In an essay he wrote for Asahi Shimbun's Internet magazine Webronza in June, professor Mikio Kawai, a specialist in "serious crime," revealed the results of a survey he conducted last March among 1,456 "older" people. He asked the respondents if they thought juvenile crime was on the increase. Sixty-two percent thought it was going up, while another 21 percent said it was going up "a great deal." Only 3.7 percent believed that the incidence of youth crime was on the decline.

According to National Police Agency statistics, juvenile crime has been going down since 2003. It is crime among elderly people that is going up, mainly as a result of income loss. Kawai says this perception of youth crime is not exclusive to Japan. The older a person gets, the more he or she tends to exaggerate crime statistics and think that things were better in the good old days.

But that doesn't explain the huge percentage of people who think young people are becoming more dangerous, and he blames the media, which fixates on juvenile offenses, especially those characterized by brutality, such as the gratuitous killing of a junior high school boy in Kawasaki several months ago, allegedly by several of his slightly older friends.