Today I received an email from a friend I met at Ninomyia house who returned back to France. She made me realize how we take some things for granted and might only realize it when things are "back to normal".
One of these things is that there is no crime here in Tsukuba area. Yes, of course I’ve been told (by my Japanese colleagues) that it’s very dangerous and I shouldn’t travel alone late at night with my bike… and on the news you’ll see horrifying stories that somewhere some school kids were smoking cigarettes with a number of camera scenes showing the evidence (2 cigarette buts on the ground next to a school) from different angles. (I really saw this on TV! Unfortunately, I don’t know what the speaker was saying, but as far as I could tell they were very serious about it).
I've been considering to take pictures of the standard bike "locks" they use here. Using such "locks" in Vienna would practically be begging for someone to steal your bike. Actually, I think the only purpose of the "locks" is to prevent someone to accidentally use the wrong bike (as I already mentioned, many bikes look very similar here). And you can leave things in the car without worrying that someone might smash the window just to find out if it is worth anything.
Oh, and unlike Vienna, dog owners always clean up after their dogs (although there is so much green space for dogs that even if everyone had a dog you still wouldn’t need to watch your steps all the time). And recently I saw what a bicyclist did who lost some small plastic wrapping trash the wind blew out of the basket. In Vienna the typical reaction would be not to react. However, this cyclist actually stopped, turned around and ran after the trash that the wind had taken. That somehow explains why everything is so clean here.
Just in case my Japanese collegues read this and disagree about the non existent crime, I found some statistics here. Although I admit they are a bit old (1998):
Murders per 100,000.
1. Russia Federation 18.07
2. United States 6.32
3. Malaysia 2.73
Taiwan 1.17
Spain 1.08
Japan 0.58
Rape per 100,000.
1. United States 34.20
2. England and Wales 14.69
3. France 13.38
Taiwan 8.82
South Korea 4.38
Spain 3.23
Japan 1.48
Serious Assault per 100,000.
1. Australia 713.68
2. England & Wales 405.20
3. United States 357.94
Taiwan 37.30
Spain 23.94
Japan 15.40
Robbery/Violent Theft per 100,000.
1. Spain 169.85
2. United States 169.02
3. France 144.10
Taiwan 14.35
South Korea 11.74
Japan 2.71
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1 comment:
True, I hadn't realized that... something else that should be considered is that AFAIK the statistics of different countries are very hard to compare to each other. Each country might have it's own categories, and might measure them differently (e.g. number of incidents reported vs. number of sentenced criminals etc.)
I actually have no idea how these numbers were normalized... so I wouldn't trust them too much. But subjectively, it really seems that Japan is the safest (highly populated) place on earth.
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