[Sublight]

Now this is what actually ticks me off.

http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/nation...na007000c.html

"Number of crimes committed by nonpermanent foreigners declines in Tokyo"

Doesn't sound like bad news, does it? Here's a quote:

Police investigated 27,459 cases nationwide of suspected crimes allegedly committed by nonpermanent foreign nationals in 2006. The number is 16.9 percent down from the previous year.

[note: "crimes" includes violent and property crimes (murder, rape, theft, arson, etc). Victimless crimes like visa violations, drug possession, prostitution and speeding are classed separately as "offences".]

Down 17% nationwide? Sweet, that's one hell of a decline. How could the National Police Agency (sorry, I called them the NPD in the OP) ever spin this to reinforce the "Gaijin Criminal" stereotype they seem to depend on? I know! Let's compare these figures to crime figures from 15 years ago in rural regions that didn't have any foreigners back then! 'Nonpermanent' eliminates most Korean and Chinese residents, and 1991 was about when the gov't started issuing work visas to Japanese Brazilians (the total foreign resident population was half was it is now, with permanent residents making up a larger percentage). So with some creative statistics, all we need to do is pick a sample population far smaller than what exists today, and then only compare raw numbers. Let's see what we get:

But in the Chubu region of central Japan, the number stood at 7,716, a staggering 35.4 times the number of 1991. The 279 cases in the Shikoku region shows a rise of 21.5 times that of 1991. The number for other regions such as Hokkaido, Tohoku, Chugoku, Kinki and Kyushu, all increased from 15 years ago.

Wow, 35.4 times the crime in Chubu, which happened to get an enormous spike in the foreign population after 1991 since it received the vast majority of those 300,000 Brazilians. And hoo boy, 21.5 times more crime in Shikoku. That means in 1991, on an island slightly smaller than New Jersey with over 4 million people, there was a grand total of 13 investigations into suspected crimes by foreigners.

Gee, I don't see any massaging going on here, do you?

But how does the NPA view these results?

"We have beefed up our efforts in Tokyo, forcing foreign criminal groups to flee to other regions," an NPA official said.

Riiiight. You know, most police agencies would be crowing over a 17% drop in crime in any subset of the population, but these useless slugs are so desperate to keep people in fear of bogeymen under the bed that they actually spin it to claim that crime is skyrocketing out of control.