One good thing about living in Japan is that it’s a very safe country where you’re unlikely to meet with violence and death. Yesterday I was reading through my RSS feed and saw the good news that murders in Japan had fallen to just 936 for 2013, the lowest number since World War II. It isn’t all sweetness and light in Japan however, since when murders do happen, there’s a tendency for the crimes to seem especially shocking and brutal, like the woman who killed her sleeping husband then sawed his body up, distributing the parts in various parks in Tokyo, or the tragic slaying of a 12 year old girl by her classmate in Sasebo, Kyushu, which gave rise to the “Nevada-tan” Internet meme. Ironically, right below the article about the low number of murders in Japan was a report about a 73-year-old woman who was killed by a neighbor using a sickle of the kind Rena likes to wield in When the Higurashi Cry, which is a very sad thing to happen. Of course, remember that news reports about Japan from the Internet are always warped, since bizarre news stories are over-reported, the same way you’re more likely to find articles about how the Japanese love squid ink flavored ice cream when in fact the most popular flavor here is vanilla.
Japan’s murder rate is the lowest since WWII.
