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Paper short abstract

Japan is an astonishingly safe society. What is conspicuous, however, is how the proportion of arrestees aged over-65 has grown fourfold since the year 2000. I offer an account of the factors behind this Japanese elderly crime boom.

Paper long abstract

Japan is in the grip of an elderly crime surge. It is not the case that Japanese crime in general is on the rise. On the

contrary, Japan remains, as it has historically been, a remarkably law-abiding society, with a steady decline even being

observable, unlike in most other developed nations, of overall criminality. What stands to be noted against this

background trend, however, is how a rapidly growing percentage of crimes is carried out by over-65s. So pronounced

has this elderly crime wave become that in 2020, when the proportion of senior arrestees reached a record high of

one in every five, a series of articles appeared in domestic and foreign media suggesting that the Japanese elderly,

finding themselves poor, lonely and isolated, purposefully commit crimes so that they can enter the prison estate and

become beneficiaries of care and community there. With a view to aiding Japanese policy-makers in formulating

policies that would alleviate the burden now undeniably mounting on prisons from this ever-growing population of

people needing extra care, I offer to fill the gap in the academic literature on this issue and empirically and

comprehensively investigate the factors behind the elderly crime boom.