ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 12 No. 1 (January 2002) pp. 9-12.
DIFFERENT RESPONSES TO VIOLENCE IN JAPAN AND AMERICA by John P. J. Dussich, Paul C. Friday, Takayuki Okada,
Akira Yamagami, and Richard D. Knudten. Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 2001. 223 pp. Paper $26.50. ISBN: 1-881798-32-1.
Reviewed by David T. Johnson, Department of Sociology, University of Hawaii.
The United States has 120 times more robbery than Japan and about 30 times more rape and 10 times more murder (per
capita). In most of American
academia--criminology, sociology, political science, and law--these differences are met by a dumbfounding disinterest
in their causes and consequences. In CRIMINOLOGY, for example, the flagship journal for the American Society of
Criminology, only 7.4 percent of articles published between 1990 and 1999 had any kind of international or comparative
focus. In the abstract, of course, almost every scholar in every discipline acknowledges that generalizations and
theories based on only American data can be grossly misleading, yet that recognition rarely affects their choice
of research topic. Of course, the barriers to doing comparative research are formidable and the end result of much
such study is disappointing. As a consequence, consumers of comparative research often have this justifiable reaction
to others' forays in the foreign field: You mean you went all the way around the world just to count the cats (or
crimes) of Zanzibar? Which
is to say, so what?
This book is a welcome relief from the neglect and disappointment that characterize comparative criminology. The
authors, all criminologists, aim to explore what accounts for different responses to conflict in Japan and America
to explain the crime differences described above. The theory they espouse emphasizes four levels of influence on
violence: structural, institutional, individual, and situational (p. 142). For them, situational determinants are
especially salient because the willingness to justify and use violence is primarily "a complex process of
defining situations through our cultural eyes" (p. 146). In the end, the authors agree with Lonnie
Athens (1997) that "people always interpret the situations in which they commit violent acts" and that
those interpretations "account for their violent actions" (p. 147). Yet this is more than merely a confirmational
study. What it adds is a deeper understanding of how, exactly, culture shapes choices and interpretations (p. 153).
Readers be aware: This book's title is a bit inapt, for the authors examine not only "responses to violence"
in these two countries but responses to conflict (physical and verbal) more generally construed. Their main method
is a questionnaire administered to 5,600 people in two cities in Japan (Tokyo and Mito) and two in America (Charlotte
and Milwaukee). They received 1,471 valid responses to some 50 questions, many of which posed hypothetical vignettes
asking respondents to say how they would react to the conflicts depicted therein. Other comparative scholars have
used this method-vignettes in surveys-with great success (Hamilton and Sanders 1992). By
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telling hypothetical stories, researchers can systematically vary and thus reliably measure the effects of various
independent variables. By using survey methods, they can take large samples and generalize widely. The method combines
the experiment's advantage of clear causal inference with the survey's advantage of generalizability.
The book's core consists of an empirical analysis organized around five primary themes: how cultural differences
account for differences in violence (chapter 2); how people define the "thresholds of violence" that
define the point at which they are willing to engage in violence (chapter 3); how fear of victimization influences
behavior (chapter 4); how the availability of weapons and attitudes toward them affect decisions to engage in violence
(chapter 5); and how people's attitudes about the police use of violence vary between Japan and the U. S.
There are many interesting findings, too many to summarize in this short space. Here are six of the most intriguing.
1. PERCEIVING AND REPORTING CRIME: Although violence is rare among the Japanese, they seem to retain a stronger
awareness of victimhood and a
greater propensity to report victimization (p. 36). This means that the crime differences described above are probably
not artifacts of differences in reporting behavior. They may even be underestimates.
2. RESPONDING TO CONFLICT: In response to the threat of assault, Americans tend to react in a bipolar manner, by
using a weapon offensively or by
complying with what the threatener wants, while Japanese people employ a wider range of reactions that include
fight, flight, compliance, and most conspicuously, the use of "confrontational" speech (p. 52). If people
with more ways of resolving a problem have more "power over the situation" than do people with a smaller
response repertoire, then people in Japan, where guns are almost nonexistent, may have more power than do the two-thirds
of Americans who rely on guns for self defense (p. 151).
3. GENDER AND VIOLENCE: American women are far less likely than American men to respond to conflict with violence
but they are just as likely as Japanese
men to do so (p. 60). This is at once a puzzle and a challenge for students of crime who rightly emphasize that
violence is "gendered." Violence is mainly a "male thing," but some gender influences pale
in comparison to what these authors call "cultural effects." This finding is especially intriguing because
cross-national studies show that Japan ranks very high--substantially higher than the United States--on measures
of "masculinity" (p. 41).
4. INSULTS AND RESPECT: American criminology holds that many men are quick to fight over minute trespasses on their
honor. The demand for "respect" is
said to have lethal consequences in urban ghettos especially. This study shows that Americans are, in fact, more
tolerant of verbal attacks than Japanese are and that their reactions are more restrained. In fact, many Japanese
"do not make a clear distinction between verbal and physical aggression," and yet their society is far
less violent (p. 27).
5. FEAR AND PUNITIVENESS: Despite living in a much safer society, Japanese citizens have higher levels of "vague
fear of violent victimization" than do Americans (p. 94). This suggests that attitudes about crime are not
a straightforward function of crime
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rates. Considering that crime policy is vastly more punitive in America than Japan, it also suggests that explaining
cross-national differences in punitiveness requires focusing on the mechanisms that link public opinion to policy
output and especially on how "insulated" policy-makers are from the punitive preferences that citizens
hold in most democratic countries (Zimring, Hawkins, and Kamin 2001).
6. POLICE VIOLENCE: Contrary to much popular belief, public confidence in police is lower in Japan than in America
(p. 127). Nonetheless, in most conflict situations, Japanese people are more likely to call the police than Americans
are. They also are much more willing to tolerate police use of non-lethal force, such as slapping insouciant suspects,
but much less willing to tolerate or justify more extreme use of force such as pulling or using a gun (p. 124).
These findings suggest that "trust in the police" is multi-dimensional and that the threshold level for
allowing police violence varies by situation and by culture. The authors conclude that each society gets the police
abuse it deserves because "police brutality is a microcosm of the wider socialized violence response set of
that society" (p. 134).
This book identifies patterns that complicate received criminological wisdom about violence, victimization, weapons,
fear, and police. Most importantly, it explains and explores the understudied and underappreciated role of MEANING
as a context and cause of violence, and it shows how meanings are constructed in different ways in different contexts.
In a field where both meaning and non-American experience are too often ignored, showing how culture counts is
a major achievement.
Although this is a valuable book, its major achievements are partly offset by several significant deficiencies.
For a work that stresses the situational and cultural contexts of meaning, it is surprising how often it overlooks
the importance of context in interpreting cross-cultural survey results. There is variation in the degree to which
subjects in different countries believe that their interview replies ought to mirror their actual behavior. Many
scholars believe that the gap between ideal and real behavior is especially pronounced among Japanese respondents,
and some have shown that they are more likely than Americans to choose less extreme answer
categories. It is unclear how, if at all, the authors confronted these possibilities in this research. The text
also contains several significant inconsistencies, concerning trust in Japanese police (p. 38, 127), the orientation
to confrontation in Japan (pp. 55, 84), the "appropriateness" of fear (pp. 95, 117), the availability
of knives and swords in Japan (p. 98), the degree of inequality in Japanese society (pp. 40, 142), and so on.
Most seriously, this book omits or unduly discounts the importance of some key contextual variables. In explaining
levels of fear, for example, the authors fail to engage the substantial literature on the links between fear and
community "disorder" (p. 82), and they slight the significance of the major finding from research on
television-viewing: that the more one watches television, the more one thinks the real world is like the television
world (p. 94). Japanese and Americans both live in cultures saturated with television. In both countries a major
message of much television programming is, as Wednesday says in "Adams' Family Values," to "be afraid,
be very afraid," so this is a major omission. Similarly, in explaining the huge differences in violence between
Japan and the United States, the authors do
not
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seriously consider the effects of two major macro-level-differences that distinguish the two societies: diversity,
and inequality. Though they nod in these directions occasionally, they do not explore the race and class contexts
of violence in any sustained way. They should have. Trying to explain different responses to conflict in Japan
and America without attending to major differences in the structures of these societies is like trying to explain
recreational behavior in Hawaii and Minnesota without considering the different landscapes of these two states.
It cannot be done and should not be attempted.
Despite these problems, DIFFERENT RESPONSES TO VIOLENCE IN JAPAN AND AMERICA will reward readers who are hungry
for comparative insights into the causes and contexts of violence. It answers important questions about the meanings
and contexts of violence, it suggests new lines of inquiry into issues such as the determinants of punitiveness
in criminal justice policy, and it challenges established verities about violence. How can more masculinity coexist
with less violence? Might less crime mean more fear? And how come Japan's heightened sensitivity to insult does
not stimulate higher rates of violence? As Professor Gilbert Geis says in the preface, this is "one of the
very few sophisticated comparative forays into the heart of issues of crime and fear of crime" (p. x).
REFERENCES:
Athens, Lonnie. 1997. VIOLENT CRIMINAL ACTS AND ACTORS REVISITED. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Hamilton, V. Lee, and Joseph Sanders. 1992. EVERYDAY JUSTICE: RESPONSIBILITY AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN JAPAN AND THE
UNITED. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Zimring, Franklin E., Gordon Hawkins, and Samuel Kamin. 2001. PUNISHMENT AND DEMOCRACY: THREE STRIKES AND YOU'RE
OUT IN CALIFORNIA. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Copyright 2002 by the author, David T. Johnson.