The Keio Line, Osaka Building Arson, In front of Tokyo University… Why the “Chain” of Arson and Injury Cases Continues.

The first fork in the road…

“Crimes are imitated. It’s a given in criminology.”

After the arson and casualty incidents that occurred on the Odakyu and Keio lines, there have been incidents of “imitation of these incidents”. Is it because the incidents were so impactful?　Nobuo Komiya, a professor of criminology at Rissho University, simply put it this way.

More than 100 years ago, it was common to think that crime was genetic, but in 1890, Gabriel Tarde published “The Law of Imitation: A Sociological Study,” and since then, the idea that crime is committed by imitation has become common in criminology. (Same as below)

(Nobuo Komiya, same as below) However, even if we see the same incident, there are people who imitate and people who don’t imitate.

However, even when we see the same incident, there are people who imitate it and people who don’t. “Human behavior is determined by the kind of people around us and the kind of information we get.

For example, if someone sympathizes with you when you are being restructured, saying things like, “That’s tough,” or “You’re working so hard,” your frustration will be relieved and you won’t be tempted to commit violence. However, if there is no one who will listen to you, or if you say, “It’s your own fault,” then you will not talk to anyone.

Once the switch is turned on that no one understands them and that they should be valued more, they will learn to commit crimes. The last thing you want is to end up fighting back against society.

The bigger the fightback, the more valuable it is. The larger the scale of the final fireworks, the more people around you will recognize you, so you search for information and think about which ones will be the biggest.

Is there someone who will listen to my problems or not? Do you have someone to listen to your problems or not? Do you have a friend to complain to or not? This is the first fork in the road, he says.

Normally, I would have been able to complain over a drink after work, but due to the Covid-19 disaster, I lost all opportunities to drink. He said that this may have been one of the triggers.

The evils of the Internet society. Biased information leads to crime.

There is also a problem with the way information is taken in.

In order to deter crime, imagination is also important. Imagination is also important to deter crime.

For example, if you imagine what would happen if you set a fire, how much damage it would cause, and how many people would be hurt, you usually can’t do it. The more multifaceted information you take in, the more your imagination expands.

But if you only take in the information you like, you won’t be able to imagine what would happen if you set a fire.

Nowadays, we can get all kinds of information from the Internet. On the other hand, there is also a tendency to only search for what you are interested in at …….

That is the biggest problem with the Internet. That’s the biggest problem with the Internet. I think it will increase division and crime.

Yes!　What should we do?

We need to educate ourselves about IT. Right now, they are only teaching the technical stuff, but literacy is important.

It’s not just about being able to read and write, it’s about being able to understand and interpret things for yourself and use them. Furthermore, how to evaluate the credibility of information sources. These are things that need to be taught and learned.

It is also important to provide them with information that gives them a sense of reality.

Japanese people have a tendency to cover up reality, perhaps because they do not want to see what they do not want to see.

For example, in the case of the Great East Japan Earthquake, many beautiful stories are told, but not much is disclosed about how tragic it was. This does not foster an attitude of pursuing the truth and essence, nor does it foster imagination.

In the West, reality is thoroughly pursued.

The film “15:17 to Paris” directed by Clint Eastwood is based on the “Thalys Shooting”, a random terrorist attack that took place on the Thalys high-speed train in Europe on August 21, 2015. The main roles were played by three young men who were present at the scene and took down the perpetrators. The main roles were played by three young men who were present at the scene and took down the perpetrators, not by professional actors, in order to make the story more realistic.

In the movie “Silence of the Lambs,” the FBI cooperated fully, and all the stories told are true stories. Jodie Foster, who played the lead role, actually underwent training at the FBI.

In Iceland, I saw a car wreck on the side of the road. This is how they show the tragedy of accidents and prevent them from happening. As a result, Iceland has the world’s smallest ratio of traffic fatalities to population.

Changing the people around us rather than the criminals themselves

Not only criminals, but also people imitate. “Not only criminals, but people imitate others. To prevent criminals from being born, we need to think about what we want them to imitate.

It is well known that children who have been abused tend to abuse their own children, but in Europe and the U.S., there is a lot of “parenting” training going on.

Parents who are abusing their children are ordered by the court to take them away from their children and attend parenting classes. Once they complete that, they get their children back.

In the same way, in other countries, the emphasis now is on changing the people around the criminals, not on changing the criminals themselves.

When they are released from prison, they are instructed on how to be accepted by the family, friends, and workers they live with. There are also mentors who have committed crimes before, but are now recovering. Not all of them are successful, but that is the way we try to rehabilitate them. I guess you could say that rather than trying to “cure the mind,” they are trying to “cure the mind.

Nobuo Komiya is a professor of criminology at Rissho University. D. in sociology. He was the first Japanese to graduate from the Graduate School of Criminology, University of Cambridge. Worked at the United Nations Institute for the Prevention of Crime in the Far East and the Legal Research Institute of the Ministry of Justice before assuming his current position. He is the inventor of the “Community Safety Map. He has served as the chairperson of the National Police Agency’s Research and Study Group on Creating Safe and Secure Communities, and as the chairperson of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Education Committee on Delinquency Prevention and Harm Prevention.

His representative work is “Shashin de wakaru sekai no kanai — kiseki, designe, machizukuri” (Crime Prevention in the World through Photographs — Ruins, Design, and Town Planning) (Shogakukan, selected by the National Council of School Libraries). He has appeared on TV, been interviewed by newspapers, and given many lectures throughout Japan. His official website and YouTube channel is “Nobuo Komiya’s Room of Criminology.