Beyond Japan Transcript
Series 2, Episode 29: Crime & Desistance with Adam Hunt
Edited by Oliver Moxham, Host and Producer (18/5/2022)

OM: Oliver Moxham
AH: Adam Hunt

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OM: Hello and welcome to Beyond Japan, an interdisciplinary podcast that looks at thebroad reach of Japanese Studies from within and beyond Japan. This podcast isbrought to you by the Centre for Japanese Studies at the Sainsbury Institute for the
Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in collaboration with the University of East Anglia.
I’m your host, Oliver Moxham, Research Project Coordinator at the Sainsbury Instituteand researcher of language and Japanese war heritage.
Today I’m joined by Adam Hunt, PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield, tocompare crime between Japan and the UK and how factors such as attitudes towards
former convicts affects “desistance”; that is, attempts to reduce the rate of reoffending.
We hope you enjoy the show.
***
OM: Good morning, Adam, thank you for joining me on the podcast today.
AH: Hello, thank you for having me.

OM: So, first off, we'd like to know a bit more about you. Can you tell us about your areaof expertise and how your interests brought you there?
AH: Right, so my area of expertise is desistance from crime, which is how people
transition out of crime. What brought me there is general undergraduate research. I had

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a teacher at Manchester Metropolitan who did research with a group of his friends,
about 20 friends that were drug offenders, and he researched how they all transitionedout of crime. My interest started there and then my own personal research andexperience with Japanese media gave me an interest in Japan.
So, I started learning the language and I sort of just combined the two interests from mywork in desistance generally in Western spheres, and then realised that very few people
have actually done research on Japanese desistance in English. There is a small pieceon the topic, but other than that I'm not aware of anyone writing in English on
desistance, though people are writing on desistance in Japanese.
OM: I see. So, let's begin by looking at crime and punishment in the UK and Japan ingeneral. In recent episodes with Dr Viviana Andreescu on capital punishment in Japan,
we discussed that while Japan has a relatively low crime rate and a powerfulprosecution system, the general public has a high fear of crime. How does this comparewith the UK?
AH: It's very similar if you think about Japan and England in terms of how they operate
in terms of information on crime. They both have a media that is using the same
systems to gain viewership, and in contemporary society, the talking points tend to be
globalised, so it's a homogenised view of crime across the world
So, I suppose – it's a very long explanation – Japan, oddly, has a high fear of crime. I
mean, one of the best indicators of just how concerned with crime Japan is, is the
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number of volunteers that contribute towards crime prevention activities. In Japan, theynumber in about 3 million of a population of 125 million. These stats might be slightly
out of date, but that is an extraordinarily large amount of public that are actively
contributing towards crime prevention measures, even though Japan has a very low
level of crime in terms of recorded crime statistics relative to the wider world, but we'll

get on to that topic in a second, I believe.
OM: So, the general media then, is the main driver behind public concerns aroundcrime in both Japan and the UK. Is that correct?
AH: Yes. So, the news, online publications, YouTube – based on my reading, there's alevel of political mirroring where politicians will address media concerns and sort ofvalidate their existence by addressing them as real concerns, but my reading on this
topic is not extensive. y understanding is that, yes, there is a high fear of crime, eventhough Japan is arguably the safest country in the world.
OM: Okay. I'm somewhat sceptical of the claims that Japan is a low-crime country,
particularly around sexual harassment. I remember sitting through an induction before
my year abroad where the women in my class were told how to deal with chikan, or‘molesters’ on public transport, as though it were a common nuisance. I later learned
that while 65% of women in Japan reported experiencing groping, over 95% of such
incidents weren't reported to the police. In your opinion, do you think there is a gap
between crimes committed and crimes reported in general?

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AH: I do. There's significant evidence that there is such a gap, even outside of Japan. I
have some statistics that are worth considering just to set up the discussion. So in
Japan, the number of police recorded crimes – this is based on a white paper that was
published in 2021 on crime in 2020 by the Japanese government, translated into
English, so the listener can actually go and look at this themselves – the number is

750,000 police-recorded instances. In England, the number of police-recorded crime is
6 million, so obviously that's a lot higher.
So, that's police-recorded crime, that's not self-report data. One thing to point out is thatJapan's population is 125,000,000, and the data here is from England and Wales, andthe combined population of England and Wales is roughly 60 million, so the relative
difference in terms of crimes per population is very close to 15-fold, approaching 20-foldin terms of recorded incidents, but if you look at the crime survey for England andWales, which is self-report data, you will see that in England and Wales there's anestimated 12 million instances of a penal code violation, which is a fairly sizable gap
between recorded crime and the actual number. In recent times, because of the crime
survey for England and Wales has put in significant effort into attempting to drive up
police numbers to represent true levels of crime, because obviously you have that crime
survey data that's telling you that there's all these crimes that happen that aren't being
recorded. So, initiatives to get people talking to the police, especially with sexual
offences which are significantly underreported because of the possibility that revictimisation occurs whenever someone reports crimes like that, which are troubling.

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In terms of Japan's underreported crime, there's a few factors to get into in terms ofsexual offending, understanding that requires getting into power dynamics in Japan andits overall structure and how that may contribute towards people not wanting to comeforwards.
OM: I see. So, let's consider criminal demographics. What are the social backgroundsof convicts in the UK and Japan? Are there any striking differences that jump out to you
between these two countries?
AH: So, between these two countries, the demographics of offending, generally
speaking, relate to the type of crime you consider. The majority of crime is made up ofcrime related to ability to survive. So, if you look at Japan, of the 750,000 crimes,

roughly 500,000 (well over 50%) is theft, and theft is usually driven by socio-economic
deprivation. In England it's very similar. The majority of crimes come from socioeconomically deprived areas. Something worth noting is the motivations to commit
crime are relatively varied based on the actual specific offence that occurs.
Something that is worth explaining is the age-crime curve. Of the large portion of
offences committed, there are two types of offenders: these short-term offenders that
only commit a small amount of crime; and long-term offenders that have life
circumstances that make it very difficult for them to effectively engage in normal society,and these people will usually have longer careers of offending. We'll get onto thissubject later.

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So, there aren't specific types of offenders, if you look at literature on this, so there isn't
too much specialisation in offending, so you don't have specifically a thief or specificallya violent assault person or specifically even sexual offending in some cases. So, if you
think about why someone will get arrested if they are in a life circumstances that is
conducive to criminal activity and the people they are associating with, they will havevarious activities within their life and so they will generally be caught only for a few –maybe even [only] one – of those activities, which means that in terms of data, when
you see a person that's committed a violent assault and a person that's committed theft,
there's an entire possibility that both of these people have very similar lives in terms ofcriminal offending if they are long term offenders. That's worth bearing in mind in termsof demographic characteristics.
Something in terms of difference between England and Japan in terms of thedemographic characteristics is the obvious point, which is England is a lot more
ethnically diverse, and there is a significant amount more of socio-economic deprivation.
Something worth pointing out is that Japan has a different age of criminal responsibility,
so the actual landscape of its criminal justice system and the people that it's dealing
with is slightly different. Plus, Japan's age of criminal responsibility, up until about April
2022, was 20, so you were considered an adult at the age of 20 in Japan. There has
been a slight change where if you are sentenced for something over a year, you will betreated as an adult from the age of 18 now, and that's only just changed, so that was

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April [when] that rule change went into play. I'm not entirely sure what the implication ofthis is and how it's going to play out in relative terms.
The other point to raise in terms of demographics is that Japan is, again, isolated
relative to England in terms of demographic factors that would compose a country. So,
England has got a lot of different nationalities in its DNA, but Japan is very
homogenised. Consequently, a lot of Japanese culture is built around the understandingthat everyone knows all of these social rules.
OM: One big difference that stands out to me is that, talking about socio-economic
difference, in the UK, we have the mentality of a class system - working class, middle
class, upper class - and these distinctions of blue collar, white collar crime, whereas

Japan has a very large middle class, so there isn't so much stereotypical views basedon your socio-economic backgrounds, maybe, in Japan when it comes to crime.
AH: Yes, that's true. One of the difficult things about talking about crime in Japan is thatcriminals occupy a different spacing category relative to the wider population. So, if you
think about theories on Japan and Japanese culture, you have to very carefully consider
whether those theories are applicable to the specific group of people that are offendingin Japan, which may be composed of the people that aren't necessarily Japanese. So,
it's something that would require extensive statistical work to just double-check all of thestatistics on what percentage of people that are committing theft and so on and so forth.

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Something that I didn't note earlier was one statistic that I have in terms of comparing
England and Wales, [which is] useful for the discussion going forward. I'm not 100%
certain how comparable exactly these two statistics are, but I have the statistic forcharge or summoned in England and Wales, which totalled about 315,000, and then in
Japan, they had offences with a finalised judgement, which is 250,000, so the relative

difference there is about two-fold compared to 20-fold in the official statistics. I justthought I'd mention that now, while I remember.
OM: Interesting. So, your research is centred around "desistance", defined by UKjustice inspectorates as "the process of abstaining from crime by those with a previous
pattern of offending". Before getting into desistence, what are the most common
reasons behind reoffending?
AH: So, answering this question requires explaining, generally, “desistance”. The mostcommon reason behind offending [is that] a person's life is not conducive to a life
without offending. It's a very vague answer, but on an individual level, the motivations
will be different. On a general level, the motivations are blurred. There's no real patterns
that are easy to identify outside of financial need. Everything is quite personal to them interms of how they orientate their lives.
So, to further explain the system, I believe you've got another question for me that willlead into this.

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OM: Yes, so could you unpack the process of desistance for us, placing it in the context
of how justice systems have attempted to deal with reoffending in the past?
AH: So, the first thing to know about assistance, as I noted earlier, is the age-crime
curve. You've got a large portion of people that will be called "adolescent limited
offenders". If you look at the graph, there's a big spike around the age of 18 where
people start being sanctioned for offences and not being deflected into youth-related
rehabilitation, and then, over time, this curve sharply and then gently decreases throughto about the age of 30. So, you have a large cohort of offending that occurs at the ageof about 20, and then over time, this will gradually decline in the population, so people
are slowly phasing out of committing crimes. This specific age that this spikes up varies
between countries based on their practices in response to youth offending.
So, that's the main background of the system's research is trying to understand why
people transition out of crime. So, there's this inherent assumption, which isn't
understood widely, that people will actually eventually exit crime and people aren't
offenders for life.
There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. Japan is one of the notable exceptions.
Japan has an offending population that is growing older. There's old offenders in Japan,
so there's definitely social conditions that can change this pattern of offending decline.
Japan is a unique country in terms of desistance because it's ageing and there is a
declining birth rate, so there's a lot less young people and a lot more old people, whichmeans the actual structure of society is a little different, and a lot of inherent
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assumptions that exist on desistance don't apply specifically to the older population ofJapanese offenders that are specifically offending because there's an inability to live
there, which is surprising. When you start reading about this, there's a double take thatyou'll do, then you also realise that there's no one writing about this in English papers atleast. I'm aware that there's definitely people doing research in Japanese on this.
As you would expect, the explanation of desistance is very multifaceted. There's four
different things that are worth noting in terms of why people are transitioning out ofcrime. Why people transition out of crime is based on their relative agency. So, agency
as a concept is a little difficult to summarise, but contemporary thinking places agency
as a relative power to the environment a person exists within. So, each person on an
individual level will have a different level of agency to affect change in their life, and thiswill be based on a number of factors.
There's obviously structural factors, so things like if a country has a criminal record, youwill want to look at how that is affecting their ability to gain employment and things likethat. One of the important factors that's noted in desistance research is the concept of"prosocial bonds", so connections and events and people and bonds in life that are

positive in terms of influence. So, these are things like marriage, things like
employment, things like friendship, family support, and any number of small things, andobviously it takes different shapes. So, it's understood that as a person goes through life
they will accumulate prosocial connections and these will motivate and change their life

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in a way that makes offending seem less needed in the case specifically where
someone gains employment.
There is another side to this, which is the concept of internal change. For the offender,
the ability to obtain prosocial bonds is based on a person's ability to get those bonds insome way. [For example], to gain employment you need obviously skills, so for a lot ofoffenders that have come from socio-economic deprivation or very poor backgrounds,
they may not have – in the peak of their offending – those skills, so in order to desist,
they require some sort of internal change, skill-set change. So, there are two sides tothis: the motivation to change needs to kick in; and also the ability to change needs tokick in, so what desistance research does is identify where in society people are gaining
these supportive mechanisms and relationships.
There's also background to all of this change and desire to change is the concept of afeared self or a negative motivation from offending. Say, for example, you look at anoffender and they have been to prison and they start talking about some of the people
that they met in prison and they'll explain that they were looking at this 20-years-older
person – so in their 50s or 60s and they're still in prison – and had some sort ofrealisation that may be them if they continue offending and that they do not want to dothat. So, you will get increased motivation to change over time as people realise that
there are more negative events that can happen because of offending.

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Overall, desistance is centred on a concept of support and supportive mechanisms insociety. This can be state-run support lines, it can be drug counselling, all sorts ofthings. Does that answer your question?
OM: Yes, very comprehensively, thank you. I guess one last thing I would like to ask
about that is do you know how far a public sympathetic to past offenders is an importantfactor in desistance?
AH: It is a very interesting question, something that I've been trying to think about.
There is historical perception of Japan as being a sympathetic country to offending. Brie
Thwaite wrote a piece that explained Japan was restorative in the way that it
approached criminals. That isn't entirely true, and there's been a lot of push-back fromJapanese scholars and researchers in general that Japan is actually quite
disintegrative. The sympathetic nature is only important in the case where criminals arebeing identified in society as they are trying to desist.
So, if you think about it in those terms, in England, because the criminal record isdisclosed before employment, the reaction to offenders will heavily inform their ability tomake one of the pivotal changes to their life necessary to end offending, which is theability to obtain money in a legal way. I have spoken with several colleagues in Japanand I have mixed messaging on whether or not people are required to disclose theircriminal record to people, and I've been told that they do and I've been told that they
don't, so I'm not going to comment at the moment.

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My understanding is Japan does have a criminal record and I think it's variable whether
it's public or not for young offenders. I know that it isn't, so that would be people
currently under the age of 20, but yeah, being sympathetic towards the offender isimportant specifically in these structures that can provide support. So, a person called
Donna Seger did research on desistance in Israel and she found the family reaction to

offending there is very supportive. There's sort of this view that a person offending is the
responsibility of that family and it's the responsibility of that family to correct thatbehaviour across even close family connections.
So, the response to offenders is very important to consider, but it varies by stakeholders
that you think about, so family, the state, the probation service, employers - any of thesedifferent aspects of society that are interacting with an individual will have a potentiallydifferent reaction to that offender based on the ideology and culture that they exist
within. So, yes, the answer to your question is it is important that people are
sympathetic towards offenders in facilitating desistance, but how that sympathy
manifests in reality is obviously very complicated.
OM: Sure, and I guess beyond a personal basis of how people respond to meeting andinteracting with past offenders, there's also the grander political level, right? When you
think about – again, to refer back to right-wing tabloids in the UK and the Conservative
Party's stance on law and order – about having more police and removing parole rights
for people who commit serious crimes, increasing sentences, there doesn't seem to bemuch empathy for those who have committed crimes. The voters – on the right, at least
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– seem quite keen to lock them up and throw away the key almost. So, without empathy
towards offenders, there is no capacity to give people legally the opportunity to startagain, I suppose.
AH: I agree, it's very tricky, the political landscape in terms of dealing with offenders.
For the offenders, what is best is a society that tries to understand them, tries tounderstand why they're offending. I feel like we are slowly at certain levels, starting tounderstand that offending isn't necessarily entirely the offenders fault, but there stillneeds to be that understanding that crime will be punished, people can't abuse thesystem, and you've got to have all these systems in place.
The right-wing ideology has always been to be very punitive and to really embrace thatrighteous condemnation that we have historically in us based in religious ideology ofplacing someone as an “other” and "us" as superior, and creating a very black-andwhite world, but in terms of offending, the drivers of crime are usually quite nuanced andthe real solutions to crime are structural solutions. But yeah, I agree that there's a lot ofpolitical ideologies that aren't productive.
One of the issues you have is that the crime problem is so nuanced, the real answers
don't appropriately fit into short sound bites that you can build a campaign around. It's
an interesting point.
OM: I've got one last question: I mentioned earlier about the very strong prosecution
system in Japan which has abnormally high prosecution rates of over 90%, and how
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they have the right to technically hold someone who's been arrested for two, three
weeks if they so choose. This can lead to false confessions, and so people can very
rapidly find themselves in a position where they're being cast as an offender when they
haven't actually offended, with little recourse to defend themselves. So, surely thesepeople, if they are convicted, they can't really be called "re-offenders" if they haven't

offended in the first place, they've been falsely imprisoned. What can be done toaddress this?
AH: Well, I don't believe anyone in England really has the knowledge or capacity tochange that. Something worth considering is that in Japanese society, the entire
structure is very different and the level of trust people are given on an individual level isa lot higher. There is sort of this inherent belief in people that there won't be abuse of
power. England and English people are very sceptical of giving the state specificallyovert power, because of its history, this identification of corruption, and things like that.
So, the [prosecution] statistics [in Japan] are pretty scary if you were to consider thosestatistics to exist in a place like England, but something worth remembering is that theJapanese criminal justice system does have some level of deflection before sending

people to courts. If you look at the actual numbers in the white paper, a higher
percentage of people are turned away from prosecution, so the burden of proof doesn't
happen in the courtrooms, it happens elsewhere, and the police are given a significant
amount of responsibility in that regard.

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The standards of policing expected in Japan are a lot higher just in terms of qualificationand practice. Probation, for example, requires undergraduate degrees. There's justextremely high levels of education in Japan. So, it's very important to consider thecontextual factors around Japan when you view a specific cultural practice and not todraw comparisons one-to-one and situate all of the various components to that

discussion. So, I think the best thing to do is to wait for someone specifically to engage
in research on those topics and look at those rather than make guesses at the time
when we don't really have full information about how these systems are being used.
My assumption is there's significant abuse of power that's occurring in Japan, but I don't
know the scope or scale, and Japan is a very utilitarian country, as most [collectivist
countries] are. So, collectivist countries tend to be very group-orientated, so theindividual and the individual's rights aren't seen as pivotal. They aren't the central pointof the cultural dialogue, as you would find in a place like America, which is extremely
individualised. So, concessions are made for the individual to improve the wider
functioning of society. I hope that answers your question.
OM: Yes, thank you, and for any Japanese Studies students out there looking for a PhD

topic, there you have it. Thank you for answering my questions today, Adam. Before wefinish the episode, could you share with us what other projects are you currently workingon?
AH: Other than the PhD, my other projects are learning Japanese, which is very
difficult, all-consuming, and still very bad, to be honest. I'm looking forward to trying
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learning in Japan, see if that makes a difference. I'm hoping, once the PhD is finished,to complete a more robust desistance study with my colleagues, where I will have aJapanese native researcher help me interview probationers there, rather than me do it,which is what I'm planning to do with the PhD. In terms of research quality, it would be
extraordinarily helpful just in terms of understanding the data itself, facilitating better

quality interviews, and the scope of the project would be better. So, I'm basicallyplanning to do the PhD again, but with someone, which would be really nice if I canactually manage it.
OM: Excellent. Thanks again, Adam, it's been a real pleasure.
AH: Thank you for having me.
***
OM: You can find a link to Adam’s research profile in the description below. Don’t forget
to subscribe on JapanInNorwich.org or on your preferred podcast provider for updates
on new episodes. You can also get in touch to recommend topics for the podcast at
cjs@uea.ac.uk. Join us for our next episode with Sophie Richard, art specialist andacclaimed writer on Japanese museums, as we explore art museums in Japan of every
variety.
We hope you will join us then. Thank you for listening.

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