Deltoid

In “Point Blank” Gary Kleck writes:

“One way one might crudely and partially control for United States-Japan cultural differences is to compare homicide rates among Japanese-Americans, who live where guns are plentiful, with the homicide rates of their presumably culturally similar brethren in Japan, where private gun ownership is nearly nonexistent. Certainly this pair of populations is more comparable than the population of Japan compared with the entire U.S. population.

Not necessarily. The US does not accept immigrants with criminal records, so this group of Japanese-Americans will be less likely to commit homicide than the general Japanese population.

Up through 1979, the FBI reported homicide arrests sorted by racial breakdowns which included “Japanese.” For the period 1976-1978, 21 of 48,695 arrests for murder and non-negligent manslaughter were of Japanese-Americans, or 0.04% (U.S. FBI 1977-1979).

A 95% confidence interval is 0.03% to 0.07%.

Applying this fraction to the total of 57,460 homicides yields an estimate of 24.78 killings by Japanese-Americans for 1976- 1978, or about 8.26 per year.

This assumes that there is no racial bias in the arrest patterns of any US police force.

With 791,000 persons of Japanese ancestry in the United States in 1980 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1984), this translates into an annual rate of 1.04 homicides per 100,000 population.

There are two different definitions of “Japanese” being used here – Japanese ancestry (note that a person can have multiple ancestries) and police ticking a box marked “Japanese” on an FBI form (what do they do if they don’t know/care?).

Considering all the factors above, we can guess that the homicide rate for Japanese-Americans is somewhere between 0.5 and 3.0 per 100,000 pop.

For the same 1976-1978 period, the annual homicide rate in Japan averaged 2.45 (United Nations 1982, pp. 192, 718).

No it didn’t. Kleck can’t read. That’s the rate for BE50 “All other external causes”. The reference does not tell us the homicide rate for 76-78, but if Kleck had turned to page 777 he would have discovered that for 79 they split category BE50 into AM54 (Homicide) and AM55 (Other violence), with rates of 1.0 and 1.5 respectively. That is, homicides were 40% of the “All other external causes” deaths. If this was true for 76-78, the homicide rate in those years was 0.98 per 100,000 pop.

Thus, crudely controlling for Japanese culture in this way indicates that in Japan, where civilian gun ownership is virtually nonexistent and gun control laws are extremely strict, the homicide rate is 2.3 times as high as it is among Japanese-Americans living where guns are easily available and gun laws are far less restrictive.'’

The Japanese homicide rate is probably lower than that of Japanese Americans, but there is insufficient data to have any certainty.

Cristina Yu wrote:

You didn’t mention Japan. Japan’s such a safe place that they’re murder rate is almost as low as the murder rate for Americans of Japanese descent. Almost, but not quite.

Wrong. Kleck says this on page 189 of “Point Blank”, but he looked up the wrong number (2.45) for the Japanese homicide rate.

Unless you consider self-murder, that is, in which case, it’s rather high. Their suicide is higher than our murder rate plus our suicide rate combined.

Not any more (though it used to be true):

1990 rates per 100k population from WHO Statistical Yearbook
        homicide   suicide
US          10.1      12.6
Japan        0.6      16.4

(Interestingly, the male suicide rates in Japan and the US were identical (20.4))

Not to mention that their commonest form of violent death is for a parent to knife the kids, then (if the parent is male) the wife, then make an attempt (successful or not) on him/herself. (If hubby is having a hard time with his career, it is EXPECTED that his wife will unburden him in this manner — and that she’ll succeed when she goes for herself.)

In the US we call that a “murder-suicide” and count one suicide (or suicide attempt) and N-1 murders. In Japan they call it “multiple suicide” or “family suicide” and count N suicides.

Untrue. The WHO breaks deaths down by age. In 1990 there were 47 child (under 14) suicides in Japan. That’s a rate of 0.2 per 100k children. (For comparison the US rate was 0.5.)

Tim Starr writes:

Japan classifies cases of husbands murdering their wives & kids then killing themselves as all suicides, no homicides, thus skewing their statistics in favor of suicides & against homicides.

This claim is easily seen to be false: You just have to look at the Japanese suicide statistics. There are no recorded suicides of small children.

That doesn’t necessarily falsify the claim. How are “small children” defined?

Under 5. And the suicide rate for 5-14 year olds is half of the US rate.

How do you know that “family suicides” in Japan don’t usually take place when the children are no longer “small”?

Because I’ve actually read something on the subject. A typical “family suicide” involves a mother of small children killing her children and herself. Just because the literal translation of the Japanese word for this is “family suicide”, it does not follow that the homicide of the children is officially recorded as suicide.

See: R, Markman & D. Bosco, “Alone with the Devil,” 342ff (1989). Iga, Mamoru “The thorn in the chrysanthemum : suicide and economic
success in modern Japan”