NPA “Crime Infrastructure Countermeasures” campaign also targets “foreign crime” anew. Justifies more anonymous anti-NJ signs

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Hi Blog.  Last blog entry we talked about how the National Police Agency exaggerates and falsifies data to whip up media panic about “foreign crime”.  We’ve also talked for many years on Debito.org about how the NPA has been putting out racist public notices about NJ criminals (including, in my opinion, assisting the seedier J-media to publish some examples of hate speech).  Well, anonymous postermakers are now getting into the act, what with the NPA’s most recent anti-crime campaign:

First, check these out (courtesy of Welp):

gizokekkonjune2013gaikokujinhanzaitsuihouJune2013

http://image.blog.livedoor.jp/kankyotoshisetsu/imgs/c/9/c9eaf02e-s.jpg
http://image.blog.livedoor.jp/kankyotoshisetsu/imgs/3/1/318b27b8-s.jpg

The poster at right calls upon Tokyo Immigration Bureau to do something about fake international marriages, claiming they’re “rising rapidly” (kyuuzouchuu), and says (with the obligatory plural exclamation points that are characteristic of the alarmist far-right) that we cannot permit illegal foreign labor or overstayers!!

The poster at left calls for the “expulsion of foreign crime” (!!), with murder, mugging, arson, rape, and theft listed at 25,730 cases! (Again, no comparison with Japanese crime, which is far, far higher — especially if you look at theft.) The bottom boxes are not to me fully legible, but the blue one asks the authorities not to give up in the face of fake applications for visas, Permanent Residency, and naturalizations!

(I would love to get larger copies of these posters. If anyone sees them on the street (take a photo!) or finds them online with greater resolution, please send to debito@debito.org.  Thanks.)

COMMENT:  Neither of these posters has a source or an organization listed on them, so anonymous vigilante hate groups are getting into the act. I find the first poster in particular unsettling, where brides are portrayed as merely cowls of flags.  You can’t trust NJ women, because under their pretty faces are lurking nationalisms that are not part of “us”.

Back to something more professional.  Again, from Welp:

sonokouihanzaijune2013

Courtesy http://www.police.pref.kanagawa.jp/images/h0/h0001_03.gif

This is from the Kanagawa Prefectural Police site (a proud sponsor of the door-to-door neighborhood resident checks and forked-tongue friendly cops who produce racist posters). It warns people in four languages that what they’re doing is criminal activity, including forgery, “bogus marriage” (wow, the language level is getting better), “false affiliation” (gizou ninchi, meaning a J male falsely acknowledges paternity of an NJ child to get that child Japanese citizenship), and false adoption (I hope this won’t now target Japan’s Douseiaisha).  Although not mentioning NJ in specific, the poster’s multilinguality means it’s meant for an international audience (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, English, and I think either Tagalog or Bahasa Indonesia).

(Again, I would love a larger graphic so we could read it all:  Eyes peeled, Debito.org denizens of Kanagawa!)

COMMENT:  The interesting bit is in the bottom green section, where it talks about the Hanzai Infura [illegible] Taisaku (Crime Infrastructure Countermeasures).

What’s meant by “crime infura”?  It’s a new enough concept to warrant an explanation from the Kanagawa Prefectural Police Site:

hanzaiinfrakanagawakenkeisatsuJune2013

Courtesy http://www.police.pref.kanagawa.jp/images/h0/h0001_04.gif

“Infrastructure” is the things and organizations that are the basic foundation of a society, meaning roads, rails, plumbing, etc.

By “Crime Infrastructure”, this is meant to be the the same thing to undergird crime, such as cellphones under false names, fake websites, false marriages, false adoptions, and false IDs.

The Ibaraki Prefectural Police have a more elaborate explanation, with helpful illustrations of eight cases.  Three talk about the shyster groups and internet sites who offer drugs, fake subscriptions, loans and financing schemes, etc. But five of the eight talk about NJ criminal activity, including money laundering through “illegal overstayers”, employers of the same, underground hospitals that engage in illegal medical activities and drug dispensing (!!), underground taxis, false IDs, and false paternity scams to get Japanese citizenship.  As I said, complete with helpful illustrations (note the absence of hakujin, so the illustrator has to play with noses to gaijinize them properly):

hanzaiinfuraibarakijune2013

Courtesy http://www.pref.ibaraki.jp/kenkei/a01_safety/security/infra.html

In fact, this “foreign crime infrastructure” meme is not new.  The first Debito.org heard about it was in 2009, when the NPA circulated its regular crime reports:  NJ crime was down year on year, so they had to find a way to sex up the numbers.

Hey presto!  Shift the focus from about foreign criminals as INDIVIDUALS, and towards foreign crime in GROUPS:   Then we can talk about NJ crooks targeting Japan and spreading their invisible tentacles nationwide. (Never mind the already well-established tentacles of organized crime in Japan, naturally — as Tokyo Governor Ishihara said, NJ crimes are so heinous in comparison that there are some parts of Japan where allegedly Japanese yakuza fear to tread! (Ishihara, Nihon Yo, 2002: 100))  To raise the fear factor further, we’ll even tell the media that Gaijin groupism means the NPA can’t measure foreign crime statistically!  

By 2010, this is exactly what happened.  And as of 2013, the NPA is now trying to popularize a new concept (since NJ crime still isn’t cooperating by going up anymore) of a “crime infrastructure”, as if it’s now embedded and endemic, invisible and unmeasurable — because it’s connected to NJ.  It’s part of the externality of once-peaceful Japan’s contact with the outside world and internationalization.

This new campaign conveniently occasions those posters made by anonymous vigilantes. Now we have a propaganda infrastructure that normalizes public displays of xenophobia in Japan.  Arudou Debito

11 comments on “NPA “Crime Infrastructure Countermeasures” campaign also targets “foreign crime” anew. Justifies more anonymous anti-NJ signs

  • Loverilakkuma says:

    Hi all,

    Regarding the ‘KTHO[Kick The Hell Outta] Foreign Crime!!’ poster (the second one), the caption in the black box says “不法外国人の在留を助ける悪徳行政書士を許すな!!” (Don’t tolerate wicked scriveners for helping illegal foreigners to stay!!)

    More importantly, I also found the source of the two posters from someone’s personal blog.

    http://kkagayaki2.exblog.jp/20552582/

    I have no idea the blogger is the one who created the posters, but has a close link with right-wingers including Zaitokukai(with their photos attached.). This blogger seems to be one of the key organizers, by providing a bunch of information for any anti-foreigner campaigns on a daily basis.

    And, more shockingly, the blogger is ‘she.’ Holy cow. You can go the webpage in the link to click ‘profile’ tab(‘プロフィールを見る’ in Japanese. See from here. http://kkagayaki2.exblog.jp/20552582/.

    Imagine a Japanese woman camouflaging in the smokescreen of modesty and silence turns into a nasty conservative rabble-rouser like Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin to vent off her bile. First thing came to my mind is a Japanese version of ‘Sarah Palin,’ who talks lots of plain non-sense through the image of the Alaskan Grizzly hockey mom by frequently appearing in public media to the detriment of civility in politics. Yes, just like that. That’s how anyone begins to go off the deep end to the extremism.

    Reply
  • Mark in Yayoi says:

    The first Latin-letter language on the signs is probably Tagalog (not Indonesian). The word palsipikado (“forgery”) looks so much like Spanish falsificado (“forged” / “falsified”) that is has to be the same; it’s what the Spanish word might sound like if adopted into a language that did not historically have F, which is what happened when the Spanish were in the Philippines a few centuries ago. So my money is on Tagalog.

    A little Googling brought up this blog entry with a slightly better image of the yellow Kanagawa poster:

    http://starkodama.livejournal.com/919401.html
    bouhaninfurabokumetsutaisakuJune2013

    The injection of cuteness at various points in that poster actually makes it a little scary. Check out the smiling devil face on the shadow of the person lined up at the counter, and the big word “uso” on the paper he’s submitting.

    And they’re trying to pretend that the last six digits of the telephone number (045-681-1274) spell hanzai infura nakuse. It’s something of a stretch to have the syllable se be the number four. Come to think of it, the fact that they bothered to contrive and then acquire a goro-awase telephone number just to handle hanzai infura shows that this isn’t just a one-time buzzword; they’re probably going to use this campaign for quite a while.

    Reply
  • Jim di Griz says:

    @ Debito,
    Although shocking, you shouldn’t be surprised to see the women in the posters depicted as dehumanized national symbols; after all, isn’t that exactly how Hashimoron and other right wingers defend and attempt to normalize the wartime sex-slave issue? It’s all about ‘victim Japan’, the women are just seen as objects requiring not a jot of empathy.

    Reply
  • Jim Di Griz says:

    @Mark In Yayoi #2

    Even more bizarre than the possibility of ‘former NJ’s GF, jilted to become nationalist avenger’ is that fact that she has 2 followers, one of whom is John Lennon! Seems to be a strange choice of handle for a follower of her anti-NJ marriage hate blog. Didn’t Lennon marry Yoko Ono, a Japanese woman? The crafty Beatles swine! He was only after a dodgy visa!

    Reply
  • Jim Di Griz says:

    @Debito

    Regarding the double exclamation marks. Isn’t there some kind of massive irony in the fact that using this imported symbol (twice!!) is necessary for these right wing racist twits to communicate their message? After all, shouldn’t they be rejecting this western languages symbol and printing よよ instead?
    The fact that they choose not to, but use !! instead says something about how deeply the western exclamation mark resonates with the Japanese public, in contrast to what can only therefore be the lack of impact that よよ has.
    This in itself is an indicator of how pointless the ‘anti-NJ’ movement is; they can’t even convey their message, with the level of emotive power they feel, in their own language. Game over.

    Reply
  • @Jim
    The exclamation mark is believed to be originally Latin. Would you expect the English Defence League to use runes?

    Reply
  • Mark in Yayoi says:

    @Jim and Joe: Trivia time: indeed, the exclamation mark is an I on top of an O; an abbreviation for [i]interjectio[/i], and the question mark is a Q on top of an O, for [i]quaestio[/i]. I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t know if ancient Chinese ever had a symbol for this. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were something that has since disappeared, because there were definitely marks used to indicate tones and stress in Chinese-Japanese dictionaries in the past. The [i]Ruiju Myōgisho[/i] contains them, if you want to look into it.

    Reply
  • Bitter Valley says:

    Notice the slitty eyed evil looking foreigners in the truck, driven by the distressed looking round-eyed (presumably Japanese) driver.
    Presumably the slitty eyed evil doers are Chinese or Koreans?

    Then the other evil foreigners have big noses?
    Presumably these evil foreigners are Europeans or non-Asians.

    What on earth is going on with this?

    Reply
  • The Shizuoka Prefectural Police even have their ‘gaijin hanzai’ stats up on their web page…http://www.police.pref.shizuoka.jp/hanzai/gaijinhanzai/index.htm This from the PD with the biggest ura-gane slush fund in the country, according to news reports when I left in 2008.

    — Yes, well found. I’ve updated the blog post to reflect this information, thanks. Nice that the Shizuoka Prefectural Police website, as you note, indicatively titles the url “gaijin hanzai”.  Also love the little chart they provide:

    shizuokagaijinhanzaistatsjune2013

    Not only is the chart hard to read (the undifferentiated bars are numbers of Gaijin committing crime, but you have to look at the bottom numbers to figure out that the green bar is visa violations (which Japanese cannot commit), and the light blue bar is for non-visa-related crimes.  Same with the yellow and red lines respectively for number of Gaijin crimes committed.  Note how since 2004 the number of NJ committing any kind of crime is on a downward trend, as are visa violations.  

    But what gets rendered in red?  The jagged line to show rises.  Gotta keep that Gaijin scare on.

    Shizuoka Kenkei, remember, is the organization that provided the general public with that racist prevention of Gaijin Crime manual back in 2000.

    Reply
  • Andrew in Saitama says:

    It seems that “foreign” and “criminal” are inherently associated in the minds of the masses; The November 4th broadcast of “Sukkiri” had a special about the Fuchu Prison Festival, and managed to create a proximity between “foreign” and “criminal”, even though nothing in the report was about either! “There are about 1200 prisoners, including foreigners, in the Fuchu Prison Complex.” (I suppose we should be grateful – NJs being included in the same count as the Japanese for once…)

    Reply
  • Andrew in Saitama says:

    And on Unbelievable last night, there was a story of a man and his 3 year battle to clear his name of a groping charge. It seems (so the program stated) that the actual culprit was probably the “gaikokujin-fuu” man standing behind the accused. And the program used the term “gaikokujin-fuu otoko” at least four times during the report. Again, linking NJ and crime in the minds of the masses.

    Reply

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