Regarding David Chester's July 31 letter, "Mind boggles at police reports": What business is it of his how police conduct their investigations? Often in the United States, once a suspect's name is in the media, there's a circus on the airwaves and the gossip magazines do a hatchet job on the suspect. Maybe the woman who slashed six other people at Hiratsuka Station is mentally impaired and needs psychiatric care, not a media circus.
As for the other criticism -- why it remains legal for an individual to possess child pornography -- this is a good question. However, even in those countries that have outlawed the possession of child pornography -- and such offensive and violent pornography should be illegal -- many people still unlawfully download kiddie porn off the Internet. If the Japanese police tried to arrest everyone in Japan who purchased child pornography or viewed it on some illegal Web page, they would have to greatly increase the number of police investigators.
Chester seems typical of those foreign residents in Japan who feel a certain smug moral superiority when reading or hearing about crime in Japan, forgetting that back home, in places like England or the U.S., crime is far worse and far more violent. London police, for example, are at their wit's end trying to deal with all the recent violent knife attacks in a city that was once considered a fairly "crime free" urban setting.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.