Decline of Japan’s Homicidal rate (Quantitative Data)
In the article “The Vanishing Killer”, by David T. Johnson, I was able to draw information on part of the possible reasoning behind why Japan has had a drop in the number of people killing each other in addition to some statistical data that is rather stunning. Japan has seen a “large and rapid” drop in homicides committed by “young men” after the war according to Professor Hasegawa Mariko of Waseda University(1). You may ask, “why do I bother to mention the young men part?” but in reality, most of the homicides before the war were committed by young men themselves.
We can see from the graph of homicide rate in Japan between 1888 - 2003 that around 1945 when the Japanese surrendered in the war, the rate dropped by about approximately 2.5. This can be explained by the absence of men of murder age for the cause of the war, leading to the “vanishing” killers. As the graph goes on, there’s a gradual decline of the homicidal rate. The article describes this as a possible result from “the risk associated with murdering” and “the increase in the number of people attending college from 13-40%). The reason that I find this source and data reliable is because the statistical data published is official police data from Hasegawa in different times and this article is written by a sociologist so there is hopefully less bias and instantaneous conclusions. The interesting part of the data is that there is a shift in the age of typical murderers from younger 20′s to more 40′s and late 50′s postwar. I think it’s important because it’s redefining a new homicidal age group which could possibly mean that the previous conflicts that caused young people to murder was mostly fixed to shift the age range. Source:
http://0-eds.a.ebscohost.com.ignacio.usfca.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=d78f9fb9-16d4-4d77-a709-e6bc337e748b%40sessionmgr4010