Japan murder fuels false anti-China
furor By J Sean Curtin
The
brutal slaying of a Japanese couple and their young
children by a gang of Chinese students last year still
haunts Japan's Chinese community and unfairly poisons
Japanese attitudes toward China and the Chinese.
The first verdicts in China (two of the three
accused fled to China, where they are on trial; one
remains in Japan) in the high-profile case are imminent,
and many Chinese residents of Japan fear that the
announcement will spark another round of negative media
coverage. As a result of the killings in June 2003, the
number of Chinese students allowed into Japan has been
drastically restricted. Many in the Chinese community
feel that the press is stereotyping them as criminal,
fueling a rising tide of anti-Chinese sentiment.
These troubling domestic developments come at a
time when bilateral relations between Tokyo and Beijing
are strained, most recently by the suspected incursion
of a Chinese nuclear submarine into Japanese territorial
waters. With both domestic and international issues
dominated by negative images of China, the prospects for
improving relations with the Middle Kingdom do not look
promising.
The cold-blooded murder of the
Matsumoto family in the southern Japanese city of
Fukuoka is still the most emotive domestic issue
clouding Sino-Japanese skies at a time of strong
economic ties. Three Chinese students, Wang Liang, 22,
Yang Ning, 24, and Wei Wei, 24, broke into the Matsumoto
house to steal money and then brutally killed two
children and their parents for about 37,000 yen in cash
(about US$350). The trio later dumped the bodies in the
nearby Hakata Bay, attaching weights so that the corpses
would not float.
Wang and Yang fled to China,
while Wei was arrested by the Japanese police and is
currently on trial in Fukuoka for murder. China
apprehended Wang and Yang in August 2003, indicting them
in July this year. While Japan's slow justice system is
still dealing with Wei, judgment in the Chinese trial
appears imminent. The accused, who have admitted their
guilt, are expected to receive death sentences because
prosecutors have demanded "severe penalties".
The prosecutors publicly acknowledged that the
murders had an extremely negative effect on Chinese
students in Japan, and expressed concern about the
damage done to "the friendship between our two nations".
Besides catching and putting the culprits on
trial, the Chinese authorities went to extraordinary
lengths to assist their Japanese counterparts and
offered support to the relatives of the slain family. In
a rare move, the Japanese media were allowed to cover
the Chinese legal proceedings and Japanese translation
was provided for key sections of the trial. Despite this
unprecedented level of cooperation, the Japanese media
have almost exclusively focused on the negative aspects
of the case.
A Chinese student, who did not wish
to be named, told Asia Times Online, "This is a truly
terrible crime. I feel so sad for the little children,
but why are the newspapers and TV just concentrating on
the nationality of the killers? Japanese people have
committed crimes like this in the past. Chinese people
are just as shocked by what happened, but the media
[seem] to be blaming us for it."
Dr Tom Ellis, a
senior lecturer at the Institute of Criminal Justice
Studies at Portsmouth University in the United Kingdom,
offered a simple explanation. He observed, "It is an
unfortunate fact that a murder committed by a foreigner
is far more newsworthy than a within-nation
domestic-violence death."
Right-wing
politicians, such as Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara,
are exploiting this case and other crimes committed by
foreigners, generating anti-Chinese sentiment and
xenophobia. Alarmingly, many ordinary Japanese believe
Chinese and other foreign residents are largely
responsible for recently rising crime rates, even though
police statistics clearly show that foreign criminals
account for only a minute fraction of all crimes.
William Stonehill, a foreign businessman and
long-term Tokyo resident, summed up the feeling of many
foreign citizens: "The number of crimes committed by
foreigners is microscopic, and the whole notion of a
foreign crime wave is an exaggeration of the Japanese
government."
Professor Richard Friman, director
of the Institute for Transnational Justice at Marquette
University in Wisconsin, described the phenomenon more
dispassionately. He said, "Shintaro Ishihara has
demonstrated that crime, especially foreign crime, works
as an electoral/power-base issue, and on a national
level Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers have followed
suit. The appeal of the issue is not a new discovery for
Japan and certainly not a new discovery elsewhere in the
world."
Over the past two decades, crimes
committed by foreigners have never exceeded about 4% of
all crime in Japan, and typically the yearly average has
been between 2% and 3%. Foreigners currently make up
just over 1% of Japan's total population, so they are
only slightly over-represented in the figures. Despite
this, the police, lawmakers and the media have focused
on foreign crime as if it were one of the most serious
issues facing Japan. For example, five of the 16 annual
Police White Paper policy reports published between 1987
and 2003 took crimes committed by foreigners as their
main theme.
Dr Tom Ellis, the criminal-justice
expert at Portsmouth University, explained why police
forces tend to exaggerate the level of foreigner crime.
He told Asia Times Online, "It is a virtually universal
phenomenon that each nation finds it an appealing
explanation that foreigners are far more likely to
commit crimes than their own nationals. This is usually
put down to cultural notions. In reality, there is often
some truth in foreign or minority-group
over-representation in crime, but not usually for
cultural reasons. Rather, it is normally because
immigrants are denied access to legitimate job markets,
or at least access is far more difficult, and so
involvement in illicit markets is likely to be slightly
higher."
In response to the killing of the
Matsumoto family, the government restricted the issuing
of student visas, leading to an estimated 46% fall in
the number of new students allowed to come to Japan
during 2004. Surveys show that the vast majority of
rejected student were Chinese.
In 2003, there
were 109,508 foreign students in Japan, of which 64.7%
hailed from China, with 14.5% coming from South Korea
and 3.9% from Taiwan. Some believe that when the
official figure for foreign students in 2004 is
released, the overall number will drop below the 100,000
level.
Ryoji Yamauchi, president of Asahikawa
University, sees this as a backward step that will
damage Sino-Japanese ties. He explained to Asia Times
Online, "The government should definitely not try to
restrict the number of Chinese students coming to Japan.
If we are going to build a better, more internationally
minded Japan, at ease with its neighbors, we desperately
need as many of these young people as possible. When you
see foreign and Japanese students having fun together,
you know this is the future. I am proud of our foreign
students - they add great dynamism to campus life and
often excel. At a recent graduation, a female Korean
student delivered the valedictory speech."
Yamauchi added, "The recent bad publicity
generated by the murder of the Matsumoto family is
regrettable. This was a highly exceptional case and the
government and media should take a more responsible and
measured attitude when discussing it. We need to build a
better relationship with China. We certainly won't do
this if we concentrate on rare acts of inhumanity and
ignore all the bright young Chinese people [who] come to
this country and make it a better place."
J Sean Curtin is a GLOCOM fellow at
the Tokyo-based Japanese Institute of Global
Communications.
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