ISSN 1936-5349 (print)
ISSN 1936-5357 (online)

HARVARD
JOHN M. OLIN CENTER FOR LAW, ECONOMICS, AND BUSINESSPRIVATIZING POLICE:
JAPANESE POLICE, THE KOREAN MASSACRE,
AND PRIVATE SECURITY FIRMS
J. Mark Ramseyer
Forthcoming in The Cambridge Handbook on Privatization
Avihay Dorfman & Alon Harel, eds.

Discussion Paper No. 1008
06/2019
Harvard Law School
Cambridge, MA 02138

This paper can be downloaded without charge from:The Harvard John M. Olin Discussion Paper Series:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center
The Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=3402724

Key words: privatization, police, security services
JEL: K14, K23, L32, L33, L51
Prepared for Avihay Dorfman & Alon Harel, eds.,
The Cambridge Handbook on Privatization.
Draft of June 9, 2019
Address correspondence to:
J. Mark Ramseyer
Harvard Law School
Cambridge, MA 02138
ramseyer@law.harvard.edu

Privatizing Police:
Japanese Police, the Korean Massacre,
and Private Security Firms

by J. Mark Ramseyer*
Abstract: Public security is often a non-excludable public good that involves economies of scale.
For these obvious reasons, modern democracies provide their residents with basic security services out of the
public fisc.
Yet the capacity to protect overlaps with the capacity to prey. As a result, regimes in dysfunctionalsocieties sometimes use the public security apparatus to extract benefits. Sometimes the security services
use their resources to extract benefits for themselves.
Public security is also a normal good: the level of security that people demand tends to increase
with income. Hence, wealthier citizens often choose to purchase additional levels of security on the market.
In democracies, they do this to supplement the security provided through the public police. In dysfunctionalsocieties, they do this in part to protect themselves from the public police.
I illustrate several of these simple principles with examples from Japan: the development of themodern police force, the Korean massacre after the 1923 earthquake, and the development of modern private
security firms.

* Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, Harvard University. I gratefully acknowledge the generous
support of Harvard Law School and the University of Tokyo Law Faculty.

Security is often a non-excludable public good. On the one hand, it benefits the people
who buy it; on the other, it benefits the people who live near the people who buy it. It benefits
those neighbors even if they refuse to share in the cost of the security themselves.
Security also entails economies of scale. In part because of the positive externalities
involved, people economize when they purchase the security together. Rather than each pay toprotect himself, they save resources if they collectively purchase their security together.
Unfortunately, a firm (or person) who can protect can also often prey. The technology andorganization entailed in preserving public security is often also the technology and organizationby which a firm can extract benefits for itself. As a result, in dysfunctional societies the public
police often exploit their power -- either for those who control them or for themselves. Private
police sometimes do the same.
Security is also a normal good: the level of security that people demand tends generally torise with their income. Consequently, in modern democracies wealthier citizens often buy private
security services to supplement the public police. In dysfunctional societies, they buy private
security services in part to protect themselves from the public police.
In the essay that follows, I illustrate several of these simple principles with examples fromJapan.
I. Public Goods
A. The Logic:
In the course of keeping order and deterring crime, police officers face economies of scale.
Through their investigations, through their intervention, through their sheer presence, they reduce
the number of people who might otherwise take property or harm others. I could hire a team ofprivate guards to do the same. So could my neighbors. Inevitably, however, we would spend morethan if we cooperated at the outset and hired one team that simultaneously protected all the homes
on our street.
In doing all this, police officers supply a service from which they cannot readily exclude
someone who refuses to cooperate. When a team of guards collectively protects several residents
on a street, they supply a benefit (an externality) that redounds (that spills over) to the benefit ofeveryone else. Suppose one resident refuses to contribute to the cost of the guards. He still enjoys
much of the security that the guards provide. Thanks to their presence, a thief has fewer homes on
the street to rob, fewer cars to steal, fewer residents to mug. He faces lower returns to committing
crime on the street. Necessarily, he is more likely either to travel elsewhere to steal or to opt for alawful career instead.
Even the smaller steps a resident takes to prevent crime produce positive externalities.
Suppose I install an alarm. Although it covers only my house, it still reduces the aggregate take athief can expect from my street. To be sure, if the thief is already on the street, my alarm (provided
I post a credible sign on my lawn) may cause him to rob my neighbor instead. But to the extent
that my alarm deters rather than diverts a criminal (and most crime-prevention steps do both), my
alarm confers a positive externality on my neighbor (Hui-wen & Png 1994).
Note that the same logic applies to military force. Although by convention we often
analyze military protection separately from police work, the same principle applies to both. Police
officers protect us from domestic predators. Military forces protect us from foreign predators.
Both jobs involve economies of scale. And both jobs supply non-excludable public goods.

B. Functional and Dysfunctional Governments:
This logic straightforwardly fits wealthy democracies. In countries like Japan, the U.S., or
those in Western Europe, it explains why citizens opt to fund basic security services through thegovernment. And for the most part, they purchase similar levels of protection. Table 1 below gives
standard numbers for police, murders, and general population levels in the early 2000s, and rates
per 100,000 population. Germany employs more police than the others; Japan and South Korea
hire fewer. The U.S. has a much higher murder rate than the others; Japan enjoys a lower rate.
[Insert Table 1 about here.]
Because this logic presupposes a reasonably honest and effective state sector, it carries lessrelevance for societies with dysfunctional governments. If an autocratic regime controls its police
tightly, it may choose to use its police to keep itself in power. If it does not control its police, those
officers may choose to use their power to extract revenue for themselves.
That said, democratic governments are not the only regimes that use police to preserve
order. If a state protects its residents from outside predators, it enhances its opportunity to prey on
its residents itself. It can use its monopoly on the use of force (as Max Weber and Douglass Northput it) to exclude foreign predators and silence domestic predators. Necessarily, it increases its
own ability to extract wealth for itself.
By some accounts, the relatively benign police and military forces in modern democracies
have their roots less in the democratic process than in interstate competition. In medieval Europe,
military predators (call them feudal lords) competed with each other for territory, and from theirterritories extracted private returns (tax payments, however denominated). Farmers on the
periphery, however, could move. Rather than pay tribute to one sovereign, they could switch
loyalties and pay tribute to a neighboring one instead. In effect, that competitive pressure tended
to push incumbent lords toward keeping their extractions at competitive levels.
C. Nineteenth-Century Japan:
Military officers (samurai) in late-19th-century Japan saw their competition in the West.
As the U.S. Navy began to pressure the Tokugawa government (i.e., the shogunate) to open its
ports, military officers associated with several out-lying domains (han) ousted the government ina coup. Nominally, they returned the Kyoto-based emperor to power -- hence the term "Meiji
Restoration." In fact, they returned nothing to the emperor. He had served as titular head of thecountry before; he remained titular head now. The military officers toppled one military
government, and replaced it with their own.
Over the course of the next two decades, the new leaders steadily consolidated their power.
They did not install a democracy or run a charity. They arrogated control to themselves, andrewarded themselves handsomely for the effort. They understood, however, that offering theircountrymen stability and prosperity would increase their domestic support. And they understoodthat this stability and prosperity would also help provide the resources necessarily to keep foreign
threats in check.
To consolidate their power, the new leaders created a military. In 1871, they dissolved therival domainal governments, and began to try to force the domainal leaders (daimyo) to disband
their armies. They found it a hard process, and succeeded only after a civil war in 1877. Out of
their own domainal armies, they then created the nucleus of a national military force. To staff theofficer corps, they recruited heavily from their home domains. To staff the general soldiers, in1873 they instituted a draft.

To further their control, the new leaders also created a national police force. By 1881, they
had put in place its basic organizational structure. In the same year, they also created a special
police (the kenpei) to maintain order within the military (and enforce the draft). And after several
anarchists and socialists plotted to assassinate the emperor in 1910, they created a separate police
force (the tokko) to watch groups that might threaten the national political structure (Tsuchida2017, 8-33; Yoshida 2016, 53-59, 78-81).
II. Protection and Predation:
A. The Logic:
When a government creates an organization that protects its citizens, it necessarily also
creates an organization that can prey on its citizens. After all, the structure and technology ofprotection overlap heavily with the structure and technology of predation. Dysfunctional
governments are often dysfunctional precisely because they cannot constrain that public predation.
The same problem plagues private security forces. Suppose a person (or firm or group)
maintains an organization to protect his family and their assets. On the one hand, the organization
may provide a public good: to the extent it deters rather than diverts crime, it confers a positive
externality on other citizens. As several scholars noted about modern Australia, the modern private
security industry has been "a major contributing factor to reductions in crime since the 1990s"(Prenzler, Sarre & Kim 2017, p. 323). On the other, it also creates a threat: that security industry
now enables the person (or firm or group) to prey on other citizens itself.
Over time, people have used private security services for what have seemed morally
ambiguous ends. In the late 19th century, for example, U.S. firms famously hired the Pinkertonsto break strikes. The moral ambiguity follows from the moral ambiguity of unions themselves: thePinkertons either violated the rights of workers, or protected the firm's ability to pay market wages
in the face of a labor price-fixing cartel. In the early 20th century, firms hired Bugsy Siegel andMeyer Lansky. Because of Prohibition, those in the alcohol distribution chain could not turn tothe police to enforce their contracts. Within that legal vacuum, Siegel and Lansky supplied
contract-enforcement services. Here too note the overlap between protection and predation: overtime, the Siegel-Lansky firm would evolve into the entity that eventual presidential candidate
Thomas Dewey would attack as Murder, Inc.
In modern democracies, we tend to believe (or hope) that we can use electoral pressure tokeep the public police in check. But we read about the Pinkertons in Arthur Conan Doyle's Valleyof Fear. We watch Moe Greene (modeled on Siegel) and Hyman Roth (modeled on Lansky) in
the Godfather. And we find ourselves less confident that anyone will keep private police forces incheck.
B. Dysfunctional Governments:
For obvious reasons, private security services thrive in societies with weak governments.
Residents hire men to protect themselves and their family. They hire men to guard their property.
They hire men to enforce their contracts (as New Yorkers hired Siegel and Lansky). Were thestate to offer effective police protection, they might do without the private services. Absent that
protection, they hire their own.
When Sicily lacked a strong government in the 19th century, the mafia famously arose to
take its place (Gambetta 1996). But more modern history offers its own analogues. On a
population of only 57 million, for example, South Africa maintains 152,000 public police; itscitizens, however, hire an additional 8,700 security firms and their 489,000 employees (Berg &Howell 2017, 276).
Contemporary civil security services can introduce much the same ambiguity as the
Pinkertons and Siegel-Lansky. As the chaos from the Soviet collapse spread through Eastern
Europe, "trained professional soldiers ... switched to private security companies." As they did,"the private security sector became its own political, criminal and social force" (OCCRP 2010).
The men who run these private firms in places like Eastern Europe are not all trained soldiers.
They also include simple "[k]illers, drug dealers and racketeers" (OCCRP 2010). Many of themprey on their own behalf. In Bulgaria, they "force their way into the very companies they are hired
to protect, taking shares and money from owners" (OCCRP 2010).
In these dysfunctional states, sometimes those in the public regime manipulate the private
security firms to their own private advantage. Sometimes, that advantage can be political. In
Moldova, a minister threated to drop security firms from government contracts unless they
intimidated residents into voting communist (OCCRP 2010). Sometimes, it can be financial. In
Swaziland, the state serves as the principal client to the private security services. In Liberia andSenegal, government and police officials own the primary security services. In Tanzania, army
officials own them (Berg & Howell 2017, 280).
C. 1920s Japan:
1. The earthquake. -- In the wake of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, young Japanese men
illustrated the overlap between protective and predatory activity. Coming on September 1, themagnitude 7.9 (Richter scale) force toppled buildings and smashed homes. Hitting at 11:58 in themorning, it caught many people in the course of cooking lunch. It scattered their charcoal andkerosene stoves, severed gas lines, and set their wooden homes ablaze. The approaching typhoon
winds then fanned the flames across the Kanto (greater Tokyo metropolitan) plain. The aftershocks continued relentlessly, and the fires burned for three days.
The shocks and fires destroyed 40 percent of Tokyo -- 293,000 homes -- and left 60 percentof the population homeless (Aldrich 2012; Naikakufu 2005). Gas, water, electricity, transportation-- the earthquake stopped them all (Yoshida 2016, 205). One hundred five thousand people diedor disappeared across the plain; 70,000 died within Tokyo proper (Tsuchida 2017, 61). The death
toll was spectacularly high within the crowded ghettos where most Koreans lived. Wrote historianCharles Schenckling (2006, 833), it was "Japan's most deadly, economically costly, and physicallydestructive natural catastrophe in history."
2. Private security. -- Traditionally, neighbors had often banded together to provide
communal services. Tokugawa-era governments had not provided much by way of public goods.
In many communities, those local neighborhood bands were all the public service anyone had.
The bands helped put out fires. They repaired the dikes. They organized community festivals.
In the wake of the earthquakes, many of the men quickly organized themselves into these
service bands. The police officers could not manage the city. They were radically understaffed
for so total an urban collapse, and faced deaths and destruction themselves. The government calledboth on police from neighboring areas and on the army, but neither could arrive immediately(Yoshida 2013, 78-79; Tsuchida 2017, 66-67).
Facing this chaos, the private bands -- numbering perhaps 1,600 in Tokyo, and another 600
in neighboring Kanagawa (site of Yokohama) -- undertook a wide range of services. They rationed

food. They distributed other necessities. They carried off dead bodies. They repaired bridges,
roads, water lines (Naikakufu 2005; Keishi cho 1923a).
The local bands also killed Koreans. As early as three hours after the earthquake, survivorsin Tokyo and Kanagawa began to hear rumors of marauding Korean gangs.1 The Koreans torchedbuildings, people said. They planted bombs, they poisoned water supplies, they murdered, theypillaged, they raped.
Korean militants had moved up a planned terrorist attack, reported the newspapers. Japan
had annexed Korea in 1910, and since 1919 Korean activists had started to fight back. Given thiscontext, the Kahoku shimpo newspaper (for example) reported a confession taken from a Koreancaught carrying a bomb (Kahoku 1923b, 1923e). He and other activists, he said, had planned a
massive terrorist attack for the wedding of the crown prince (later the Showa emperor) scheduled
for that fall. In the face of the earthquake, they had accelerated their plans.
Primarily, Korean saboteurs had operated within Korea itself. But they did indeed reachJapan sometimes. Upon hearing these rumors of Korean sabotage, private security bands began
to scour the Kanto plain for Koreans gangs. In the course of their search, they killed many Koreans-- saboteurs or not. They also killed some Japanese they mistakenly thought were Korean.
Although the public police initially worried about the Korean sabotage, they soon
concluded that the private bands posed a bigger problem. They had initially warned residents to
be wary of Koreans. Soon they switched to protecting Korean residents from the deadly private
bands (Tsuchida 2017, 67). Across the metropolitan area, they gathered Koreans into guarded
precincts. In Chiba prefecture's Narashino alone, they held over 3,000 (Kanto n.d.).
3. The puzzles. -- The puzzle is not whether this happened. It is how extensively it
happened. More specifically: (a) how broadly did Koreans commit crimes amid the chaos of theearthquake, and (b) how many Koreans did the private security bands actually kill?
(a) Korean crimes? The circumstances. Oddly, historians routinely dismiss the accountsof Korean crime as sheer rumor -- oddly, because the demographic and political circumstances
make it implausible to think the stories could have been entirely fictitious. As of 1923, the Koreansin Japan were disproportionately male. In 1920 (the year of the census), 41,000 Koreans lived inJapan and 36,000 were men (Table 2). They were also young. Of the 36,000 men, 5,300 were age
15-19, 11,500 are 20-24, 8,400 were 25-29, 5,000 were 30-34, and only 2,100 were 35-39 (Somusho 1920).
[Insert Table 2 about here.]
Young men are a high-crime demographic anywhere, and young Koreans were a highcrime group in Japan (see Table 2). Of 100,000 male Japanese in Japan, police counted 191 who
violated the Criminal Code in 1923. Of 100,000 male Koreans in Korea, they counted 75. For
Koreans in Japan, the rate came to 542.
[Insert Table 3 about here.]
What is more, by the early 1920s Koreans extremists had launched a haphazard antiJapanese resistance. On March 1, 1919, and the days and weeks following, many Koreans took tothe (Korean) streets in large protests. Within a month, self-proclaimed Korean leaders hadorganized a government-in-exile in Shanghai.

1

Yoshida (2016, 230-32). For details of the rumors, see, e.g., Naikakufu (2005).

The most militant of the anti-Japanese Koreans organized themselves into terrorist andsaboteur squads. Operating out of Beijing and elsewhere, they orchestrated a series of bombingsand terrorist attacks against Japan. Most of these they carried out on the Korean peninsula. But
not all.
In 1920, militants tried to kill the Korean crown prince in Japan. They thought him too proJapanese, and planned to assassinate his Japanese wife-to-be and the Japanese governor general of
Korea as well. Police foiled all three assassinations. In 1921, assassins did successfully kill Min
Won-sik in Tokyo. The journalist and politician had pushed for Korean rights, but extremists
thought him too moderate as well, and assassinated him. In 1922, militants tried to assassinate
Japanese army general (and eventual prime minister) Giichi Tanaka in Shanghai.
In the days and weeks before the earthquake, Korean anarchist Pak yol and his Japaneselover Fumiko Kaneko apparently (some historians dispute the charge) plotted to kill the Japaneseemperor himself. A Japanese anarchist would indeed shoot (but not kill) the crown prince (laterShowa emperor) in December 1923. But on September 3, the police arrested Pak and Kaneko, andeventually charged them with attempted regicide.
For the fires that broke out across the city in the hours after the earthquake, Korean leftists
took credit. In Shanghai, they were ecstatic about the disaster. And "when told the theories about
the violence by anti-social Koreans," the Korean Governor General's office reported, "they foundthe theories reasonable" (Chosen sotoku fu 1923a). In Korea itself, the leftists forthrightly claimed
responsibility. According, again, to the Governor General's office (Chosen sotoku fu 1923b):
Those espousing communism, along with the various labor groups organized by thecommunists, observe that the harm from disaster was caused less by the earthquake thanby the accompanying fire. They then declare that ideologues holding the same goals thatthey hold lit the fires. Their compatriots lit the fires for the sake of revolution, they explain.
They rejoice in the heroic accomplishment, and look forward to the chance to participate
themselves.
The reports. Newspapers reported a wide range of eyewitness accounts of Korean crime.
To be sure, they competed in a world of yellow journalism. Yet to take but a few examples, on
September 3 the Osaka Asahi newspaper reported that Korean mobs were advancing on Tokyo
from neighboring Yokohama, torching houses as they came (Asahi 1923b). On September 4, it
reported that the Korean mobs were carrying explosives and oil (probably kerosene) as they ran
through the city (Asahi 1923c). Several Koreans, wrote a Nagoya paper, upon their arrest
confessed to planning to blow up a train (Nagoya 1923). The Tokyo Nichi Nichi newspaper
detailed first-hand accounts of Korean arson, dynamite, and general rampage (Tokyo nichi nichi
1923). The Sendai-based Kahoku shinpo (Kahoku 1923c) wrote on September 5:
You could call it a secondary cause of the Tokyo disaster or -- depending on yourpoint of view -- the principal cause. This is the violence by the anti-social Koreans. ... The
earthquake broke gas lines across the city. Groups of Koreans then scattered across thecity lighting the gas, and causing more than 120 fires. In some places, they threw bombs.
After the disaster, they poisoned wells ....
Some Tokyo residents took refuge on the late Prime Minister Aritomo Yamagata estate. Yet they
now had nothing to drink, wrote the Kahoku shimpo newspaper, because Koreans had poisoned
the wells on the estate (Kahoku 1923a).
Some Koreans did indeed use the chaos to loot, burn, rape and poison, the Japanese
government eventually concluded, but not on the scale claimed in the rumors (Keibi bu 1923;

Naito 1923). As the Korean Governor General's office put it, the rumors "were not without sometruth." They "had facts at their root," but became exaggerated in the course of their repetition(Chosen sotoku kanbo 1923; Chosen sotoku fu 1923b).
The Justice Ministry investigated, and reached the following conclusions. During the fivedays after the earthquake, 139 fires broke out in Tokyo. Of these, 8 were caused by arson, and 3
by specifically Korean arson (Shiho sho 1923, 8-276). More generally, the Ministry (Shiho sho
1923, 350) concluded that from September 1 to 3, Koreans carried out 2 murders, 4 attempted orplanned murders; 6 burglaries, 3 rapes, 17 thefts, 3 cases of embezzlement, and 4 violations of
explosives regulation. One Korean was found trying to poison the water supply. Five were foundtrying to transport a bomb (Shiho sho 1923, 8-321 to 0322, 9-356 to -357; Goto n.d.).
Compared to the apocalyptic rumors, these are very low numbers. Observe, however, thatthe police were radically short-staffed. They had lost facilities to the fire, lost personnel, and had
plenty to do besides investigating unverifiable oral claims of past crimes. Block after block, mile
after mile, homes lay burned and flattened. Survivors needed food, water, and medicine. The
police officers had neither the resources nor the time to decide which house had burned becauseof a cooking fire and which because of arson. If they suspected arson, they had no way todetermine who had torched it. Given the chaos, necessarily much crime would go unnoticed.
Much noticed crime would go unsolved. And much solved crime would go unpursued.
(b) Japanese massacres? -- the estimates. Contemporaneous estimates. In the wake of thedisaster, several groups and individuals published estimates of the number of Koreans massacredby the Japanese private security squads. First, take the estimates published by the prominent 1920s
professor and democratic activist Sakuzo Yoshino. Yoshino did not investigate the killings
himself. Instead, he relied on an estimate made by a Korean citizen's group. The group concluded-- and he reported -- a Korean death toll from the security squads of 2,613 (Yoshino 1924). Thisis the best-known estimate within Japan, and the one most often cited by serious Japanese scholars.
Second, a militant Korean-based group published a pamphlet in early 1924 entitled"Massacre." In it, the group detailed an estimated death-toll of 3,680 (Anon. 1924a).
Third, in December of 1923 the virulently anti-Japanese Shanghai-based Korean
government-in-exile compiled reports it had received from correspondents in Japan for a total
death toll from the security squads of 6,661 (Anon. 1923; Naikakufu 2005). This is the only
estimate in the 6,000 to 7,000 range. When western scholars claim death tolls of 6,000 (see below),
they apparently rely on this tally. Note that a half-year later, this same government-in-exile wrote
in an open letter to western governments that the security squads had killed 3,655 (Shu 1924).
Last, an anonymous Korean militant wrote in March 1924 that the security squads had
killed 23,059 (Anon. 1924b).
Modern English-language accounts. Scholars writing in English cite a wide range of
numbers. They rarely explain why they choose the numbers they do -- but they do seem always
to choose high numbers over the low. Peter Bates (2006, 17), Jinhee Lee (2008, 206), Kazuhiro
Abe (1983), Yoshiaki Ishiguro (1998, 332), and Miriam Silverberg (2005) each cite numbers in
the 6,000-7,000 range. In one article, anthropologist Sonia Ryang claims that the Japanese patrols
may have killed 10,000 (2003: 746 n.2; also Neff 2016). Elsewhere, she suggests 20,000 (Ryang
2007).

Contemporaneous newspapers. The same sensationalist newspapers that detailed rampant
Korean crime also repeated accounts of rampant Japanese slaughter. A century later, we have little
reason to think either set of accounts more accurate than the other. On October 20, 1923, theOsaka Asahi newspaper actually reported both sets of claims: that day, it published two articles
side by side -- in one, it detailed Koreans looting burned buildings and beating and killing anyone
who blocked their way (Asahi 1923d); in the second, it detailed Japanese security squads
slaughtering 120 Koreans -- laborers, male and female students alike (Asahi 1923a).
The accounts are extremely common. The Hokuriku Times, for example, told of a security
band that killed 58 Korean workers while they were still bound together for transportation(Hokuriku 1923). Kahoku shimpo similarly described a band of young men who slaughtered
Koreans being transported (Kahoku 1923d). The Yomiuri shimbun reported Koreans being killed
and left on the train tracks, Koreans being thrown into the flames, Koreans being thrown into thesea (Yomiuri 1923). And in early 1924, the Yamato shimbun described hundreds of decomposedbodies of massacred Koreans washing up on shore (never mind how it could have known they
were Korean bodies) (Yamato 1924).
The estimation problems. The evidentiary morass that plagues any attempt to determine
the scope of Korean sabotage plagues any attempt to determine the scope of the retaliatory murders.
The earthquake and fire killed 100,000 people. Wherever they went, police officers found piles ofdead bodies, most of them badly burned.
For obvious reasons of sanitation, citizens, police, and other government officials
incinerated and buried the bodies as quickly as they could. They did not have the time to determine
whether the person was killed first and then burned, or had been trapped in the blaze alive.
Japanese and Korean young men looked the same: no one had time to determine whether a corpse
had been Japanese or Korean.
At root, the job of "calculating" the number of Koreans murdered involved the same task
as the job of "calculating" the extent of the Korean sabotage: it involved listening to rumors,
judging their credibility, and adding. Early 20th century Japanese newspapers were nothing if not
sensationalist. They reported extraordinarily frightening stories of Korean crime, and equallyappalling stories of Japanese retaliation.
When the observers and correspondents behind the contemporaneous estimates compiled
their counts, the bodies had often been incinerated long before. Constructing a body count meantlistening to rumors about the past. To reach his total, Yoshino's source reported estimates from 75
locations across the Kanto plain and beyond, from places as distant as Karuizawa. Some of his
entries are precise: 3 killed in Asakusa park. Others have suspiciously round numbers: 500 killedon the "Kanagawa steel bridge". Yoshino summed the numbers and came to 2,613 (Yoshino 1924).
In their own pamphlet, the Korean revolutionary activists apparently did the same. They
entered 2 victims near Koyama, 2 near Aoyama, and 2,000 for Haneda. They summed the numbers(nothing about any Kanagawa steel bridge), and came to 3,680 (Anon. 1924a).
The Shanghai provisional government compiled reports from activists in Japan too. Again,
it reports 1 victim here, 3 here, and 500 from Yoshino's Kanagawa steel bridge -- but no entry forthe activists' Haneda. The government totaled these to 4,407. Then, however, it reported that its
correspondents had sent in another set of numbers (some for the same areas) -- it added the two
separate sets of numbers (with no apparent attempt to check for duplication) and reached 6,661(Anon. 1923). Recall that the next year, the same government reported a 3,655 death toll towestern governments. This time, however, the total included 1,962 deaths from Haneda (Shu
1924).
Now consider the March 1924 report from the anonymous Korean militant. He writes thatthe 2,000 killed in Haneda were Koreans shot by the Army cavalry (Anon. 1924b). To reach his
own sum, he adds numbers from a wide variety of places (2 killed in Aoyama, 2 killed in Omiya,and so forth) -- and the flat 2,000 shot by the cavalry in Haneda. He asserts that the 2,000 number
appears in Yoshino's numbers -- it does not. But having now reached a suitably large sum, he adds
onto that sum 7,861 for those victims whose bodies were discovered, and 3,249 for those whosebodies were not discovered (never mind why this would not completely duplicate the earlier
reports). He further adds 3,100 for Koreans killed by the cavalry (obviously including the alreadycounted Haneda victims). This, he reports, yields a total of 23,059 Koreans killed by the Japanese
after the earthquake.
The government count. The Ministry of Justice counted the Koreans it knew to have beenmurdered. In November of 1923, the it identified 231 Koreans murdered in the greater Tokyo area,and 59 Japanese mistaken for Koreans and killed. For these murders, it prosecuted 325 Japanese(Shiho sho 1923, 9-363 to 364, 9-374). In December that year, the police reported 422 killed in
the general metropolitan area (Keiho kyoku 2013, 6-187, 6-188; Goto n.d.).
In one account, the Korean Governor General's office estimated the number of Koreanskilled by the Japanese private security squads at 300 (Zaikyo senjin 1923). In a second account,it estimated the total Koreans deaths from all causes at 832. It then suggested that 20-30 percentof those deaths were caused by the security squads: a number in the range of 170 to 250 (Chosen
sotoku kanbo 1923).
(c) Japanese massacres? -- the range. Introduction. "So," one lawyer dryly noted in 1924,"it seems we can be certain that it was more than 2 and fewer than 10,000" (Yamazaki 1924).
Sarcastic as he surely was, the lawyer had the right approach. These various purported
estimates do not provide information. In truth, they are not estimates at all. The first days of
September were days of unprecedented chaos. People died when houses collapsed. They diedwhen the flames surrounded them. They died when long-time rivals used the chaos to settle scoresor when looters found them in the way. And some died when Japanese security teams thoughtthem responsible for arson, poisoning, looting, rape, or murder, and killed them. Some of thepeople behind the estimates (like Yoshino) added up the rumors they heard. Some of the others(like the Shanghai provisional government) tallied the rumors and then added them multiple times.
Minimum. Much as the lawyer implies, the best a scholar can do is calculate a plausible
range. The minimum number is easy. The Japanese government limited its counts of Koreansabotage to those with the strongest claims to credibility, and seems to have done the same withthe murders of Koreans. If the police in December 1923 reported 400 Koreans killed, we can bereasonably sure that the security bands killed at least 400 Koreans.
Maximum. The maximum is harder. Start with the number of Koreans in the greater Tokyo
area at the time of the earthquake. On the one hand, historian Shoji Yamada (2012-2013, 4) has
done some of the most careful work on the earthquake. He writes that 8,600 Koreans lived inTokyo in 1923, 3,600 in Kanagawa, and another 1,900 nearby -- for a total 14,100 in the Kanto
plain. The Governor General in Korea estimated similarly estimated 9,000 Koreans in Tokyo city

proper (Chosen sotoku kanbo 1923). On the other hand, a 1923 Japanese government report
estimates that only 10,000 Koreans lived in the greater Tokyo area (Kanto kangei 1923).
Some of the Tokyo Koreans were students, and had not yet returned from vacation. The
Governor Generate estimated 3,000 Korean students in Tokyo (Zaikyo senjin 1923; Chosen sotoku
kanbo 1923); the Toa nippo newspaper (Toa nippo 1923) estimated 2000. The university students
would still have been home on vacation on September 1; lower-level students would have beenback in town. The Governor General put the number of students in Tokyo at the time of theearthquake at 1,200 to 1,300 (Zaikyo senjin 1923); the Toa nippo (1923) put it at 1,600.
Many Koreans would have died in the earthquake and fire. According to the Director
General, about 4,000 of the Koreans laborers (not students) lived in the Honjo and Fukugawa
wards (Zaikyo senjin 1923; Chosen sotoku kanbo 1923). The Honjo ward -- in the merchantquarters to the east of the Sumida River, now part of Sumida ward -- suffered a fatality rate muchhigher than anywhere else in the area: of a population of 256,000 (Somu sho 1920), 48,000 to
51,000 died (Keishi 1923b). On a Korean population in Honjo of 4,000, that ratio yields a death
toll of 790. Note that this almost exactly tracks the Governor General's count of 832 total Korean
deaths.
Once the rumors of the killings by the Japanese security squads began to circulate, thepolice took Koreans into protective custody. They held the largest number in Narashino -estimates of Koreans held there range from about 3,200 (Chosen sotoku kanbo 1923; Rikugun ni
oite 1923) to 3,000 (Shinkasai ni 1923; Koyagi 1923). The total number of Koreans the police
held in all protective facilities is less clear. The estimates range from 5,300 (the Korean Director
General's office; Chosen sotoku kanbo 1923), to 8,000 to 9,000 (the Navy; Koyagi 1923), to 11,900
in Tokyo proper and 4,300 elsewhere in the greater Tokyo area (the Ministry of Justice; Naimu
sho 1923).
Shortly after the earthquake, the Japanese government helped a large number of Koreans
return to Korea. One navy report from southern Korea placed the number of refugees arrivingfrom the greater Tokyo area at 6,000 (Kaigun 1923: 3-38, 3-41, 3-45 to 3-48, 3-57). The office ofthe Korean Governor General placed the number -- in various reports -- at 5,700 (Chosen sotoku
kanbo 1923), at 6,500 (Chosen sotoku fu 1923b), and at 7,200 (Chosen sotoku fu 1924).
Conclusion. Start with the crudest of approaches. Suppose 14,100 Koreans lived in thegreater Tokyo area, that 1,000 students were home on vacation, and that 800 Koreans died in thefires. That leaves 12,300 Koreans. If only 5,700 returned to Korea, and the security squads
slaughtered every remaining Korean in the Kanto plain, they would have killed 6,600. By contrast,
suppose the police took into custody anywhere close to the Ministry of Justice's estimate of 16,200
Koreans. Obviously, the security squads could not have killed any Korean at all. The range ofpotential killings thus runs from 0 to 6,600.
Consider, however, the credibility of these various numbers. First, given that Yamada
enjoys scholarly respect and has devoted much of his career to this subject, take his estimate of
14,100 Koreans rather than the Japanese government's estimate of 10,000. Second, given that thelower government refugee counts date from 1923, take the Governor General's 1924 refugee totalof 7,200. Third, given that even Yamada places the total Tokyo-area Korean count at 14,100, drop
the Ministry of Justice's estimate of 16,200 Koreans in protective custody. The rough mid-pointof the other estimates of Koreans in custody falls at 7,200.
In short: Start with (i) 14,100 Koreans, and subtract (ii) 1000 students on vacation, and (iii)
800 deaths from the fires. The calculation yields a pool of 12,300 potential victims.

Note that the numbers above place both the number of Koreans in custody and the numberof Koreans returning to Korea at 7,200. This fits the picture of a Japanese government that placed
any Koreans it could identify in custody, and then encouraged them to return to Korea.
Accordingly, take (a) the 12,300 potential victims, and subtract (b) the 7,200 in protective custodyand then repatriated to Korea. This leaves a smaller pool of 5,100 potential victims: if the security
squads successfully identified and killed every Korean in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area who
did not return to Korea, they would have killed 5,100.
The government counted 400 victims of the security squads. Given the chaos of the time,
we would not expect it to identify every -- or even most -- of the victims. For the same reason,
however, we would not expect the security squads to locate every Korean who stayed out of theprotective custody, and we would not expect every Korean to have wanted to return to Korea.
Hence the range: significantly higher than 400, and significantly lower than 5,100.
4. Postscript. -- Ironically perhaps, three decades later, Japan-resident Koreans would
launch a decidedly real campaign of sabotage and terror. Three decades later, the exaggerated
rumors of 1923 would start to come true. At the close of the war in August 1945, 1.9 million
Koreans lived in Japan. Most wanted to return to Korea, and during the last four months of theyear, 100,000 to 200,000 Koreans left every month. They had come overwhelmingly from thesouthern tip of the peninsula, and there they returned (Sasazaki 1955, 38-39; Ri 1980, 182).
As the months passed, Japan began a steady recovery, while Korea remained mired inchaos. Kim Il-sung controlled the north -- and would begin his famously brutal family dynasty.
In the south, the fiercely anti-communist Syngman Rhee steadily consolidated his hold. His too
was a brutal consolidation. Just on the island of Jeju (from which a large fraction of the Japanresident Koreans had come), over the course of 1948 to 1949 his forces would slaughter 14,000 to
30,000 real and suspected communists.
With Japan in recovery and South Korea in chaos, the exodus slowed. Many of those who
had planned to leave Japan decided to wait. The specially chartered trains for the harbor left withempty seats. Many Koreans who had returned home began to have second thoughts. Having
already left Japan they could no longer return legally. They chartered small boats for midnight
landings instead.
The resulting cross-cutting migratory currents shaped the politics of the post-war Japanresident Korean community: an initial migration from Japan to South Korea, and an illegal return
migration from South Korea to Japan. Capitalist and apolitical Koreans may not have appreciatedRhee's pugilism, but they did not face the vulnerability that their far-left counterparts did.
Necessarily, Korean communists in Japan had more reason to stay in Japan than their capitalist
and apolitical counterparts; communists in South Korea had more reason to migrate back to Japan
than their capitalist and apolitical counterparts.
Within the Japan-resident Korean community in the early post-war years, Kim Chon-hae
would play perhaps the most prominent role. Kim had spent the war in a Japanese prison as apolitical prisoner. Released in October of 1945, he immediately set about organizing Japanresident Koreans. He would also join the Central Committee of the Japanese Communist Party(JCP), and eventually emigrate to North Korea where he would serve on the Central Committee ofthe party there as well (Ri 1980, 3). As representatives of the Korean community in Japan gathered
to form an encompassing organization (the Federation of Japan-Resident Koreans; Zai Nihon
Chosenjin renmei), however, Kim maneuvered himself into the role of "Supreme Adviser." From

there, he and his allies purged non-communists from the Federation's leadership, and placed theFederation under the direct control of the JCP (Ri 1980, 3; Sasazaki 1955, 50, 58).
Koreans in Japan began to turn violent almost immediately. Police counted 5,000 violent
incidents involving 50,000 Koreans in 1946 -- including violence against Japanese government
agencies and the police (Sasazaki 1955., 198-99). The violence ebbed for a few years, but police
again counted massive violence in 1949 -- this time involving 20,000 Koreans (Sasazaki 1955,
205).
The Korean violence took a distinctly political turn in 1950. In January, Stalin ripped the
JCP for its peaceful tactics, and in June the North Korean army invaded the south. The duly
chastised JCP went underground, and embarked on a multi-year campaign of terror and sabotage.
For its front line, it recruited heavily from among the Japan-resident Koreans (see Ri 1980, 16-21;
Sasazaki 1955, 4-9, 49, 102).
In effect, the JCP and its allied Koreans had begun a Korean War front within Japan. The
Koreans organized themselves into -- ironically, for this essay -- what they called private security
organizations. They named them the Committees to Protect the Motherland (Sokoku boei iinkai),and trained under surreptitiously infiltrated North Korean military officers (Sasazaki 1955, 101103).
The Motherland Protection Committees coupled terrorism with sabotage. They bombed
police stations. They attacked government offices. They set cars on fire with molotov cocktails.
They attacked American military installations and personnel. And they disrupted munitions
production for the Korean front, and the transportation of those munitions to South Korea(Sasazaki 1955, 60, 103).
III. Security as a Normal Good
A. The Logic:
Security is a public good and a normal good, and the juxtaposition presents a problem. On
the one hand, because security service is a non-excludable public good subject to economies ofscale, we provide it through the state. Were everyone to buy his own security individually, we
would collectively lose the economies of scale involved. We would also present everyone with aprisoners' dilemma, and find ourselves with suboptimal levels of service. Rather than leave each
person to buy his own security, we provide it from the public fisc.
On the other hand, because security services are a normal good, people do not necessarily
want the same level. Instead, the welfare-maximizing level of protection rises with income.
Wealthy people spend more to protect their own security and (having more property to protect)earn greater returns from protecting their property as well.
Modern democracies finesse this mismatch by limiting public security to a basic minimum.
The government provides a base level of police protection. Beyond that base, wealthier citizens
buy extra protection out-of-pocket. When they do, they tend to focus on those services with theleast spillover. Most home owners, for example, do not hire private guards for their houses. Ifthey do hire guards, they hire them collectively as a neighborhood association. Instead, private
individuals invest in technology. They purchase alarm systems, motion detectors, video cameras,
higher quality locks -- all of which do relatively less to help their neighbors.
Some democracies, like the U.S., also limit the mismatch between public provision andprivate demand by hiring police at the local level. Given that people tend to segregate by income
everywhere, this lets residents buy public security services closer to their private preferences.

Richer citizens live in municipalities that hire police protection at levels that insure relatively low
levels of crime. Poorer citizens make do with homes in higher crime areas.
Egalitarian commentators routinely complain about this, of course. The rich live incommunities where the public police keep crime to low levels, they note. The rich buy private
security services besides. All this is true, but no different from any other normal good. Demand
for most goods and services rises with income (hence the term "normal"). Given that it does, therich consume more of most such goods and services. So too with security protection.
D. Private Policing in Japan:
1. Introduction. -- Security services form a large industry in modern Japan. The national
government itself supplies 251,900 police officers. But as befits a wealthy country with a rangeof tastes for security services, many Japanese augment this basic protection with private security
contracts. As of 2016, 9,400 private firms employed 543,000 employees (Keisatsu 2016, 1). Thesefirms primarily offered traffic management and security services for homes and commercial
establishments (Keisatsu sho 2016, 4).
Americans buy less private security. With roughly three times the Japanese population,
the various governments in the U.S. provide roughly 810,000 police officers. Americans
supplement this public service with 1.13 million of what the Labor Department calls "security andgaming surveillance officers in 2017. They hire another 100,000 IT security officers, and 40,000
private detectives (U.S. Department of Labor).
Table 1 offers some comparisons to a few other countries. Switzerland also enjoys low
crime levels (though still higher than Japan), but uses only half the private security officers. The
U.K., France and Germany both have more crime and more police. The U.K. has a larger market
for private security; France and Germany have smaller markets.
The largest of the Japanese security firms is Secom. Founded in 1962, it boasts sales of
971 billion yen (as of May 2019, $1.00 U.S. traded for about 110 yen yen) and a workforce of
54,600. The next largest is Alsok, with sales of 436 billion yen and 37,500 employees (Nihon
keizai 2019, 247). The typical Japanese security firm is much smaller. As of 2016, only 49 firms
had 1000 employees or more; 2300 firms had 1 to 5 (Keisatsu 2016, 2-3).
The industry does many things, of course, but it particularly seems to offer low paid andnon-demanding jobs to elderly men forced out of work before they had planned to retire. About
110,000 of the Japanese security workers in 2016 were aged 50 to 59 -- the modal age decade. The
most publicly visible of the security workers wave traffic around construction sites. Others guide
elementary school children across traffic intersections, tell them grandfatherly jokes, andencourage them to continue home carefully (Keisatsu 2016, 2-3).
Japanese consumers can of course hire private guards individually for their homes, but few
do. Most upper-middle class Japanese instead contract for wired services. They install alarmsystems, post prominent Secom or Alsok signs, and connect the alarms to the relevant security
service.
Yet as taxpayers, Japanese sometimes collectively contract for extra private police. Most
notably, two of the wealthiest wards in Tokyo, along with the extremely poor Okinawa, havecontracted with Secom for additional policing. The wards are Setagaya (population: 900,000) and
Minato (243,000). In the two wards, Secom squad cars circulate on a 24-hour basis. Consider thecontrast with the U.S. American communities buy police protection at the municipal level -- withwealthy communities buying enough to keep crime rates extremely low. Japanese communities

obtain basic police protection from the national government, and then sometimes purchase extra
protection from private firms as well (Yasuda 2019; Chiiki 2012).
The growth in the modern Japanese security industry coincides with a growth in crime.
Over the course of the 1990s, crime --especially thefts -- soared. In 1992, police reported 1.74
million Criminal Code crimes (mostly thefts). By 2002, they reported 2.85 million. The numberof private security employees followed quickly -- from 291,000 in 1992, to 437,000 in 2002. Afterpeaking in 2002, however, crime began to fall, and by 2007 the Criminal Code violations had
fallen to 1.91 million, and by 2017 to 915,000. Private investments in security stayed high: in
2007, private security firms employed 494,000, and in 2016 they still had 543,000 (Keisatsu sho,various years; Endo 2017, 49).
2. The criminal overlap. -- (a) Misora. Of course, the investments that protect resemble
the investments that enable a person to prey. For an effective guard (a real guard, not an elderly
gentleman helping grade school children over a crosswalk), one of the qualifications is a facility
for violence. As a result, the security and criminal industries have often overlapped -- as the mafia,
Siegel and Lansky, and the Pinkertons exemplify.
Japanese history illustrates the same overlap. Take Hibari Misora, the most wildly popular
Japanese singer of the 1950s, and perhaps for the entire second half of the twentieth century. Witha deep and throaty alto, she specialized first in jazz and then in a retro-traditional Japanese genre
known as enka. In the days before television, she toured the country with her songs.
Singers lived vulnerable lives in the late 1940s. Arriving in a new town as entertainers,
they worked at the mercy of the local mob. Often, the mob controlled access to the local stage.
From entertainers they demanded a protection tax.
In 1948, Misora's parents took their 11 year-old daughter to meet Kazuo Taoka, the don ofwhat would become the largest of the Japanese mobs, the Yamaguchi gumi. The group recruitedheavily from the burakumin under-class in Japan. Misora herself was said (by some) to come fromthe buraku, and her younger brother would in time join the Yamaguchi gumi. Misora sang for
Taoka, and he apparently loved her voice. He promptly took her under his wing. For the rest ofher career, she travelled with guards from the Yamaguchi gumi. (Misora N.D.; Yamadaira 2016;
Buraku mondai 2015).
In 1963, the city of Kobe (where the Yamaguchi-gumi has its headquarters) began building
a retail arcade near the Sannomiya railroad station. For that work, Kobe hired the large,
mainstream construction firm of Kajima. Yet Sannomiya lay in a mob-dominated part of the city.
Anticipating trouble, Kajima contracted with the Yamaguchi gumi for security services. But theline between protection and extortion being as vague in Japan as anywhere else, the police called
it extortion. They charged Taoka, and the court eventually sentenced him to four years in prison.
Taoki died before serving time. Misora spoke at his funeral (Yakuza soshiki N.D.).
(b) Iijima. Isamu Iijima had anti-communist tastes. Born in 1921, he had served as acaptain in the imperial army. In 1960, he organized a brigade to fight the far-left during the riots
over the U.S.-Japan defense treaty (Iwasaki 2018, 13-14). And from that history, Iijima created abusiness. Primarily, he specialized in attacking student activists, labor unions, and citizen protest
groups.
In 1969 and 1970, Iijima transformed his brigade into the Special Defense & Assurance
firm (Tokubetsu boei hosho). As staff, he hired graduates of the martial arts teams at third-tieruniversities. Iijima had a memorable criminal history himself (11 violations), and willingly hiredmen with similar records. He maintained about 200 core employees, and hired on another 2000 asnecessary (Iwasaki 2018, 14).
Iijima and his men played prominent roles in 1970s violence. Time and again, firms hired
Iijima and his staff to break strikes. When victims of the Minamata mercury poisoning attended
the general shareholders meeting of the polluting Chisso fertilizer firm, Chisso hired Iijima. His
employees beat the shareholders, and closed down the protests (Chisso 1971). When leftist groups
fought plans to build an international airport at Narita, the firms involved hired Iijima. Again, his
men left the protestors badly injured.
About this all, Iijima was nothing if not forthright (Iwasaki 2018, 15):
When a security firm has a contract with a firm, it breaks the strikes at that firm. ....
And if we have a security contract with a university, we have police powers within theschool precincts. ... Lynching should be tried at law, to be sure. But if the other side fights
back, and in order to clear them out a few skulls have to crack .... Well, that can't be helped.
Sign a security contract, and we can enter fully into battle.
The unions retaliated by demanding industry regulation (Iwasaki 2018, 18). Faced with
their pressure, the government investigated, and counted 321 security firms with 27,000 employees.
Of the managers, branch officers, and directors, 77 had criminal records, and 4 were former
members of the mob. Of the firm presidents, 20 had criminal records (Sato 1971, 108; Iwasaki
2018, 19).
Given the union pressure, the Diet passed a regulatory statute in 1972 (Iwasaki 2018, 11).
Through it, the government introduced a variety of measures that would let it exclude from theindustry men with recent criminal histories or syndicate ties. The unions ran Iijima out of business,it seems. Today, security officers are more often genial grandfathers joking with grade school
children than they are Iijima's martial arts graduates
But the problems are not gone. In 2004, the city of Yao (50 kilometers from Kobe) decided
to build a disability welfare center. In the course of the contracting, the nominal human rights
group for the buraku under-class (the Buraku Liberation League; BLL) illustrated how
simultaneously to play protector and predator. With its close ties to the mob, it maneuvered itself
into position as a consultant to the Kajima construction firm. Kajima then paid large amounts ofthe government funds to a BLL official, and hired for security services a firm on whose board the
BLL official's wife served (Jiage 2008; see generally Ramseyer & Rasmusen 2018; Ramseyer2019).
Kosmo Security Services currently (2019) operates a 500 employee shop out of Osaka(next to Kobe and Yao). Its manager maintains close ties to the buraku under-class and the BLL(Ese dowa 2017) -- not irrelevant given the buraku's ties to the mob and the BLL's history of
extortion. Several years ago, a local elementary school hired Kosmo to guard its building at night.
In 2007, however, the police arrested one of its guards. In one of the teacher's desk, it seems theguard had found photographs and videos of naked girls being measured in the health clinic andchanging into their swim suits. He stole the photographs and videos and promptly tried to extort
payments from the teacher (Saitei ningen 2007; Kosumo keibi 2019).
In 2009, the police arrested a former president of Echigo Security Assurance for funnelingprofits to the mob (Mainichi 2009). And in 2010, the government revoked the license of a Fukuoka
security firm on the ground that one of its managers also held a senior post with the Yamaguchi
gumi (Boryokudan gaisha 2010).
The tensions, in other words, continue.

V. Conclusions
Modern democracies provide security protection out of the public fisc. They do so bothbecause the protection involves a non-excludable public good, and because it is subject toeconomies of scale. Simultaneously, however, security protection is also a normal good. The
demand for security tends to rise with income levels. In some countries (as in the U.S.), citizens
decide the level of public security at the local level -- facilitating Tiebout competition; othercountries (e.g., Japan) find the resulting inequalities politically unpalatable and centralize policing
instead. In either country, wealthier citizens tend to augment their public security with private
services bought on the market. In both countries, the private security services carry with them thepotential for extortion as well as protection.

Table 1:. Public Police and Private Security Services,
Selected Countries
PoliceNo.
Rates
Belgium
37,900 350.0
Bulgaria
28,200 372.4
France220,000 340.0
Germany
308,400 377.0
Japan
251,900 199.6
Switzerland 17,800 228.9
U.K.
151,000 243.5
U.S.
807,000 245.3

Private security
No.
Rates
15,400 142.2
57,100 755.5
147,800 228.4
168,000 205.4
543,000 430.2
17,700 227.9
364,600 588.0
1,133,900 344.7

Murders
Rates
198
1.83
128
1.69
743
1.15
662
0.81
442
0.35
46
0.59
655
1.06
14,612
4.44
No.

Population
10,840,000
7,564,000
64,714,000
81,802,000
126,220,000
7,786,000
62,008,000
328,994,000

Notes: Numbers are for most recent years available, but
because of differing sources and reliability should be taken
only as rough approximations.
Sources: CoESS & APROSER, The Socio-Economic Added Valueof Private Security Services in Europe, March 14, 2013 (Wemmel,
Belgium: CoESS General Secretariat); U.S. Department of Labor,
Bureau of Labor Statistics (Occupational Outlook Handbook,2019); United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime, Intentional
Homicide, Count and rate per 100,000 (n.d.); Claire Provost, The
Industry of Inequality, The Guardian, May 12, 2017; generalsources on internet. For Japan, see sources given in text.

Table 2:

Population in Japan, by Origin

Total

Male

FemaleJapanese
1920
1930

55,884,992
61,972,025

27,980,989
32,049,065

27,904,003
31,922,060

Koreans
1920
1930

40,755419,009

36,043
297,501

4,712
121,508

Source:Kokusei, various years.

Table 3:

Criminal Code Violations in Korea and Japan,
by Koreans and Japanese, 1921-1925

Rates per 100,000:
Crimes by Koreans
Crimes by Japanese (male)in Japan (all)in Korea (male)in Japanin Korea
1921
595
126
280
77
1922
589
104
226
69
1923
542
75
191
63
1924
379
75
140
70
1925
498
71
135
75

Notes: Numbers are for people sentenced (rather thanarrested). Korean numbers are for both sexes, while Japanese
numbers (crimes and totals) are for males only. Note, however,that the Koreans in Japan during this period were overwhelmingly
male, and the crimes by Korean women in Japan were in the single
digits. The number of total Japanese males from 1920 to 1925 isinterpolated using Kokusei data.
Sources: Somu sho, Kokusei chosa [Vital Statistics] (Tokyo:
Somu cho, various years); Shiho sho chosa ka, Naichi ni okeru
Chosenjin to sono hanzai ni tsuite [Regarding the Koreans inJapan and their crimes], 5 Shiho kenkyu 1, 59 et seq. (1927).

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