For many Japanese, their lawmen’s best is no longer good enough. After decades of praiseworthy service, the 230,000-member National Police Agency is under fire for corruption, inefficiency and downright incompetence. According to the latest government statistics, violent crime is at a 23-year peak, and while still modest by American standards, Japan’s murder rate is now higher than England’s. The problem goes beyond simple numbers. Over the past decade, economic recession and the breakdown of traditional families has led to a rash of sex crimes and serial killings–many committed by troubled youths. But a police force once seen as the industrial world’s model is failing to catch some of these new predators. “Problems hidden deep inside Japan’s law-enforcement system are floating to the surface,” says Hiroshi Kubo, author of seven books on the nation’s police. “If things don’t change, Japan is headed for a crisis.”
The pressure for reform is mounting–even within the NPA. In 1995, NEWSWEEK has learned, an elite team of criminologists began a five-year internal study analyzing the agency’s failure to break complex cases. Presented recently in a classified report sent to the NPA director general and the Justice minister, the group’s findings note grave deficiencies in Japan’s criminal-investigation system. According to Yuki Nishimura, the team’s senior research psychiatrist and psychological profiler, Japan’s national crime database is beyond salvage, law-enforcement concepts are decades out of date and investigators are often their own worst enemies. They routinely withhold information from crime reports, fail to share evidence across jurisdictional boundaries and lack even basic knowledge in crime analysis. “They must be taught to gather information and analyze it in ways that can be used by others,” she told NEWSWEEK. “But the police force is conservative. Many officers believe in the old system.”
Will that system ever change? It must if police hope to regain public support. According to a survey by the mass-circulation daily Yomiuri Shimbun, trust in the cops dropped to 52.3 percent, down nearly 22 points in a year, following the January resignation of NPA boss Yuko Sekiguchi. He stepped down to take responsibility for a string of sex, drug and hazing scandals within the force. The Kyoto mishap and an embarrassing child-abduction saga in Niigata prefecture have since done further damage to the agency’s flagging prestige. Scandals have “reduced mental strength and investigative capabilities” within the force, leading to poor performance in the field, warned a Yomiuri editorial last week. Both inside and outside the NPA, reformers are growing more vocal by the day. The most radical idea: creation of a new agency–a Japanese equivalent of the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation–with field agents and a mandate to operate anywhere in the country. “New wine must be put in a new cask,” says a retired police commander. “The agency must reform its organization, personnel and investigative methods in order to deal with new crimes.”
In its day, Japan’s traditional law-enforcement system was something to marvel at. Police lived with their families in chuzai-sho, small stations with residential quarters, or spent long hours in koban, tiny police boxes built in every neighborhood. A good cop knew his beat and caught problems early by tapping the local gossip. Established after Japan’s surrender to Allied forces in 1945, the neighborhood policing system embraced the liberal values of America’s New Deal: poverty was the root of crime, and criminals were capable of rehabilitation.
In 1988, a 27-year-old print-shop worker named Tsutomu Miyazaki rocked the system to its foundation. A rumpled loner with deformed hands and a dysfunctional family, he became the prototype for Japan’s new-age criminals. Addled by child pornography, he abducted and strangled four young girls in a yearlong killing spree, raping, and in two cases cannibalizing, their corpses. At trial he claimed the killings were ordered by “rat people” who spoke inside his head. According to criminal psychologists, Miyazaki displayed traits common to Japan’s serial killers: perverse sexual attitudes shaped by pornography and TV violence, and the lack of social training typical of kids from troubled homes. Police netted Miyazaki by accident when he was detained on unrelated charges and matter-of-factly confessed to the murders.
Over the next five years, criminal psychologists studied Miyazaki with a growing sense of dread. They saw that he represented a new breed–the product of contemporary societal breakdown rather than poverty, the kind of criminal who would be invisible to cops in the koban. In 1990 the Japanese Criminologists Society proposed in a letter to the Ministry of Justice that Japan train police and juvenile-detention-center personnel in modern forensics, psychiatry and criminal psychology. Five years later the NPA hired Nishimura to critique agency tactics in complex murder cases.
Nishimura’s study set Japan on a path blazed by the United States and Canada, where headline-making serial murders were one factor that pushed law enforcement to develop more sophisticated methods for tracking criminals. She interviewed serial killers, observed Japanese police in the field and attended more than a dozen international conferences and training courses–three of them at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As she studied, Japan experienced a rash of disturbing crimes. In Kobe in 1997, a 14-year-old boy crushed a girl’s skull with a hammer and beheaded a neighborhood boy, then taunted police in a letter to Japanese newspapers during a three-month manhunt. In 1999 a 29-year-old videogame fanatic hijacked an ANA jet after it departed Tokyo Haneda Airport with 503 passengers aboard and briefly took control of the aircraft. In a struggle with the crew, he killed the pilot with a knife. At trial, he confessed: “I wanted to fly under Rainbow Bridge [on Tokyo Bay] and try a Dutch roll and a somersault.”
Over time, Nishimura’s focus on modifying existing practices gave way to a more radical agenda: building new systems. In the NPA’s database, for example, she found mountains of material too inconsistent in quality ever to be useful. In prefectures across Japan, she noticed that the best cops kept their theories to themselves. Her most damning discovery: many Japanese police neglect to put details about victims on their crime reports, an omission that makes it impossible to predict the behavioral patterns of the killer. In one case, a firefighter stole a gun from a police officer and went on a robbing and killing spree. Information was gathered in different departments–ballistics in one place and other evidence elsewhere. But the data was never shared. “If the investigators had all of it, they could have caught him much earlier,” says Nishimura. “He killed 10 people.”
Just as koban symbolize Japan’s old ways, Nishimura’s sleek office foreshadows a different future. She is based at the National Research Institute of Police Science, a chrome-and-steel complex built last year on Tokyo’s northern fringe. Fewer than a hundred agents currently work in the institute, but its massive size suggests that many more are coming. Her sixth-floor office sits above a morgue and smells faintly of formaldehyde. The security system is computerized and the architecture is lavish, but the feeling is pure “Silence of the Lambs.” After visiting the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Division near Washington, Nishimura returned with FBI T shirts to wear on her midday jogs, imitating the star of the Hollywood blockbuster, Jodie Foster.
In April Nishimura’s team will begin a new three-year study on sex crimes, which rose by 25 percent in 1999 compared with a 14 percent increase for all serious crimes. The project confirms that senior NPA and Ministry of Justice officials approve of her work. But their support for a second study, rather than a mandate to implement the findings of her first one, suggests that top law-enforcement officials remain wary of modern techniques. Kubo, the author, says the two-tiered NPA structure is a major obstacle to change. At the top, about 500 senior administrators with no field experience call the shots. Below, nearly 230,000 provincial officers serve like enlisted men in an army. In big cases, senior officials “can take an investigation in an entirely wrong direction,” he says. “And because the police force is a class-based society, nobody below can stop them.”
The results can be tragic. Last month a 19-year-old girl emerged from nearly a decade in captivity, ending a harrowing confinement that competent police work might have prevented. The victim was snatched from her schoolyard in Sanjo, in northern Japan, in 1990. Her accused abductor was a convicted child molester with a history of mental dis-orders. The suspect, 37-year-old Nobuyuki Sato, held her upstairs in his mother’s modest house in Kashiwazaki, a small city on the Sea of Japan only 50 kilometers south of Sanjo. According to neighbors, the son routinely beat his mother, who had failed to persuade local social workers to check on her son’s behavior. After the girl’s rescue (by hospital staff visiting the house, according to media reports), the mother told police that she never went upstairs or knew her son kept a prisoner. “Just like the Hitchcock film ‘Psycho’,” says criminal psychologist Susumu Oda.
Japanese find it alarming that such a crime could occur without neighbors’ or local cops’ taking notice. “The system depends on communities where everyone knows each other,” Oda says. “But nowadays, that base has dissolved and that system is being destroyed.” Last Thursday the top cop in Niigata prefecture, Koji Kobayashi, admitted that Sato was never a suspect in the abduction because his criminal record hadn’t been entered into the police computers. “At an appropriate time we would like to [apologize] to the victim and her family,” he said. No apology can rectify her ruined life.
