Women’s Crime Rate Rising In Japan

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32130, 28 October 1969, Page 25

Women’s Crime Rate Rising In Japan

(N.Z P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) TOKYO. The growing emancipation of Japanese women is being reflected in the country’s crime figures, particularly those for murder and theft. Although no authority has yet analysed the problem, many people feel that the increasing crime rate among women is a result of the spectacular advances, after centuries of subjection, made by Japanese women in occupational and social spheres since the war.

Young Japanese girls no longer lead sheltered lives. They are now finding independence, earning money, and striking out on their own in the big cities. Inevitably, many go astray. More than 400 women were arrested on murder or attempted murder charges last year—some 20 per cent of the 2297 people held on these counts. Although most women on murder charges had killed children, there were at least 10 cases of wives paying hired killers to remove unwanted husbands. A typical example involved a 31-year-old woman arrested in Kofu, west of Tokyo, for paying her 24-year-old lover and an accomplice to kill her husband. The pair waylaid him, dumped his body under a bridge and arranged his motor scooter as if it had struck the bridge accidentally, the police reported. Child-murder still predominates, however, and economic hardship is often the motive. But one Tokyo woman recently killed her baby because she was ashamed of neighbours’ gossip about her fastgrowing family Apart from killings, crimes by women last year increased by 50 per cent over 1967, and the police report a continuing upward trend. Official figures list 45,573 women arrested in 1968, a 150 per cent increase in 10 years. Twenty per cent of them were charged with stealing, and crime experts believe this reflects the fast-develop-ing consumer economy in Japan, and the ease of shoplifting in supermarkets. Some authorities are hoping that when the novelty has worn off, the present feminine crime wave will prove to have been but t fleeting phenomenon.