Why is Japan so safe - focusing on the little things

An old abandoned building in central Illinois. 

This summer while on the road in America, I saw a lot of nice areas, but also a lot of squalor. My brother and I drove all over, and the same thoughts kept popping into my head.

What is it that makes some places in America feel just plain dangerous? I kind of touched on the idea that America can be scary at times in a previous post, mainly about driving, but I'd like to go into a bit more detail in one specific area this time.

You drive through a place you've been to before and you know where the good part of town ends and the bad begins, but the same is true even when driving in completely new cities. You feel this driving around Chicago - go west from O'Hare and everything is fine, until it isn't.

The same thing happens in much smaller places, too. This summer I drove around the Davenport, IA area quite a bit, and holy shit there are some bad areas, and you can feel the sense of danger before you see anyone or hear anything that would lead you to believe it's anything different from places just blocks aways.

This isn't a race thing, because you get the same feeling no matter what part of the country you're in and with all kinds of people. And it isn't just about poverty and the trend for poorer areas to have more crime.

Talking with my brother, we were commenting about how certain places with that special rundown feel are always the ones that feel most dangerous. And I got to thinking about it later after coming back to Japan; that's one thing I never feel here. Yes, there are a lot of shitty areas and a lot of places with high rates of unemployment, but almost nowhere do you get that, "man, I shouldn't be here," feeling.

What is it then? Why is Japan so safe? Why are crime rates so low, even in places where most people are barely scraping by.

A week ago I started reading The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell. In it he talks about the broken windows theory. Here's the wikipedia page, but it can be quickly summarized with this quotation from the original source (by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling):

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.

The idea goes that little crimes like vandalism  lead to bigger and bigger ones because when people see no one gives a shit about an area, they know no one is watching. Crimes of opportunity become more and more frequent, and before you know it the really bad stuff starts to occur.

 Another old abandoned building, in Memphis.

Of course, the theory has its critics, but by cracking down on little things like graffiti, vandalism and petty theft (like sneaking a ride on the subway), seems to be a major part of why New York's overall crime rates plummeted after new policies were implemented by Rudy Giuliani. Send out a signal that this place isn't safe to commit crimes in and the crimes will stop.

Ruined buildings in Cairo, IL. 

Now I'm not saying I'm 100% convinced the theory is even true, but if it is then that would go a long way to help explaining why Japan is so damn safe and crime free.

Maybe all the old guys paid to clean the streets are really helping to keep crime down more than anyone realizes. Maybe the constantly repainted bathroom stalls and train cars send a message to people that someone is watching, and stop crime from happening more than a limited police force could possibly be able to.

So maybe we don't really even need the common cultural explanations for Japan's lack of crime. Maybe the answer is a lot more simple.

It makes me wonder about crime rates in Japan before WWII and also about how clean and maintained cities were. I don't have any data on hand, but from what I've read I get the feeling that crime along with squalor (of the broken windows/ruined houses variety) was a lot more common before 1980 than it is now, but I'm not sure if the trends would be any different prior to the war.