Autumn 1996
Volume 23, Number 1

Japan is a national-cultural formation where as little as possible is left to chance; while perhaps the most extravagantly mass-mediated society in the world and one of the most urbanized, it has nonetheless the lowest crime rate among the major advanced capitalist nations.4 Anthropologists, sociologists, and criminologists have long pondered Japan's low crime rate, given the extraordinary density of its cities, in which live the great majority of the archipelago's population, ascribing its urban orderliness to a combination of factors: a highly articulated system of neighborhood police stations (called police boxes); comparatively intact families and customs of neighborly surveillance; strict gun controls; and a monopolization (and thus containment) of crime by the yakuza. Whether this urban orderliness, developed in the later postwar period, will be sustained under the pressures of a weakening economy and increasing numbers of foreign guest workers remains to be seen. There is, in fact, a great deal of white-collar crime in Japan (and the statistics on petty crime keep rising). But violent crimes--crimes that intrude on the body politic, that upset everyday life--have been spectacularly rare in late modern Japan. When such crimes occur, they are major events in a highly articulated media economy that needs scandals, booms, and incidents--and thrives on creating them in a society that is all too harmonious, at least from the perspectives of a staggering culture industry hard put to provide the eventfulness that is ambivalently desired.5

Fig 1.--Pocky candy box, front and back. On the back, the top line reads, "More talk about Pocky," as descriptions of eight different varieties of Pocky stick reveal that Pocky is "this big of a family" (that is, there's not just one kind of Pocky, but many different kinds): the family includes the "cute little Pocky" (kawaii rittoru pokkii), the "stylish marble" Pocky (osherena maburu), the "somewhat adult almond crush" Pocky (chotto otona no amondo kurasshu), as well as new additions to the family--the plain almond Pocky and the milk Pocky. The regular Pocky itself, a "long seller" (longu sera) since 1966, heads the "Pocky family" (pokkii famirii) lineup.

If the Aum Shinrikyo incidents have disclosed the fragility of Japanese harmony through the specter of terror (one has only to remember the statements in the New York Times, made by Japanese and others, that the sarin poison gas incidents didn't seem Japanese to realize anew the sense of contradiction that unexpected violence evokes when Japan becomes the domestic setting), they are, again, far from the only postwar events to have upset everyday civic security. The mid-1980s witnessed a series of crimes that prefigured the disjunctures that the sarin subway incident disclosed. The first set of crimes was originally called the "suspicious bullet" incident, in which a flamboyant playboy with underworld connections was accused of murdering his mistress and wife in Los Angeles. The media attention lavished on the suspect, Miura Kazuyoshi, soon gave the incident the dimensions of an elaborate soap opera (or "home drama" as they are known in Japan), as reporters hounded Miura throughout the world, and he emerged as a veritable star on Japanese television. He controlled much of the publicity surrounding him, eventually picking and choosing the reporters who could interview him. The focus of the obsession of many women, particularly housewives, he inspired a new syndrome called Miura exhaustion (Miura zukare), a malady caused by staying up to watch late-night television reports about his latest exploits.6

The second event, which occurred in August 1985, was the so-called Toyoda Trading Company incident, where a swindling company president, who had amassed a fortune by persuading elderly people to invest their life savings in worthless gold certificates, was murdered by hired hit men as network television crews caught the entire thing on camera. The president had holed up in his Tokyo apartment, while dozens of reporters massed around the entry to his apartment waiting for him to come out. While they were waiting, two men suddenly broke the door down, went into the apartment, and knifed the luckless company head to death. The reporters went inside and filmed the ongoing murder from a safe distance. Nobody tried to intervene, and the entire killing was shown on TV that night.5

The third set of incidents was carried out by a group who called themselves "the Mystery Man with the 21 Faces" (kaijin nijuichi menso) and who mounted a year-and-a-half campaign of intimidation against Japan's largest food and candy manufacturers: they kidnapped the president of one company, set fires in factories, sent threat letters and demanded money, and (most notoriously) threatened to place and did place poisoned candy in stores. Known as the Glico-Morinaga incidents (after the names of the two giant confectionery manufacturers blackmailed, Ezaki Glico Corporation and Morinaga Corporation), the crimes also involved a sustained, lingering harassment of the police and the media.8

Of these three sets of events, the Glico-Morinaga affair (the Guriko-Morinaga jiken; jiken can translate as incident, event, or affair) reveals the densest array of linkages among media and criminality, capitalism and the urban everyday.

4. Crime statistics are tabulated in Setsuo Miyazawa, Policing in Japan: A Study on Making Crime, trans. Frank G. Bennett, Jr. and John O. Haley (Albany, N.Y., 1992). In 1985, for example, the number of homicides in the U.S. was 18,980, in West Germany 2,796, and in Japan (with a population about half that of the U.S.) the number was 1,847. Major crimes (which would include theft, rape, homicide, drug offenses, and various property crimes) were as follows: U.S., 12,430,000; West Germany, 4,215,000; Japan, 1,608,000 (see p. 13).

5. In theorizing the everyday and its relationship to (late) modern Japan and the "criminal incidents" I discuss here, I have been guided in the first instance by Henri Lefebvre's Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (New Brunswick, N.J., 1990) and the essays in the special issue "Everyday Life," Yale French Studies, no. 73 (1987), edited by Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross; see, in particular, the editors' introduction, pp. 1Ð4, and Maurice Blanchot, "Everyday Speech," pp. 12Ð20. In speaking of the relationship of terrorism to everyday life, Lefebvre noted that "infringements from the everyday life [terror] ordains are condemned as madness and perversion, for although everyday life is the rule it is free neither to set itself up as a principle, to organize itself nor even to appear as everyday life" (Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, p. 148). It is this invisibility of a certain (late) postwar Japanese urban everyday that I wish to examine through its appearance in the form of criminal eventfulness as managed by and as imaginable through the mass media. A book that focuses less on overt terrorism than on the capitalized forms of free-floating, ambient fear in everyday life is The Politics of Everyday Fear, ed. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1993). Such ambient fear no doubt has a dense relationship to the possibilities of terror that appear as extraordinary, as nonambient.

6. This syndrome is discussed in Oda Susumu, Guriko-Morinaga jiken: 21 seikigata hanzai o bunseki suru [The Glico-Morinaga Incidents: An Analysis of a Twenty-First Century Crime] (Tokyo, 1985), p. 20; hereafter abbreviated GM.

7. The redoubling of the effects of representation are quite stunning in the case of these two incidents--shown most clearly in a film made in the late 1980s called Kommiku zasshi nanka iranai! [Comic Magazine], a parody of Japanese mass media where the notorious Miura plays himself on screen and the entire Toyoda Trading Company murder is restaged with a new ending. The hero (a television reporter) now enters the apartment and intervenes to stop the murder in a reconfiguring of the possibilities of media.

8. My study of these incidents is based on articles written over a series of five years in Japan's major daily newspapers, especially the Asahi Shinbun; articles in weekly magazines; books detailing the events, including Susumu, Guriko-Morinaga jiken, and Guriko-Morinaga jiken [The Glico-Morinaga Incidents], ed. Asahi Shinbun Osaka Shakaibu (Tokyo, 1985); television and radio reports; and interviews and discussions with Japanese friends and colleagues.

Marilyn Ivy, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Washington, is currently at work on a book about mysteries of the everyday, eventfulness, and machineries of inscription in late modern Japan. She is the author of Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (1995).