ABSTRACT
Apart from bodily injury or manslaughter caused by negligence in traffic offences, the Japanese police registered 2,033,546 Criminal Code offences in 1998. The ratio of frequency, that is, the number of criminal cases registered by the police per 100,000 residents amounts to 1,608. Japan’s crime rate decreased from 1948 to 1978 almost continuously (1948: 2,000; 1973: 1,091), but since then it has gradually increased (1974: 1,095; 1997: 1,506). Still, Japan shows lower figures when compared to Western industrialized states (Research and Training Institute of the Ministry of Justice 1999). 2 Japan’s crime rate, being the lowest of all advanced nations, may astonish Western observers. Some criminologists in foreign countries, such as Haley (1989, 1991, 1999) from the United States and Braithwaite (1989) from Australia have looked for the causes of the low Japanese crime rate. They say that it results mainly from the underlying assumption of ‘restorative justice’ that has traditionally been practised in Japanese criminal justice. Haley states that ‘victim–offender mediation’ ‘is an essential feature of Japan’s success and should be expanded in the United States and other criminal justice systems along with other elements of the restorative model, while ‘there are no victim–offender mediation programs in Japan. No mediator training agencies exist. There are no statistics or studies. Mediation is a normal aspect of daily life.’ So the practice and theory of Japanese criminal justice deserves a closer look.
