Learned Criminals

The 22-year-old student at Tokyo's Aoyama Gakuin University was just plain bored: somehow, he decided, he would have to get rid of his tiresome prostitute sweetheart. And so, one day last fall, Kenjiro Yoshida invited her around to his dormitory and strangled her with a necktie. Three months later, police found her body under the dormitory floor."

In prewar Japan, such an act by a university student would have been unthinkable. Today student crimes have become one of Japan's major problems. Once limited to the well-to-do, higher education is now open to thousands of boys and girls who work their way through school. In addition to the 165 colleges and universities Japan had before the war, 335 new ones have sprung up. But what might have been an unmixed blessing has brought with it a curse. Last year 5,664 students were arrested for major crimes; of these, one in five came from a university. A sampling of what has been going on: P: In December, a Meiji University student stabbed and killed a taxi driver to get money to buy a few drinks. P: In February, four more Meiji students beat and robbed another driver.

P: In May, feuding students from Rikkyo and Nippon Universities started a riot in a beer hall. Result: one student dead. P: In June, three students from Komazawa, Japan's foremost Buddhist university, were arrested for assault and attempted rape after breaking into a public bathhouse and attacking two bathhouse maids.

What is the reason for the crime wave? Some officials blame it on "mass-production" education, others on the fact that some of the new colleges and universities are really phony institutions, interested mainly in student fees. Whatever the cause, prewar respect for learning and authority has dwindled; a frightening number of young criminals offer no other explanation for their acts than that they were out "just for thrills." In the first four months of 1957, the number of students arrested topped 2,500. This spring police found that university students were the masterminds behind three large juvenile gangs in Tokyo.

Last week Japan stepped up a nationwide campaign against the big crime wave. It ordered increased street patrols for the summer, began sending out pamphlets to parents and teachers on how to deal with delinquents, assigned crime-prevention specialists to lecture at civic organizations across the country. Meanwhile, local school boards are increasing their budgets to train teachers in guidance; the Tokyo board alone will spend fully one-third of its funds to combat delinquency. Said Director of Detectives Heiichi Kosugi of the Tokyo police: "If something is not done soon, the universities will become hotbeds of intelligent crime."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.