Stabbing incident exposes Japan's social crisis; poll: 79.7% of respondents believe Japan's public safety has worsened over the past 10 years

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【Global Times reporter Xing Xiaojing Global Times special correspondent Sun Xiaolei】According to reports in Japanese media, on the evening of the 26th local time in Tokyo, inside the Pokemon-themed store on the second floor of the Ikebukuro commercial facility “Sunshine City,” a man stabbed a female shop attendant and then injured himself. Both died after efforts to save them failed. On the 27th, experts, in an interview with a Global Times reporter, said that in recent years, extreme violent incidents have occurred frequently in Japan, and there has been an overall rightward trend in social sentiment. When the extreme consequences of this social ideology rebound on ordinary people in the form of indiscriminate violence, it reflects a dangerous reality of a society that is increasingly torn apart and lacks a mental outlet.

On March 26, inside Sunshine City, Ikebukuro, Tokyo. (Visual China)

“Sunshine City” is a landmark building in Tokyo. Its former site was the old Duck Prison and execution ground. Duck Prison was built in 1895. After the end of World War II, the U.S. military used it to detain the main war criminals who were to be tried in Tokyo. Seven Class-A war criminals, including Hideki Tojo and Kenji Toi Haruna, were all held here, and on December 23, 1948, they were executed here.

After Duck Prison was returned to Japanese management in 1958, it was renamed the Tokyo Detention Center. In order to erase the traces of war crimes, the Japanese government, after the war, used the rationale of pushing forward the development of “sub-center areas” (fukutoshin). In 1971, it demolished Duck Prison and, on the site, built Ikebukuro’s “Sunshine City” and the nearby Higashi-Ikebukuro Central Park.

When Sunshine City was completed in 1978, Japan was once proud of the fact that it had built what was then Tokyo—and even the entire country’s—tallest building. In 1979, with the opening of Higashi-Ikebukuro Central Park, the place that had carried memories of postwar trials simply disappeared. In its place came a mixed-use commercial complex combining shopping, entertainment, and office space. Today, people in Japan come here to relax and be entertained, but they know little about history.

Besides the knife attack incident in Ikebukuro, since the start of this year, Japan has also seen multiple other malignant incidents, including ones targeting foreigners, raising people’s concerns about public safety. On February 25, a Chinese citizen was attacked in the street in Sumiyoshi Ward, Osaka, by people of unknown identity, and the backpack containing 5 million yen in cash was stolen. Japan’s Mainichi Shimbun reported on March 26 that on March 22, a 27-year-old man in the Chuo Ward of Fukuoka City was seriously injured after being stabbed in the abdomen, and the Fukuoka Prefectural Police issued a nationwide wanted notice for it.

In fact, Japan’s increasingly prominent public safety problems are not only reflected in specific news reports; relevant statistics and public opinion polls also show it to different degrees. Citing data from Japanese police, Japan TV news on February 12 said that in 2025, the number of criminal case reports reached about 774k cases, marking the fourth consecutive year of growth and exceeding the figures for 2019—before the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this year, Japan’s Jiji Press also reported that a public safety questionnaire survey implemented by Japan’s National Police Agency last October showed that 79.7% of respondents believed that “Japan’s public safety has deteriorated over the past 10 years.” This proportion increased by 3.1 percentage points compared with 2024. Since Japan began conducting relevant statistical surveys in 2021, public safety conditions have continued to worsen. The survey targeted men and women aged 15 and above across Japan, and received 5,000 valid responses.

In addition, on the 25th, Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun released a nationwide public opinion survey it conducted jointly with the Japan Institute of International Affairs. When asked what kind of country Japan should strive to become, 62% of respondents said it should become “a country with world-class public safety levels,” ranking first.

Xiang Haoyu, a specially appointed research fellow at the Asia-Pacific Office of the China Institute of International Studies, analyzed in an interview with a Global Times reporter on the 27th that the extreme violent incidents that have frequently occurred in Japan in recent years have their root cause in a deep structural social crisis. This physical erasure of historical sites, in reality, cuts off the roots of social reflection. Xiang Haoyu said, “Under the influence of long-term economic stagnation and changes in the external environment, Japanese society’s emotions have shown an overall rightward trend. This tendency is not only reflected in a tough stance toward external policies, but also in a lack of empathy inwardly and blurred moral boundaries. When historical lessons are buried by modern consumerism, feelings of isolation and extremism among individuals will grow under the shadow of prosperity.”

“When the extreme consequences of this social ideology rebound on ordinary people in the form of indiscriminate violence, it reflects a dangerous social reality that is increasingly torn apart and lacks a mental outlet.” Xiang Haoyu said that this historical warning, to some extent, can be viewed as a trial of contemporary Japanese society. If the trial of the time was a reckoning of the crimes of militarism, then today’s criminal cases are a test of the act of forgetting history, evading reflection, and the failure of social governance.