Five high schoolers were arrested for a honey-trap robbery in Shibuya. Of 2,677 comments, 67 percent of the vote went to one law — and 0.2 percent to the adult's side of it
The thread agreed 95 to 5 that the law should be harsher. The comment explaining why the scheme works in the first place drew 416 presses, and it was almost alone.
How the votes fell
Ranked by upvotes. Left of the slash is agree, right is disagree. This is where the resentment actually sits.
- 1 9180 ∕ 147 it is time to revise the Juvenile Act. Serious crimes like robbery with injury deter better when they are punished normally, and softening the sentence does not look like a route to rehabilitation. Making amends to the victim would serve the offender better as well
- 2 5497 ∕ 90 lately there are far too many crimes by minors that are cunning enough to shame an adult. After the war, when food was scarce and there were many war orphans, applying adult punishment to boys who turned to crime simply to stay alive was judged too cruel — that is how the present Juvenile Act came about. None of that applies now. It needs revising urgently
- 3 5191 ∕ 148 what exactly do the adults defending the Juvenile Act expect from people who are effectively saying the Act should not exist? Rather than "they will reform eventually," is it not that the offence happened because their upbringing failed badly enough for crime to take hold? If rehabilitation is not deterring crime, then the effort put into it amounts to nothing
- 4 4776 ∕ 108 even a minor, once tried under the criminal code, carries a record, and life afterwards closes in. If the person has not genuinely reformed, those around them are right to see them as a risk of a next time. Legally, serving the sentence settles the debt; society does not interpret it so simply, and young people should be told that plainly. If the feeling of being shielded by the Act is making offences escalate, then both its scope and the shape of rehabilitation need rethinking
- 5 3162 ∕ 115 what kind of upbringing produces someone this bad? Depending on the offence, the parents who produced a criminal bear serious responsibility too — all the more when the child is a minor, and no less once they are an adult. I raised children myself, and what I watched over most was giving them a minimum sense of right and wrong: do not hurt people, do not take what is not yours. Producing a person who cannot manage even that is a heavy thing to answer for
I read all 2,677 top-level comments. The buttons came to 45,321 presses of I relate against 2,325 of hmm — 95 to 5 — plus 1,345 presses of good point. In 268 comments, 10 percent of the thread, the objections won; 79 percent of all agreement went to the top ten comments and 86 percent to the top twenty. Of the 34 threads I have counted, only the NHK licence-fee thread was more one-directional, at roughly 98 to 2. Where the votes went is clearer here than in anything I have counted. Comments touching on the Juvenile Act: 342 of them, 30,521 presses — 67 percent of the whole vote. Seven of the top twenty comments mention it, and those seven alone hold 29,013 presses. This thread was not discussing the crime. It was discussing a law. The single largest voice, 9,180 presses, says the Act is due for revision. The second, 5,497, sets out where the Act came from — the war orphans of the late 1940s — and concludes that none of it applies now; comments reaching back to the postwar years or to the past in general came to 46, drawing 6,251 presses, 14 percent. Comments on the responsibility of parents and upbringing: 26, drawing 3,917 presses, 9 percent, though 3,162 of those sit on one comment. Now the quiet places. Comments raising the adult side of the case — the man who went to the hotel, and whether he broke a law himself — came to 75, drawing 103 presses: 0.2 percent. The largest of them, a single line reading "the victim is a child-prostitution offender too," drew 25. Comments explaining why the scheme works at all — that the person robbed cannot go to the police without incriminating himself — came to 15, drawing 432 presses, 1 percent, of which 416 sit on one comment. "Punish the parents too" drew three comments and two presses. Comments mentioning Shibuya itself: seven, 31 presses, 0.1 percent. Comments touching on poverty or take-home pay: eight, 70 presses, 0.2 percent. Finally, my own reading against the votes. That the law and the police are too soft: emphatically right — 67 percent of the vote landed there. That parents carry responsibility: right as well, 9 percent, the thread's second pillar. But my claim that being caught has almost no consequence is refuted head-on by the fourth loudest comment, 4,776 presses, which says a criminal record closes life down and that society does not forgive as easily as the law does. My claim that the cause is stagnant take-home pay drew eight comments and 70 presses; my guess that these children do not live in Shibuya drew seven comments and 31 presses; and "punish the parents too" drew two. Where I placed the cause, the thread mostly agreed. Where I placed the cure, it went quiet again.
Here is what happened.
In Shibuya, Tokyo, five people including a first-year high school girl have been arrested. The suspicion is that in June this year they assaulted a man on the street, injured him, and took 300,000 yen in cash after telling him: "this one is 15, what are you going to do about it — pay 8 million yen in settlement money."
The method has an old Japanese name, tsutsumotase, and it works like this: a young woman goes off with a man, and once they are alone her accomplices appear and demand money. Here, according to the report, the girl went into a hotel with the man and the boys were waiting when he came out. She told police she wanted money to go out with, and the other four have broadly admitted the allegations.
Let me put my own reading down first. The era when a parent was a parent because they could strike a child, and the child accepted them as a parent on those terms, is over. Strike a child now and it is the parent who gets arrested — and this has become a country where you can get by with no parents at all, and get by after committing a crime. Why? Because the law is soft and the police are soft. Don't get caught and you're fine; whoever does it wins; and even being caught costs almost nothing. The only people it costs anything are the ordinary ones with ordinary jobs, which is no use to anybody. Children do not regard their parents as parents either — because the parents are children on the inside as well. Adults grow old without ever getting the chance to grow up: take-home pay does not rise, life does not stabilise, and children cost money. There are fewer Japanese people left with the strength and the beauty of mind to believe that people are good to begin with. And I would guess these particular children do not live in Shibuya.
That is what I believed walking in. The day after the story ran, I read all 2,677 top-level comments — the thread holds 3,579 including replies — and counted the buttons.
95 to 5: the most united thread I have seen but one
The thread pressed "I relate" 45,321 times and "hmm" 2,325 times. 95 to 5. The objections won in 268 comments, 10 percent of the thread.
I have counted 34 threads for this site now, and only one was tighter than this: the thread about the public broadcaster's licence fee, which came out at roughly 98 to 2. Last week's overtime thread was 79 to 21; the Disney one before it, 82 to 18. Here, almost nobody is arguing with anybody.
But "everyone agreed" is not a finding. When a thread is this united, the only useful question is what it united on — and that has to be counted.
Sixty-seven percent of the vote went to a law, not to the crime
Comments touching on the Juvenile Act: 342 of them. Presses of agreement: 30,521 — 67 percent of the entire vote. Seven of the top twenty comments mention it, and those seven alone hold 29,013 presses.
So this thread was not really discussing five arrested teenagers. It was discussing a statute.
That is worth pausing on, because it is not how these threads usually go. In most of what I have counted, the crowd argues about the people in the story — who behaved badly, who should have known better, what the person on the receiving end should have done. Here the five arrested teenagers are barely described. Almost nobody speculates about them, and the details the report does give — the hotel, the phrase they used, the 300,000 yen — are used as evidence in an argument about legislation rather than as things to be indignant about in themselves. The case has been read, almost immediately, as an instance of a general problem. A thread that does that is not venting; it is filing a complaint, and the complaint has an addressee.
It is time to revise the Juvenile Act. Serious offences like robbery with injury deter better if they are simply punished, and I cannot see how softening the sentence leads to rehabilitation. Making amends to the victim would do more for the offender too.
少年法は見直しする時期。
強盗傷害みたいな重い犯罪は普通に罰した方が抑止になるし変に軽減しても更正に繋がるとは思えないし被害者への贖罪を果たした方が本人のためになると思う。Two lines, 9,180 presses. A fifth of everything this thread gave away is sitting on that one comment.
The second loudest is about the year the law was written
This is the one I would most like readers outside Japan to take away.
Lately there are far too many crimes by minors cunning enough to shame an adult. After the war, when food was scarce and there were many war orphans, it was judged too cruel to apply adult punishment to boys who turned to crime simply in order to live — that, as I understand it, is how the new Juvenile Act came about. None of that applies today. It needs revising urgently.
最近は少年達の狡猾で大人顔負けの犯罪が余りにも多い。
戦後、食料も乏しく戦災孤児も多かった、生きる為に仕方なく犯罪に手を出してしまった少年達に、大人の刑罰を適用するのは酷だとの判断から、新少年法に成ったはず。
今はこれに全く当てはまらない、速急に見直しが必要だよ。5,497 presses. Japan's Juvenile Act belongs to the years just after the war. Children who had lost their parents were stealing in order to eat, and it was thought cruel to sentence them as adults. The rule that keeps their names and faces out of the news comes from that law.
What this comment argues is that the premise is gone. Comments reaching back to the postwar years or to the past in general came to 46, drawing 6,251 presses, 14 percent of the vote. When a Japanese comment thread turns on a law, it often reaches not for the text of the statute but for the year it was written. That is a shape worth remembering.
The fourth loudest comment tells me I am wrong
I wrote that being caught costs almost nothing. The thread's fourth largest voice says the opposite.
Even for a minor, being tried under the criminal code means a record, and I think life afterwards closes in. If they have not genuinely reformed, they had better understand that the people around them will see them as a risk of a next time. [...] Legally, once the sentence is served the debt is paid — but society does not interpret it that simply. I think that is what should be explained to them properly.
少年であっても、刑法で裁かれたら、”前科”がつくことで、その後の人生は閉塞的になると思いますし、本当に更生ができていないと、まわりからは”次”に対するリスクになると思った方がいいです。
［…］法的には、ちゃんと刑期を過ごしたので、罪を償った‥とはなりますが、社会はそう簡単には解釈してくれません。そういうことをちゃんと伝えた方がいいかと思います。4,776 presses. "Legally the debt is paid. Society does not interpret it that simply."
I thought the only people who pay for anything in this country are the ones with ordinary jobs. In the Japan this writer is describing, the offender pays too — for a very long time. And note what is being asked for. Not a heavier sentence. An explanation. What is missing, this comment says, is that nobody tells them.
The fifth arrives at the parents
What kind of upbringing raises someone this wicked? Depending on the offence, the parents who produced a criminal bear serious responsibility as well. [...] I raised children myself, and the thing I attended to most was giving them a minimum sense of right and wrong. Do not hurt people, do not take other people's things — that is the minimum.
どういう教育を受けたら、こんな悪人に育つのか。
犯罪の種類にもよるが、犯罪者を作り出した親にも重大な責任がある。
［…］自分も子育てしてきたが、子育てで一番に気に掛けていたことは最低限の倫理観を持たせること。人を傷付けたりしてはいけない、人の物を盗ってはいけないなどは最低限のこと。3,162 presses. Comments about parents and upbringing came to 26 in total, drawing 3,917 presses, 9 percent — and 3,162 of those are on this one comment. The second pillar of this thread really is the parents.
But "punish the parents too" drew three comments and two presses. Nine percent of the vote agrees that the responsibility lies with the parents, and then stops dead at the point where anything would happen to them. What this thread wants from parents is not a penalty. It is a different upbringing.
The quiet place is the adult
Here is where the thread went silent.
There is another adult in this story: the man who went into the hotel with the girl. The report describes him as the victim — assaulted, injured, robbed — and gives neither his age nor what took place inside. So whether he broke any law is not something I can tell you.
The thread, however, did raise it. Seventy-five comments touched on it. Between them they drew 103 presses of agreement — 0.2 percent of the vote.
The victim is a child-prostitution offender too, isn't he.
被害者も児童買春の加害者だよね。One line, 25 presses. That is the biggest voice this subject had all day.
Thirty thousand five hundred and twenty-one, against one hundred and three. The same thread, on the same day, about the same incident, said "make the law harsher" thirty thousand times and "what about the adult" a hundred times.
This is not an accusation. But in a thread this united behind severity, the severity had exactly one address — and you cannot see that without counting.
I want to be careful about what that gap does and does not show. Half the comments in this thread drew no agreement at all, so a small number of presses is often a sign that a comment was never seen rather than that readers rejected it. What the seventy-five tell us is something narrower: the thought was available. It occurred to seventy-five different people, they wrote it down, and it never travelled. Nothing stopped it except that the readers scrolling past had already found the sentence they were looking for, thirty thousand presses earlier, and it was about somebody else.
And the comment that explains why the scheme works
Tsutsumotase has a mechanism, and it is not the violence. It is that the person robbed finds it hard to go to the police, because doing so means explaining what he was doing.
Fifteen comments set that out, drawing 432 presses. Four hundred and sixteen of them are on this one.
Is the thinking perhaps: we're minors, so even if the worst happens we won't go to prison, and besides, the customer on the other side doesn't want to be charged himself, so it will never come out at all? [...] I can imagine the father who raises a hand, furious at what they've done, being met with — that's assault, you know? I'll press charges. Or perhaps there are parents who say: next time, do it better.
未成年だし、もし最悪バレても刑務所には行かないし、それに相手の客？も自分が罪に問われたくないからぜったいにバレない！
と思っているのでしょうか？
［…］バカなことをしやがってと、殴ろうとした父親に、それ傷害罪になりますよね？僕、訴えますけど！と開き直りそうな気がする。または、今度やるならもっとうまくやれよ…と言う親もいるのかな？416 presses. "The customer doesn't want to be charged himself, so it will never come out."
And the writer goes further than that. The father who raises a hand and is told "that's assault, I'll press charges" is very nearly the picture I drew in my own reading, above, before I had read a single comment.
Marking my own reading against the votes
"The law and the police are too soft" — emphatically right. Sixty-seven percent of the vote went there. I did not expect it to be that lopsided; on this point the thread and I were looking at the same thing.
"Parents carry responsibility" — right, at 9 percent, the second pillar. But it stops at responsibility: "punish them too" drew two presses.
"Being caught costs almost nothing" — wrong, and told so directly by the fourth loudest comment in the thread.
"The cause is that take-home pay does not rise" — eight comments, 70 presses, 0.2 percent. I put the cause on money, and this thread barely discussed money — in a case whose stated motive was wanting money to go out with.
"There are fewer people who believe others are good to begin with" — six comments used that phrase, drawing 11 presses. Comments on ethics and moral education came to 34 and 3,300 presses, but almost all of that is the single fifth-place comment.
"These children don't live in Shibuya" — seven comments, 31 presses, 0.1 percent. The thread had almost no interest in the place. It wanted to talk about the law.
Three threads in a row now, the same shape has come out. When I say why something happens, this country's comment sections tend to nod along. When I say what should therefore be done, the votes withdraw. Last time, "rebuild overtime so it happens on instruction" drew 13 presses; before that, "charge students a third" drew none; this time, "punish the parents too" drew two.
I have counted a thread on severity before — the one where the state put up a poster reading "reform is the best revenge". What that thread wanted was not more severity in the abstract either. It was for severity to point in a consistent direction.
For readers outside Japan
Something to take away.
Tsutsumotase is an old word for an old scheme: a woman draws a man away, and her accomplices arrive to demand money. What makes it work is not force but the fact that the man cannot easily go to the police. In this case violence was added on top, which moves the whole thing into a far heavier category of offence.
The Juvenile Act was written in the years after the war, for children who had lost their parents and were stealing in order to eat, on the view that sentencing them as adults would be cruel. The convention that keeps their names and faces out of the news comes from it. The most-agreed voice in this thread did not point at the wording of that law. It pointed at the year it was written, and said: this is not that Japan any more.
And there is the mood to know about. The thread agreed 95 to 5, but it agreed about one thing only. Thirty thousand presses went to "make the law harsher," and a hundred went to "what about the adult." I could not see that before I counted either — a thread that agrees with itself is precisely the thread that most needs counting.
Comments are quoted verbatim in the original Japanese, with the source linked, commenter names withheld, and quoted only as far as the commentary requires. Translations are mine. Source articles may expire (retrieval dates noted). The substance of this piece is the author's commentary.