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Comment by JamesNelson | Hacker News Reader

> Japan has extremely low crime as well, and is probably the least Americanized of all First World nations today. Clearly, it is physically possible for the State to eradicate crime.

It is possible that the fact that Japan is the least Americanized of First World countries is the reason behind it's low crime rates. I wonder if it is their culture, not their government, which keeps the crime low.

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If you believe the autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, it is the police that are responsible. Fukuzawa lived in Japan during the mid to late 1800's, before and after the time of the Meiji restoration. At that time Japan had quite a lot of crime, the roads were not safe, and if you passed another person along the roads you would both clutch your sword and maintain a wary eye. His description sounds a lot like walking in certain neighborhoods of Philadelphia. But later in his life, that was no longer the case, and he credits the creation of a professional police force.

Read this article about the police and law enforcement in Japan: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2011/0... Notice how very, very different it is than the policing of say, Baltimore.

That would certainly seem the null hypothesis. But how do you separate culture and government? Our culture would never tolerate the Japanese criminal justice system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Japan) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_Japa...).

From the first page: "In 1989 Japan experienced 1.3 robberies per 100,000 population, compared with 48.6 for West Germany, 65.8 for Great Britain, and 233.0 for the United States." There's that two orders of magnitude again.

Suppose crime in America has halved since 1989. (It hasn't.) From the Japanese perspective, wouldn't a writer still seem a little odd in exulting over the conquest of crime? When there are still two orders of magnitude more robberies?

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