrent.
4. All the bicycles here have the most pathetic locks you have ever seen, the sort of locks which can be smashed with a hammer or removed with a screwdriver. Mine consists ofa 5mm wide bolt attached to the front wheel, which sticks into the spokes once locked. My key opens a friend`s bike lock. The locks are clearly intended only to deter people who decide to take an unlocked bike because they need to ride around the corner, not to prevent serious thieves intent on stealing a bike to sell for money. One could easily make a living here stealing and selling bikes with these crappy locks on (although all bikes are registered, but so are all English bicycles, and bike theft there is a serious problem)
5. no shop anywhere in Tottori (or Hiroshima for that matter, and often even Tokyo) has any defense against shoplifting. Many of the men`s clothing shops in Hiroshima have their jewellery stored in unlocked glass drawers, sometimes left open so you can just pocket the gewgaws. In Australia, a shop without such a defense will get lifted, simple as that.
6. people leave their flower boxes with carefully tended flowers sitting outside businesses and homes, on main roads, after closing up and leaving for the day. The Tottori post offices have ranks of these flower pots, all completely unattended and chock full of nice flowers. Sometimes you can see $100 worth of flowers (or more) sitting unattended and unguarded when anyone can just, well, take them.

I grant you, these are signs of a society generally without crime, but not crushing evidence of a general unwillingness to commit crime when it is possible to. So now I present the coup de Grace, the final stunning piece de la resistance in my argument, the simple fact which shows without a shadow of a doubt that the Japanese by and large just do not do the wrong thing. The simple fact I am about to present is so utterly compelling, so earth-shatteringly alien to our conception of the nature of man, such a great challenge to our understanding of the universal order of things, that I shall indent it and present it as a separate, essential fact, around which I hope in the future philosophers will construct whole new theories about the nature of man:

• the public toilets at Tottori University, which are frequented by poor students who need to save money, keep the spare toilet paper rolls unlocked on a shelf in the cubicle, where anyone using the cubicle could simply take them

Walking around in the university grounds, seeing happy people going about their business like ordinary human beings - greeting each other, saying goodbye, talking on their phones, studying - one is tempted to think that they are just like us. But then one goes into the public toilets and there sit the toilet paper rolls, naked and vulnerable, free to be taken by any passing criminal, unguarded and monitored only by the invisible, impotent eyes of society`s conscience. At this moment one realises how completely, utterly and inscrutably alien these people are to everything we in the English-speaking world are capable of understanding.