I was robbed in Tokyo recently, an experience as unexpected as it was distressing. Despite long years in London, plus decades of rough and ready globetrotting to some of the sketchiest places on earth, I have never been a victim in any of these notorious crime hotspots (I feel snubbed especially by London), but this was the second such experience in supposedly the safest city in the world.
What are the odds? The first time I dropped my wallet in a branch of the bargain bucket Don Quijote store and later received a phone call from the staff saying they had it, with ID cards intact but 50,000 yen gone. This time there was no phone call, it’s all gone, a similar amount of cash but far more worryingly, my entire suite of credit and ID cards.
It probably happened in the teeming and chaotic Tokyo mega-station with my small backpack unzipped and the wallet removed while I wandered around in my habitual careless, reverie. One gets complacent in Japan. It would have been the work of a moment. Two hours on the phone speaking to robots to block the cards, a day in the air conditioner-free hell that is the Tokyo Immigration center, and another day spent assembling documents for three separate submissions to Japan’s leading credit agencies to forestall identity theft (a huge problem here) was just the work of the first few days. There is plenty more to do.
And I had no access to money! Luckily my partner, who was staying elsewhere at the time, lives up to the stereotype of the typical Japanese woman for whom every potential adverse eventuality short of alien invasion, must be meticulously prepared for. She had secreted away an envelope of “earthquake money” in my flat that I was able to draw on. Bless her.
Was I just unlucky? Perhaps, but there is there is certainly room to doubt Japan’s stellar safety rating. Crime has been rising, especially pickpocketing centered around tourist hotspots for each of the last four years – logically coinciding with a surge in visitor numbers, but also, somewhat contentiously, with an steady uptick in immigration.
The impression that foreigners are fueling a mini crime wave is part of the rationale of Prime Minister Sanae Takachi’s rightening of immigration rules. On the campaign trail she spoke of inappropriate behavior by “foreign visitors” and has implemented a number of measures aimed at making it more difficult to enter Japan and to remain. I will have to pay about ten times as much as I was used to for my next work visa.
The figures are confusing and disputed, though. Those released up to 2025 did show the number of foreigners arrested increasing mainly for petty offenses and the proportion of crime committed by “foreigners” at an all-time high of 5.9 percent (3 percent of the Japanese population are non-Japanese), but some of that is visa offences (a crime Japanese cannot commit).
Anecdotes are at least as powerful as statistics, though. The murder of a Japanese woman by a Vietnamese immigrant in 2025 in Saga prefecture sparked nationwide fears despite it being a vanishingly rare, if horrible, event. For the record, the only clue I have to who took my wallet is the two attempts to use one of the credit cards, which shows an online retailer in Nigeria.
The good news is that overall crime rates in Japan remain very low, though the reliability of some of the positive statistics is at least questionable. We are talking about reported crime and acutely sensitive categories such as sexual assault or domestic abuse in a shame-based culture may well be significantly underreported. Groping is prevalent enough that many train lines have women’s only carriages.
Sexual assault or domestic abuse in a shame-based culture may well be significantly underreported
Not quite the crime-free paradise it is sometimes, rather patronizingly, depicted as then. But there is still much to admire in the way modern Japan deals with crime. There is the ubiquitous but unobtrusive police presence via the kōban (police box) system, the severe penalties (especially for drugs offenses) and the steadfast refusal to romanticize villains. And, I’d still liked to think, despite what happened to me, generally high levels of citizenship.
There has also been some effective policy making. The infamous crime syndicate yakuza took a massive hit in the late 1990s when the government made it illegal for anyone to do business with them. That made it virtually impossible for yakuza members (who are registered bizarrely) to open a bank account, get a mortgage or even a mobile phone. Recruitment dried up and most of the few that remain are now comically ancient, a Dad’s Army mafiosi.
Getting robbed in Tokyo was an upsetting, disillusioning experience and will remain an unpleasant memory. I’d prefer to recall the time I left my wallet on a bus, picked it up from the local kōban intact and tied up with a neat pink bow, by a policewoman who bowed deeply to me and thanked me in exquisitely formal Japanese as she returned it.
Those sorts of memories I’ll cherish, but sadly it’s not the whole story.
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