Fiona described Japan as a poor example of low crime and liberal attitudes to porn and violence in the cartoons there. Having had a few friends over in Japan including my old boss on a rather long business trip I would have to agree about it being a poor example. My old boss found circumstances rather unusual over there and was quite critical of Japanese society. Despite it's low crime tag, he said crime was quite rife over there. It's just not reported and often is white collar crime or japanese mafia type stuff. Women appear to be less respected than their male counterparts. My boss was offered a woman for the night as a "gift" of the company he visited, whether she was an employee or a prostitute on the books was hard to say.(that would still make her an employee I spose.) Nevertheless it was a bit of a shock compared to the usual pleasantries exchanged in a business deal. By the same token, pack rape is quite common and I understand women over there often have great difficulty getting sex attacks investigated by the police. In a documnetary I saw on Japanese society similar things with regards to women being sexually assaulted frequently, on packed tokyo commuter trains. You often hear about the order of the japanese, but my boss found it amusing to see nuclear powerplants or other industrial plants in the middle of residential areas. there was no organised town planning. I was tempted to go and teach english there...but the UK may be the go yet. No offence to Japanese people in general of course.

So, the point is, often the tags are not deserved. My pad, NZ is portrayed as low crime and a clean and green place. Yet, we have some of the worlds greatest methane ouputs, due to all the farm animals and the lush green grass. except at the moment, there's a drought in the country, it's beginning to look like australia. Crime is certainly here, and tourists often get attacked unfortunately by psychopathic predators who seem to be prevalent here. I'm in firm belief that a lot of trouble has been added to the mix as a result of deinstitutionalisation. Like the UK and the USA before them, somebody thought it would be a good idea to release psychiatric patients into the community, 'cause it wasn't nice to keep them locked up. So now, if the patients aren't being preyed on themselves by oportunists who take advantage of the vulnerable ones, the seriously unstable ones are a danger to the public. Only recently a guy who chopped off his girlfriends head and stuck it in the clothes dryer in a plastic bag was given a weekend pass to see his mother. How nice. Only he went and lay on the tracks at the local railway station, unfortunately/fortunately he didn't get killed. Naturally the police were impressed because it was only 18mnths since his arrest and a psychiatrist said he was showing no signs of anti-social behaviour and was perfectly okay to be out...or words to that effect. I wonder what methods the federation would have used to "treat" psychiatric illness? to bring it back to a B7 applicable lyst topic. Nathan.

A 'strange coincidence', to use a phrase/ By which such things are settled nowadays. Byron.

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