Abstract
This article analyzes media representation of minority offenders, and argues that media practice associates a minority status with criminal propensity through a process of minority signification. The focal point of the analysis is newspaper reporting of the 2003 Fukuoka family murder in Japan, in which three students from China killed a Japanese family. Close examination of two major Japanese newspapers suggests that their reporting of the Fukuoka case connects crime and a minority group in two ways. First, the newspapers frequently utilize nationality and immigration status as descriptors of the Fukuoka case suspects, and thus encourage an intuitive mental connection between foreignness and crime. Furthermore, opinion pieces and editorial articles interpret the murder in the context of immigration policies and the financial hardship often experienced by international students, suggesting that the Fukuoka case is one manifestation of international student criminality. The article concludes that signification of nationality and immigration status in the media may help explain the disparity between the relatively minor presence of foreign national offenders in Japan’s crime scene and their major presence in the Japanese crime discourse.
Human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets…To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.
Plato’s famous allegory of the cave articulates the nature of the criminological imagination. Like the cavemen in the allegory who see the world through shadows, we make sense of the world through images reflected in texts, television, and computer screens. Mass media are the fire that presents these images to the public in contemporary societies.
This paper introduces the concept of minority signification, and illustrates its process by examining how the media bridged crime and minority status in covering a prominent murder case involving three Chinese students in Japan. It extricates two modes of minority signification by distinguishing two forms of bridging in media reports: intuitive bridging and analytical bridging. Intuitive bridging refers to “name-calling,” which intuitively associates minority membership with crime by juxtaposing the two. Analytical bridging, on the other hand, refers to the formation of a logical and rhetorical connection between crime and minority status in an analysis of an offense. By examining these two bridging processes in Japanese murder reporting, this paper illustrates how the social marginality of minority group members is translated into the magnified representation of their criminality in the media.
Media as a structuring and structured force
The media are powerful “motors” that generate images of society. They construct the public perception of social reality by selecting information for public consumption, and then by presenting perspectives from which to interpret this information. The most acknowledged power of mass media in social construction is agenda-setting power (e.g., Dunaway et al. 2010; Sheafer and Weimann 2005), i.e., the capacity to spotlight particular events and issues and bring them into the public arena. By reporting certain topics while discarding others, the media play the role of a gatekeeper who preselects the information the public has access to.
Agenda-setting theory suggests that the media create a perceived hierarchy of significance through a process known as priming (e.g., Iyengar and Kinder 1987; McCombs and Shaw 1972; Sheafer and Weimann 2005). Priming refers to the phenomenon that our decisions are likely to be influenced by the most accessible information in our memory (Tversky and Kahneman 1973, 1981, cited by Sheafer and Weimann 2005). By priming the public consciousness to a particular issue, the media can facilitate a political change. In their analysis of media reports and voting behaviors in Israel, Sheafer and Weimann (2005) argue that more prominent media coverage of the “security and peace process” over “domestic-economy” topics tends to lead to greater voter preference for the security-oriented party.
The structuring power of the media resides not only in the selection of what is covered, but also in the decision as to how an incident is narrated. Gamson and Modigliani (1989) have coined the term “interpretive packages” to refer to a set of symbols and narratives the media utilize in order to guide the audience in making sense of a social phenomenon. “Every reporting is a narrative process,” Leavy and Maloney (2009: 276) observe, and every narrative is accompanied by interpretations of reality. By presenting a particular interpretation of reality, the media contribute to construe public opinion.
At the same time, the media are also structured products, which reflect popular thought, information in demand, and existing power relations in society. Journalism is not fiction writing. News reports include the voices of a wide range of people: crime reports feature the voices of victims; investigators and police; academics and other experts; the families, friends and neighbors of victims and offenders; and, less frequently, offenders themselves.
Like shadows on the cave wall, reflections in the mass media are not necessarily proportional to the actual figures with which the reflections are associated. It is in this distortion that two functions of the media – working as a “motor” and as a “mirror,” or a structuring and a structured force – intertwine. Popular interests, political climate, and institutional arrangements influence journalistic practice. In the commercial media, achieving a high viewing rate and circulation is essential. Journalists are compelled to report on topics which will interest the audience (Bourdieu 1998), and real-world conditions and the activities of political actors also intervene in the agenda-building process (Sheafer and Weimann 2005).
Events that are easily perceived as a “national trauma” tend to receive a large volume of media coverage because they are considered deserving of becoming a part of collective memory (Neal 1998, cited in Leavy and Maloney 2009). Tragic events that are relatable to a large proportion of the audience are more likely to achieve “national trauma” status. Leavy and Maloney (2009) observe that despite its large number of victims, the 2005 mass school shooting in Red Lake, Minnesota, received far less media attention than the similar 1999 school shooting in Columbine, Colorado, partly because the Red Lake incident took place on a Native American reservation, a setting unfamiliar to the majority of the audience. Since journalists and the audience regarded the offenders and victims in Columbine, a middle-class suburb, as of “their own kind,” the latter incident was given more space in collective memory making and news reporting (Leavy and Maloney 2009).
Narratives in the media are also influenced by what source of information journalists find appropriate and accessible. Herman and Chomsky (1988: xxii) note: “Most biased choices in the media arise from the pre-selection of right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organization, market and political power.” In the case of crime reporting, police investigators and government officials are the major sources of information. Thus crime representation in the media tends to reflect the views of official authorities. While victims and their friends, families and neighbors, as well as acquaintances of offenders, are also favored sources of media crime reports, the voices of offenders themselves are less likely to be reflected in those reports.
The rise of the internet has had a transformative effect on the role of traditional media, allowing for a much larger discursive space for citizen journalism in news dissemination (Allan et al. 2007). Amateur citizen journalists who populate online media are more diverse than professional journalists, and are not bound to production control and norms of information gathering inherent to traditional mass media (Bruns 2008). Bruns (2008) argues that online media are transforming media’s traditional gatekeeper role into a more open and interactive “gatewatcher” role, one that highlights and interprets information, not restricting its flow. Such transformation is particularly visible in the rise of internet-mediated activism (Allan et al. 2007). However, the arena of journalism is still far from a level playing field. Particularly in crime news, information from official sources still dominates crime reports, and access to primary sources is typically limited to professional journalists.
Media reports transform some criminal incidents into “instances” of larger social problems (Best 1999). 1 The 1989 rape of a female jogger by a group of teenage boys in New York’s Central Park evolved into a representation of a larger problem when the New York media started reporting the incident as a case of “wilding” (Best 1999). The use of the word “wilding” associated this particular incident with other unrelated youth violence. What emerged through this mental connection was the horrific imagery of a horde of uncontrollable urban teens who terrorize defenseless adults.
Such discursive association of one criminal case with a larger problem amplifies the perceived significance of the case. Katz (2003) compares the different public response to youth violence in New York and Los Angeles in the 1990s, concluding that the portrayal of youthful offenders as “gangs” by the California media contributed to the stronger public concern with youth crime in Los Angeles.
This media practice is certainly not limited to the United States. The popular naming of Chinese smugglers as “snakeheads” by the Japanese media contributed to Japanese moral panic 2 over Chinese immigration in a similar way (Friman 2001). The term snakeheads is a metaphor for the smuggling industry, with a guiding smuggler being the head of a snake while the following migrants make up the snake’s long body. The portrayal of Chinese smugglers as snakeheads, according to Friman, elevated the public’s fear by giving a false impression that all Chinese smugglers were part of one large Snakeheads organization, making them look more powerful and organized than they really were.
Minority signification
Criminologists have studied extensively the relationship between media representations of race and crime in the United States (e.g., Dixon et al. 2003; Gilliam and Iyengar 2000; Lundman 2003; Oliver 2003; Valentino 1999). These studies examine how the media represent racial minorities differently from whites in crime reports, documentaries, and crime fiction in the media. Some studies report that in the case of African Americans and Hispanics in particular, the rate at which they are reported as perpetrators of crime is higher than their actual share of criminal offenses. These findings, however, are not consistent (Bjornstrom et al. 2010).
How do the structuring and structured properties of the media interact with the existing stratification of society? More specifically, how does the social marginality of criminal suspects interact with the way the media present crime? This paper argues that journalistic practice often involves a process of minority signification, where the media amplifies the crime and criminality of a minority group. Here “a minority group” is broadly defined as a social group that is associated with social stigma and limited political power.
In addition to structural factors – such as media ownership, commercial structure, and political climate – cultural factors, which are commonly referred to as journalistic values, have a significant influence on media practice (Herman and Chomsky 1988; Lau 2004; McCarthy et al. 1996). Cultural meaningfulness and rarity (extraordinarity) are counted among journalistic values that make some events more newsworthy in the eyes of journalists (Lau 2004; McCarthy et al. 1996). Events that resonate with societal values attract journalists because of their cultural significance and emotional appeal to the public. In contrast, events that involve an unusual phenomenon are considered newsworthy because of their distinctiveness.
The concept of minority signification provides an analytical lens that allows us to see how minority membership in a stratified society interacts with the journalistic values of cultural meaningfulness and rarity. First, it illuminates the disproportional impact the rarity orientation of journalism has on minority group members of society. Minority group members are, by definition, rarer people in society. Thus, their group membership serves as a “news peg” (McCarthy et al. 1996), even if group membership has no relation to the nature of an event. Their rarity as a group attracts attention in the media discourse. When the nature of an event resonates with existing stereotypes of a minority group, newsworthiness of the event further increases, leading the event to become more culturally meaningful. If a member of a minority group that is already seen as a threat to society commits a crime, existing collective stigmas make it easy to formulate – and sell – a narrative that portrays a criminal incident as an omen of the larger threat that the group represents.
Minority signification may take place in two modes: the signification of minority crime and the signification of minority criminality. The signification of minority crime refers to the process in which law-breaking by members of minority groups is made disproportionately visible in the media. This form of signification takes place when mass media emphasize the existence of crime by minority members. In contrast, the signification of minority criminality refers to the process in which the lawbreaker’s membership in a minority group (e.g., being an undocumented migrant, being gay, or being a resident of an impoverished neighborhood) is presented as explanatorily pertinent to criminal behavior.
The numerical overrepresentation of crimes committed by socioeconomic minorities is just one aspect of the signification of minority crime. What is equally, if not more, pertinent is how the minority status of a suspect is represented. Even if crimes by minority members are proportionally reported, if the crime reports repeatedly refer to the minority status of an offender, the criminal presence of that group leaves a stronger mark on the audience’s perception. Furthermore, a crime report featuring the nationality of a suspect in a headline sends a much stronger message about race and crime than a report that mentions the race of a suspect only within the main text. The more explicit and repetitive the juxtaposition of minority status and criminal behavior is, the more concrete the intuitive bridge between the two becomes.
It is the very marginality of minority status that makes it easier for the media to utilize that status as a descriptor of a criminal offender. By default, minority groups are “marked” categories of people; people who are in most cases easily recognizable as distinct “types” of people. Social marking embodies cognitive asymmetry in which the “‘social mind’ actively perceives one side of a contrast while ignoring the other side as epistemologically unproblematic”(Brekhus 1996: 500). 3 Marked categories offer a readily available set of vocabulary for journalists to use, and an assortment of symbols that an audience can utilize to make sense of the reported incident. In a nationality-based society, “national” is an unmarked category that is seen as normal and general and, therefore, goes unmentioned. Meanwhile, “foreigner” is a saliently marked category, a special “type” of person; thus, his or her nationality is considered worth mentioning. The label of “foreigner” also provides a rich assortment of recognizable symbols, including language, mannerisms, and phenotype, that are believed to distinguish him or her from the rest of society.
Whether law-breaking is interpreted as an outcome of a particular situation, a product of personality, or a property of particular group membership, it has a crucial impact on what would be considered an appropriate response to the issue. Drawing from Foucault’s critical ontology, D’Arcy (2007) argues that media may take an act-centered or agent-centered approach to crime, and these two approaches lead to different societal and political responses. If crime is interpreted as a problematic behavior, an appropriate response would also focus on the acts, e.g., the creation of a safer environment. However, if crime is interpreted as a symptom of a person’s criminality, an appropriate response would be the control of latent criminals.
Minority groups are more likely to be subject to the group-centered interpretation of crime due to their distinguishable and stigmatized social status. Journalists do not use membership in a “normal” category as an explanation for crime. Crime is conventionally perceived to be abnormal behavior, thus, the explanation for it is typically abnormal. If a Japanese national commits a crime in Japan, his or her Japanese status would be an unlikely explanation for that behavior. However, the foreignness of offenders often becomes a focal point of analysis. As the vast majority of foreigners do not commit newsworthy crimes, this is illogical reasoning. Yet, the asymmetrical property of social marking normalizes the association of the minority status with criminality: if they are different from us, and did something we do not approve of, it appears natural to suspect the difference between us and them is a likely cause. This is where the mirror property of the media transforms into a motor function: journalists exploit “marked,” readily-available social “types,” and bridge a marked category with crime and criminality.
The following sections examine the process of minority signification by examining newspaper reports of a 2003 murder case in Fukuoka, Japan, in which the suspects were three Chinese students. News coverage of the case repeatedly refers to the nationality and immigration status of the Fukuoka suspects. This paper conceptualizes these repeated references as intuitive bridging, because this type of media practice associates a minority group with crime by juxtaposing the two in an impressionistic manner. Meanwhile, opinion pieces, editorial articles and other analytical pieces explain the criminal incident in relation to the suspects’ minority status, suggesting that some characteristics of the minority group may have contributed to the crime. This paper calls this mode of crime–minority association analytical bridging, since it makes a logical or rhetorical connection between a criminal incident and attributes of a minority group through contextual analysis of the case.
Methods
This paper is based on content analysis of newspaper articles reporting the 2003 Fukuoka family murder case in Japan. The intensive media coverage of this case made it suitable for this analysis, as it enabled the author to trace the development of the reports from the discovery of the murder to the arrests and eventual trials of the suspects. 4
Data include all articles referring to the Fukuoka case in the Asahi Shimbun and the Yomiuri Shimbun during the period from June 2003 to December 2004. The Asahi and the Yomiuri have the widest nationwide circulation in Japan, and are regarded as quality papers with a less sensationalistic approach. Both newspapers print twice a day, producing morning and evening editions, except for Sundays and national holidays.
Some scholars question the significance of newspaper analysis, arguing that the impact of television has become much larger in recent years (Bjornstrom et al. 2010). While television has become a popular form of media in Japan, newspapers are still widely read. According to the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association, the number of newspaper subscriptions has gone down in the past decade, but is still as high as 0.9 papers per household. 5 The number of newspapers per 1000 Japanese residents is 459.1, more than twice as many as the 201.5 per 1000 found in the United States. 6
Instead of selecting articles using the publisher-provided index, the author read all issues of the Tokyo edition of the Asahi and the Yomiuri between June 2003 and December 2004, and manually extracted 134 articles that make reference to the Fukuoka family murder case. This labor-intensive method allowed the author to capture articles which are not included in the publisher-provided index, including ones that discuss the Fukuoka family murder case in relation to immigration policies. The dataset includes 66 articles from the Yomiuri and 68 articles from the Asahi.
I analyzed newspaper articles quantitatively and qualitatively; quantitatively in order to estimate the use of nationality and the immigration status in crime reporting, and qualitatively to articulate the logics articles utilize to associate foreignness and criminality. Quantitative analysis help us to grasp a general idea of the prevalence of minority signification in media reports of this case, but do not adequately provide nuanced information about representations and association-makings. I found it necessary to engage both quantitative estimates and qualitative details to analyze the mechanism of minority signification.
Outline of the event: Fukuoka family murder case
The Fukuoka family murder case is the materialization of a nightmare foretold by anti-immigration conservatives. In this incident, a suburban Japanese family in the southern prefecture of Fukuoka was brutally murdered by three Chinese students, who, reportedly, decided to break into their house simply because the family looked wealthy. The discovery of the incident was horrifically dramatic. On June 21, 2003, police received a report from a fisherman concerning a human leg sticking out of the water of the local Hakata Bay. Underwater, investigators found the handcuffed, chained and weighted bodies of a man, a woman, and two young children. Marks on their bodies indicated that the family had been beaten and strangled to death before being thrown into the ocean. The bodies were confirmed to be Shinjirō Matsumoto, his wife Chika, and their 8-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter.
One month later, on July 22, the Fukuoka Prefectural Police released a sketch of a man who had purchased handcuffs and weights in Fukuoka City. A week later, the Yomiuri made its first reference to the suspect as a Chinese student. 7 Soon after, investigators arrested the man in the sketch, but his co-offenders had already fled Japan.
On September 3, the Yomiuri named one suspect as Wei Wei, 8 and on September 24, the other two names, Wang Liang and Yang Ning, appeared in the Yomiuri and the Asahi. 9 All three suspects were Chinese nationals who had come to Japan on student visas. They had attended, respectively, a technical school, a language school, and a college in Fukuoka for a while, but had all dropped out by the time of the incident. Wang and Yang left Japan several days after the murder, but Wei stayed behind, and was arrested on the day he was scheduled to fly back to China.
At the time of the murders, Japan and China did not have a criminal exchange treaty, i.e., a bilateral agreement in which two countries specify a procedure to send back their own nationals who have committed crimes in the other’s territory so that the country where the crime was committed can have jurisdiction over the accused. Japan’s lack of a legal capacity to punish the two fled suspects further fueled public outrage at the Fukuoka murders. The Chinese authorities subsequently arrested Wang and Yang and tried them under Chinese law. Yang, who was considered the mastermind, received the death penalty, and Wang was sentenced to indefinite imprisonment. Wei was tried in Japan and sentenced to death.
The Japanese government responded to the Fukuoka family murder case by restricting the admission of international students from China. As soon as the suspects were identified as school dropouts from China, the Japanese Ministry of Education and Science revised the national scholarship guidelines and discontinued scholarships for international students with poor academic records. In the following school admission season, the Immigration Control Bureau tightened the admission criteria for Chinese students and the control of language schools; as a result, the admission rate for Chinese applicants dropped from 74 percent to 27 percent in 2004. 10
Minority signification in the Fukuoka family murder case: Bridging crime with an immigration problem
Newspaper crime reports come in waves that vary in focus. The peaks in Figure 1 correspond to (1) the discovery of the incident (June 2003),( 2) the identification of the suspects (August–September 2003), and (3) the opening of Wei’s trial (October 2004). The vast majority of articles (87 percent, or 58 articles) are simple case reports, 9 percent (6 articles) are editorials and opinion pieces, and the rest (4.5 percent, or 3 articles) refer to the Fukuoka case as part of a report of another event.
The number of articles referring to the Fukuoka murder case in Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun, June 2003–December 2004.
Japanese newspapers covered the Fukuoka murder case most intensely during the initial discovery period; the chilling image of chained bodies in the water grabbed the attention of the media. Given that the suspects were unknown at this point, the initial reports primarily focused on the stories of the victims. The cruelty of the crime scene was contrasted with the happy, ordinary family life of the victims depicted through heartfelt testimonies of friends and neighbors. Yomiuri’s article titled “Close Family, Why… / Murder of the Family of Four / The Surprise Sad News / Speechless Acquaintance ‘Never Heard of Any Trouble’” (Yomiuri Shimbun 21 June 2003, p. 35) typifies these public eulogies of the victims. The article quotes neighbors and friends, creating the image of an innocent and beloved family (“I have never heard of them being in any trouble. They were a close family,” “They were a close family of four, a model family among friends. I haven’t seen him for a year, but they are not the kind of family who would be involved in trouble”).
As the investigation progressed, speculation about the offenders started to overshadow the testimonies of the victims’ acquaintances. The reports referred to a suspicious white car witnessed by neighbors near the family’s house prior to the incident, and suggested the possibility that the murderer had been a family acquaintance. 11 However, the possibility of this being an offense by foreign nationals was also mentioned, based on the testimony of a neighbor who heard “unfamiliar language.” 12 The image of an innocent, perfect family in the earliest reports also came to be tainted by the exposure of a less socially acceptable side of the family: subsequent articles reported that Shinjirō was involved in the shady business of high-interest loans. 13
The second peak corresponds with the arrests of the suspects. As soon as the suspects were identified, the focus of the reports shifted to these former Chinese students and the problems of immigration control they were believed to embody. At this stage, the practice of minority signification became prevalent in both newspapers. The subsequent smaller waves of coverage were updates of new findings and referrals to the case in relation to immigration policies. A small spike in late 2004 primarily consisted of reports on the trials.
Intuitive bridging: Signification of a “crime by international students”
Once the suspects were identified as international students, newspaper reports started referring to the nationality and immigration status of the suspects. These references were highly visible and repetitive. In total, 41 percent of articles referred to the suspects’ immigration status, using the term shūgakusei [international student at Japanese language school] or ryu–gakusei [international student] in a headline or subheadline (see Table 1). 14
Percentage of the Fukuoka murder case-related articles that refer to nationality and the immigration status of suspects.
The labels ryūgakusei and shūgakusei were frequently used in place of the suspects’ names until the police officially released their names, although this did not stop the media from dubbing the suspects “international students.” Yomiuri’s August 1 article titled “Fukuoka Family Murder / Is the Man in the Picture Chinese? / An International Student in His Twenties Left Japan After the Incident” (1 August 2003, p. 19) used the term “shūgakusei” as a descriptor for an unidentified suspect. Headline usage of the immigration status and nationality as a substitute for individual names was frequently observed in the Yomiuri: Yomiuri’s August 8 article is titled “Arrest of Shu–gakusei’s Friend” (8 August 2003, p. 29), and an August 21 article is headlined “Fukuoka Murder Case / Arrest Warrant for Chinese Has Been Requested by Investigation Headquarters / For Shūgakusei in Charge of the Illegal Disposal of Corpses” (21 August 2003, p. 15).
Furthermore, the Yomiuri introduced a new category of crime: ryūgakusei hanzai (crime by international student). While it is not clear who – the police, politicians, or the media – first started using this label, the media are largely responsible for popularizing the idea that international students comprise a special type of criminal. The naming of “ryūgakusei hanzai” as a category of crime allows reporters to lump together a wide range of legal violations – from homicides to shoplifting to riding away on someone’s unlocked bicycle – whose only commonality is the immigration status of a suspect, and to generalize these violations as instances of the emerging problem of delinquent international students. In editorials and policy reports, terms such as “international student crime (ryūgakusei hanzai)” and “Chinese crime (Chūgokujin hanzai)” started appearing to spotlight this new “kind” of crime. The Yomiuri used provocative headlines such as “Chinese Crime / The Residential Control of Shūgakusei Should Be Revised” (24 September 2003, p. 3) and “The Rapid Growth of ‘Ryūgakusei’ Heinous Offenders: Outstanding [Number of] Robberies [by Ryūgakusei] Last Year: Over 80% [of Ryūgakusei Offenders] are Chinese” (11 March 2004, p. 18). These articles crudely discuss crime statistics by nationality and immigration status, and refer to the Fukuoka case as a representative of “the kind.”
The repeated references to nationality and immigration status in headlines send an implicit message that these characteristics are pertinent information to the nature of crime. By referring to the suspects using collective labels, the media intuitively bridge the criminal incident with the entire group of international students. While the media could potentially use any other collective identity to describe the suspects – such as “young men,” “Fukuoka residents,” or simply “students” – the labels that actually are used are ones that construct the suspects as different from the rest of the society. In reports of the Fukuoka family murder case, the suspects’ nationality and immigration status became the primary label used as a collective pronoun.
Analytical bridging: Signification of minority criminality
While the references to nationality and immigration status in case reports intuitively associate foreign status and crime, editorials and analytical reports logically and rhetorically bridge the two through a group-oriented interpretation of a criminal incident. Analytical bridging as such may not necessarily involve a negative characterization of the group. Nevertheless, when an article refers to group membership and collective characteristics as part of the explanation of a crime, it simultaneously suggests that the group itself has a high criminal propensity, and that individual offenders are manifest examples of a latent criminal propensity inherent to the group.
Editorial articles and opinion pieces utilize criminal incidents as opportunities to discuss larger social problems. Such contextual analysis situates a criminal incident within a particular perspective. When the analysis seeks an explanation of an individual’s criminal behavior by looking at that individual’s place in a wider social category of offenders, law-breakers cease to be seen as unique individuals, and are portrayed as representatives of “people like them.”
The Yomiuri and the Asahi associated the Fukuoka family murder case with different issues regarding international students. The Yomiuri primarily discussed the case within a framework of immigration control. They argued that weak immigration control and the government’s lack of monitoring of schools let foreign criminals and delinquents enter Japan in the guise of students, which resulted in crimes such as the Fukuoka family murder case. In contrast, Asahi’s analytical piece explained the case in relation to the social isolation and alienation experienced by international students in Japan. The two newspapers contextualized the Fukuoka family murder case differently, yet both presented the Fukuoka incident as the tip of an iceberg that could be called an “international student problem.” By doing so, these articles suggested that the Fukuoka case is only one instance of a larger international student problem.
International students as criminals in disguise
Yomiuri editorials situated the Fukuoka case in the context of Japan’s international student policies, which have not been without problems. In 1983, then-Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone made it a national goal to increase the number of international students to 100,000 in a proposal commonly known as the Hundred Thousand International Student Plan, or ryūgakusei jūman-nin keikaku in Japanese (Terakura 2009). However, Japan struggled to attract the many international students it had hoped for. The number of international students steadily grew during the 1980s, but that growth stagnated during the 1990s. At the turn of the century, the number of international students in Japan was 55,755, only half of Nakasone’s goal. In order to achieve the national goal, in 2000 the Immigration Control Bureau substantially relaxed the documentation requirements for student visas in order to attract more students. They stopped requiring documentation of financial status and educational qualifications from students, and instead entrusted educational institutions to examine applicants’ qualifications. The relaxed requirement turned out to be a successful booster: the number of international students in Japan exceeded 100,000 within three years (Nihon Gakusei Sien Kiko [Japan Student Services Organization] 2011). The vast majority of international students in Japan are from neighboring Asian countries, with over half of them coming from China (Terakura 2009).
The achievement of this goal, however, came with a substantial cost. Some schools abused the relaxed requirements to recruit underqualified international students in order to augment the domestic student shortage. As a result, some educational institutions became de facto visa brokers for migrant workers, who were willing to pay an admission fee and the first semester’s tuition to gain entrance to Japan.
The Yomiuri’s editorials presented the Fukuoka incident as an exemplary case in which the liberal admission of international students resulted in criminal harm to the nation. The Yomiuri’s September 24 editorial 15 frames the discussion with the heavily laden question “Why do Chinese students commit crime?”
The perpetrators of the Fukuoka murder, in which a family of four were killed in June, were suspected to be three Chinese students who used to attend a Japanese language school and vocational school. … This year we also witnessed other incidents in which other international students from China broke into houses and killed residents. Why do heinous crimes by Chinese students continue?
This editorial listed several isolated violent crimes as examples of “crimes by Chinese students,” then suggested that the ongoing international student admission policy encouraged this “type” of crime. Quoting a Chinese student who reportedly attested, “In Japan, I could easily steal and never got caught, so it became fun,” the editorial argued that “It is unacceptable that such criminals are openly coming to Japan, using a status of shūgaku or ryūgaku.” An underlying assumption in this interpretation is that Japan is the preferred target of foreign criminals, and if the government is not watchful, a horde of delinquents will sneak into Japan to realize their criminal desires. From this perspective, lenient student admission policies not only lower academic standards, but also provide a way for opportunistic criminals to enter and live in Japan. Schools that recruited international students to compensate for the domestic student shortage were portrayed as self-interested enablers of crime. Law-breaking by an international student is presented as a manifestation of delinquent migrant criminality taking advantage of a non-restrictive student admission policy.
Based on the group-oriented interpretation of crime, the editorial suggests a group-oriented solution of crime, i.e., the restrictive admission and strict monitoring of international students.
There are over 12,000 Chinese students who did not go back when their residency period expired and continued to stay illegally. It is also not uncommon for [international students] to collectively escape from a Japanese language school in order to illegally work in [the] sex industry. … [If Japan admits international students], strict residency control should be required. … [Schools] should check students’ academic motivation and financial plans thoroughly.
16
It is not that students in Japanese higher education always prioritize their studies; to the contrary, it is not uncommon for Japanese college students to skip classes and spend time on part-time jobs. Nevertheless, working overtime and academic negligence by international students was interpreted differently from similar activities by Japanese students.
Another Yomiuri editorial, titled “A Hundred Thousand International Students / Easy Admission Should Be Reconsidered” (17 November 2003, p. 3), similarly portrayed the Fukuoka case as a consequence of admitting underqualified students. This editorial also discussed two drastically different types of law violation under the umbrella of “crimes by international students,” and presented the academic weakness of international students as a stepping stone to crime.
It has been pointed out that the increase [in the number of international students] also means the increase of international students who lack academic motivation and skills and spend all their time working a part-time job. Some of them also start committing crimes. Two years ago, a large number of Chinese international students at a junior college in Yamagata moved to the Tokyo Metropolitan Area in order to work. More recently, a family of four was murdered in Fukuoka, and former international students from China were believed to be responsible for the killings.
17
It is doubtful whether the offenders in the Fukuoka murder case fit the category of “students who lack academic motivation and skills”; they appeared to start their student life in Japan as diligent students, and at least two of them successfully completed language school programs and enrolled in college and a technical school, respectively. 18 However, in the group-oriented interpretation, individual circumstances that may have contributed to the offense vanish, and problematic characteristics of the group from which the offenders came are emphasized instead.
Economic hardship and social isolation as a pathway to crime
While Yomiuri editorials focused on the issue of immigration control, Asahi’s analysis pointed to the financial struggle and social isolation experienced by international students. Asahi’s article, titled “From Fukuoka / Japan That They Dreamed of: Unpaid Tuition, Internet Café / the Encounter of Three Suspects” (21 October 2003, p. 38), presented the financial struggles of international students as a backdrop to the Fukuoka murder case. In contrast with the Yomiuri editorials, this analytical report depicted one of the suspects as a model student who had maintained an almost perfect attendance record and good grades while working manual jobs to make ends meet. The article detailed the financial difficulties of the Fukuoka suspects, and indicated that economic challenges are a collective problem faced by international students in Japan.
“[We] targeted [the Matsumoto family] because they appeared to be rich.” It has been reported that, after the arrest by the Chinese Police in August, Wang and Yang admitted that the murder was for monetary gain. The impoverishment of the three suspects is evidenced by unpaid tuition. …. According to the research … the average income of international students is 136,000 yen (approximately US$1,700), including remittances from home. Most of them work at places like restaurants in order to “make ends meet.”
The article portrayed the Chinese-language internet café where the three suspects met as an affordable haven for students who suffered from poverty and social isolation in a foreign land. A 100-yen-per-hour internet café, according to a Japanese language school affiliate, may be “an accessible ‘Chinese society’” for Chinese students who wish to escape from “the loneliness of living in a foreign country and economic hardship.”
An Asahi opinion piece titled “International Students and Crime: Let Us Offer a Peaceful Place Where They Can Make Friends” (28 November 2003, p. 14) related the Fukuoka case to the problem of the social isolation of international students. Describing the Fukuoka case as a “heart wrenching” incident, the author of the article argued that the majority of Asian students, Chinese students in particular, were making extraordinary efforts to meet their academic goals while working long hours to support themselves.
While the Yomiuri and the Asahi focused on different aspects, both presented the Fukuoka family murder case in the context of larger social and political issues facing international students. Contextualized analysis has clear benefits, as it connects separate social events and allows readers to gain a deeper understanding of the event in relation to larger social structures. At the same time, however, when the media provide contextualized analysis, they also run the risk of overgeneralizing the causality of an event. By enlarging the framework of analysis, these articles portrayed the Fukuoka family murder case as more than just a criminal incident; it became an exemplary manifestation of international student criminality, i.e., a criminal propensity fostered by problematic social conditions – conditions shared by international students as a whole in Japan.
Conclusion
This paper analyzed the process of minority signification in reporting of the 2003 Fukuoka family murder. Careful examination of newspaper reports revealed two modes of minority signification. One is the signification of crime by a minority group through intuitive bridging, and the other is the signification of the criminality of a minority group via analytical bridging.
Minority signification is not necessarily a negative portrayal of a minority group. In the case of the Fukuoka family murder reporting, the Yomiuri articles were consistently punitive, but the Asahi presented a sympathetic view of the offenders and called for better institutional support for international students. Nevertheless, both newspapers’ coverage of the Fukuoka case resulted in emphasizing the criminal propensity of international students as a group by providing group-oriented analysis of the offense, and by repeatedly juxtaposing nationality, immigration status, and crime.
The group-oriented interpretation of the Fukuoka family murder case, i.e., the Fukuoka family murder case as a “crime by international students,” facilitated a group-targeted response – the collective punishment of international students, particularly students from China. Following the Fukuoka case, language schools in Japan faced massive complaints from residents who did not want students from abroad in their neighborhood. Furthermore, in the following admission season, the Immigration Control Bureau declined over 70 percent of student visa applications from China. While the media were not solely responsible for these responses, it is reasonable to suspect that the signification of international student status in the Fukuoka murder coverage may have contributed to the widespread group-oriented understanding of the case.
Over two decades ago, Protess and his colleagues revealed the complex and often ambivalent process of agenda-building in investigative reporting (Protess et al. 1991). Their case studies show that revealing “facts” is not sufficient to get news published. In order to win the support of editors, a piece has to have a good story as well as good information, a story with the “right” tone and angle, which fits a conceivable genre. Compelling villains, a shadow of grave peril, and threatened innocence make for a great story, thus understandable to the readership and making sellable news.
These elements of a “good story” are evident in narratives of the Fukuoka murder reporting. Beyond the three actual suspects, the Yomiuri assigned the role of villain to the problematic international students as a whole, and portrayed ineffective immigration control as a threatening problem to society. While such expansion of a story framework can be attributed to existing social groupings and stereotypes, information sources also have a large impact on news narratives. The framing of Yomiuri stories closely reflects the perspective of the Japanese police, who view loose immigration control as a criminal threat to Japanese society (Yamamoto 2010). The influence of the source could be particularly strong in Japan, where government officials have more power over the press by controlling membership to the press club, where they release official information to reporters, exclusively. 19
The media’s signification of nationality and immigration status may help explain the substantial gap between the minor presence of international students in Japan’s crime scene and their major presence in the Japanese criminological imagination. According to the White Paper on Crimes, non-Japanese offenders make up approximately 2 percent of all penal code offenders (Hōmushō Hōmusōgōkenkyūjo 2010). Nevertheless, crimes by migrants have become a major concern of the Japanese police, political leaders, and public debates during the past decade (Yamamoto 2010). The prominence of migrant descriptors such as nationality and immigration status in crime reports and nationality-oriented interpretations of crime in editorials may have exaggerated the presence of foreign criminals in the minds of the public, thus amplifying their concerns about crimes by this particular group.
This study focused on one case, i.e., the reporting of the Fukuoka family murder case in contemporary Japan. This research design allowed for detailed examination of how minority signification takes place in media representations, but made it difficult to examine the impact of contextual variables on this process. For instance, Japan has a relatively small proportion of racial and ethnic minorities. How similar, or different, would this process be in a more diverse society, such as the United States, where recent immigrants are larger in number and have more political influence? Furthermore, Japan currently does not have enforceable anti-discrimination laws that would explicitly prohibit symbolic discrimination in the media. While lawsuits against the media are not uncommon in Japan, charges are typically based on the damage of personal reputation (meiyo kison), instead of discrimination against a particular social group. Would a law that regulates racial or nationalized descriptions of offenders curtail minority signification in the media, or would it only result in more indirect representations of minority groups? Further research is necessary in order to address how demographic and institutional factors influence minority signification in the media. Comparative research of media representations of minority crime in different social settings would be suitable to examine interactions between the symbolic and structural marginalization of minority groups (Benford and Hunt 2003; Brekhus 1998; Cohen 1972; ; Hunt et al. 1994; Pharr and Krauss 1996).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to express her appreciation to Jane H. Yamashiro, Joel Best, and an anonymous reviewer for their feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript. She also thanks the University of Hawai’i Center of Japanese Studies, Misawa-Honjō International Fellowship and Waseda University for their generous support of this project.
Funding
This research was supported by the Center For Japanese Studies Graduate Fellowship and Misawa - Honjo International Fellowship at the University of Hawai’i - Ma-noa.