The Paradox of Perception
Four out of five Japanese citizens believe public safety in their country has deteriorated significantly over the past ten years, according to a National Police Agency survey released in early 2025. The poll found that 79.7% of respondents felt safety had worsened or somewhat worsened since 2015, marking a 3.1 percentage point increase from the previous year and continuing an upward trend in public anxiety that began when the question was first introduced in 2021.
Yet the same survey revealed a striking contradiction. When asked about current conditions, 60.3% of the 5,000 respondents aged 15 and older said they believed public safety in Japan remains good, a 3.9 point improvement from the previous year. This paradox, where citizens express relative satisfaction with present safety while believing the long-term trajectory is negative, reflects a nation grappling with evolving criminal threats that feel increasingly invasive despite historically low violent crime rates.
The survey, conducted online in October 2024, suggests that Japanese citizens are not reacting primarily to street violence or physical danger, but rather to an invisible siege of digital fraud, data breaches, and sophisticated scams that have colonized smartphones and home telephones. The divergence between statistical reality and public sentiment has puzzled sociologists and law enforcement officials alike, as media coverage of high-profile cases creates an availability heuristic where vivid reports of financial ruin make catastrophic outcomes feel more probable than statistical likelihoods would suggest. Older respondents particularly cited anxiety about telephone fraud targeting retirement savings, while younger participants expressed concern about social media exploitation and identity theft.
The Fraud Epidemic Driving Fear
When asked to explain their pessimism about the decade-long safety trend, respondents overwhelmingly pointed to two phenomena: the proliferation of ore ore fraud schemes and unauthorized access to personal data. These concerns align with record-breaking financial damage from scams in 2025, which reached 324.1 billion yen ($2.12 billion) in losses, a 1.6-fold increase from the previous year and a staggering 3.6-fold surge over three years.
Ore ore fraud, named after the Japanese phrase for “it is me,” involves perpetrators calling elderly victims while impersonating relatives in distress, often claiming urgent need for cash to resolve fabricated legal or medical emergencies. In 2025 alone, special fraud cases, including ore ore variants and impersonation of government officials, generated 141.4 billion yen in losses across 27,758 reported incidents, double the figure from 2024.
The criminal landscape has expanded dramatically beyond traditional telephone scams. Social media investment fraud, in which con artists impersonate celebrities or financial experts to lure victims into fake trading platforms, cost Japanese citizens 127.4 billion yen in 2025, with average losses per case reaching 13.42 million yen. Instagram served as the entry point for most of these scams, though YouTube saw a 21-fold increase in related fraud cases.
Romance scams, wherein perpetrators feign romantic interest to extract money, accounted for another 55.2 billion yen in losses. Approximately 76% of romance scam victims were between their 40s and 60s, with perpetrators increasingly pressuring targets to transfer cryptocurrency rather than traditional currency, complicating recovery efforts. NPA Commissioner General Yoshinobu Kusunoki described the situation as “extremely critical” at a February news conference, stressing the need for strengthened crackdowns on the criminal groups behind these scams.
The crime situation is in a severe state. We will continue to closely monitor whether the situation is at a turning point.
This statement from the National Police Agency reflects official recognition that Japan faces not merely a spike in isolated incidents, but a fundamental transformation in how criminals operate and exploit social trust.
The Rise of Anonymous Criminal Networks
Behind these statistics lies the emergence of tokuryu groups, anonymous and fluid criminal organizations that have largely replaced traditional yakuza syndicates as the primary drivers of organized fraud and robbery in Japan. Unlike hierarchical criminal families with established territories, tokuryu members connect through social media platforms to form temporary cells for specific operations, then dissolve and reconfigure, making them exceptionally difficult for conventional police surveillance to penetrate.
These groups have become the primary architects of special fraud operations, recruiting individuals through online job postings that promise easy income for “simple office work,” then coercing them into serving as money mules or direct perpetrators. The anonymity of these networks allows them to scale operations rapidly; when one cell is arrested, the organizers simply activate new recruits through encrypted messaging applications.
In response, Japanese police launched specialized anti-tokuryu teams in October 2025, designed to transcend organizational boundaries between different police departments and concentrate investigative resources on identifying core members. The teams focus on analyzing communication patterns and financial flows to map these amorphous organizations, which traditional intelligence gathering struggles to visualize.
The tokuryu phenomenon represents a broader dissolution of structured criminal hierarchies in favor of gig economy style illegality, where participants may never meet their coordinators and often operate without full awareness of the criminal scope until they are already compromised.
Beyond Screens: Physical Crime and Emerging Risks
While fraud dominates public consciousness, the deterioration of safety sentiment also reflects measurable increases in physical crimes. Japan recorded 774,142 penal code offenses in 2025, marking the fourth consecutive year of increases and surpassing levels seen before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019. Thefts, comprising nearly 70% of all offenses, rose 2.5%, with shoplifting of food items increasing 7% to 105,135 cases, driven partly by economic hardship cited in approximately 40% of fraud cases.
More troubling for public psychology are increases in heinous crimes and sexual offenses. Non-consensual sexual intercourse reports surged 6.1%, while violations of laws against surreptitious photography climbed 18.1%. These increases partly reflect legal reforms implemented in July 2023 that clarified definitions of consent and illegal voyeurism, alongside expanded victim support services that encourage reporting. However, the raw numbers indicate genuine behavioral trends rather than purely statistical artifacts.
Street crimes, including bag snatching and bicycle theft, increased 4.6% to 255,247 cases, with bicycle thefts specifically rising 6.0%. These quotidian offenses, while rarely life-threatening, erode the sense of communal safety that Japanese urban life has traditionally maintained, where residents could leave bicycles unlocked or walk late at night with minimal concern.
Traffic safety has emerged as an additional concern affecting public security perceptions. Accidents involving foreign drivers surged 30% over five years, reaching 7,286 incidents in 2024, including 54 fatal accidents. With foreign resident license holders reaching a record 1.25 million and the government expanding visa programs to include transport workers, the National Police Agency has prioritized traffic safety education for international drivers, acknowledging that cultural differences in driving etiquette and license conversion procedures may contribute to risks.
Online gambling represents another frontier of cybercrime concern. The NPA estimates 3.37 million Japanese have visited online casinos, with annual bets totaling approximately 1.2 trillion yen. With revised gambling addiction laws taking effect in September 2025, police plan to request removal of casino sites targeting Japanese users and crack down on advertising, recognizing that these platforms often serve as gateways to organized fraud and financial exploitation.
Internal Challenges for Police
Public confidence in safety institutions faces additional strain from internal crises within the National Police Agency itself. Disciplinary actions against police personnel hit a ten-year high in 2025, with 337 officers and staff facing sanctions, an increase of 98 from the previous year. The violations ranged from corruption and information leaks to tokuryu groups, to incompetence and criminal behavior including shoplifting and sexual assault by officers themselves.
In December 2025, an assistant inspector in Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department was indicted for allegedly sharing surveillance camera locations with a tokuryu group involved in illegal sex work arrangements. This case highlighted the vulnerability of police organizations to infiltration by sophisticated criminal networks that operate through financial inducement rather than traditional intimidation.
Other incidents throughout the year reinforced concerns about organizational dysfunction. In Hyogo Prefecture, 50 officers were disciplined for drinking and gambling while on duty. A crime laboratory technician in Saga Prefecture was found to have falsified DNA analysis reports. In Kanagawa Prefecture, a woman was murdered after officers dismissed her stalking concerns. A Tokyo police investigation into a chemical machinery company collapsed after wrongful charges, resulting in a 166 million yen damages order against the police.
Recruitment challenges compound these discipline issues. Japan’s worsening labor shortage has reduced the quality of police applicants, according to Shinichi Ishizuka, founder of the Criminal Justice Future think tank and former police academy instructor. Young professionals with marketable skills increasingly choose private sector employment over policing, leaving departments to select from diminished applicant pools where disciplinary risks may be elevated.
The erosion of unquestioned police authority in Japanese society, while democratically healthy, has created an environment where officers face greater public challenge and scrutiny, reducing their operational flexibility while demanding higher standards of conduct.
Local Solutions: The Adachi Ward Model
Against this backdrop of national anxiety, one Tokyo municipality offers a counter-narrative of effective crime reduction. Adachi Ward, which suffered the highest crime rates among Tokyo’s 23 special wards from 2006 through 2009, implemented the Beautiful Windows Movement in 2008, combining broken windows theory policing with community beautification and environmental design.
The initiative, influenced by New York City’s crime reduction strategies but adapted for Japanese community structures, focused on preventing minor crimes like bicycle theft while literally making the ward more beautiful through flower planting and public space maintenance. Rather than aggressive ticketing for minor violations, Adachi Ward stressed crime prevention through environmental design, installing 670 publicly managed CCTV cameras and subsidizing 1,160 additional cameras installed by neighborhood associations.
Between 2007 and 2019, recorded crimes in Adachi Ward fell by 62.6%, the largest decrease in Tokyo, while residents’ sense of security improved from a majority feeling unsafe to over 58% feeling secure by 2019. Bicycle thefts, which had comprised one-third of local crimes, dropped 54.8%, directly contributing to the statistical improvement and perceptual change.
The program succeeded by mobilizing existing Japanese social institutions, particularly neighborhood associations, which traditionally organize community cleaning and festivals. The Streets with Flowers Project, introduced in 2013, encouraged residents to place labeled flowerpots in front of homes, strengthening territoriality while creating natural surveillance opportunities when residents watered plants as school children passed by. By certifying “crime prevention promotion neighborhoods” that established community charters and organizing volunteer patrols with blue-light vehicles, Adachi Ward created social capital that deterred crime through informal surveillance and community cohesion rather than purely technological monitoring.
Adachi’s transformation from Tokyo’s most crime-ridden ward to a middle-ranking district demonstrates that local safety deterioration can be reversed through coordinated municipal action, even as national trends move in opposite directions.
The Bottom Line
- Nearly 80% of Japanese citizens believe public safety has worsened over the past decade, citing fraud and cybercrime as primary concerns, while 60% still rate current safety as good.
- Financial losses from fraud reached record levels of 324.1 billion yen in 2025, driven by special fraud, social media investment scams, and romance scams perpetrated by anonymous tokuryu criminal groups.
- Overall crime rose for the fourth consecutive year to 774,142 cases in 2025, surpassing pre-pandemic levels with increases in theft, sexual offenses, and violent crime.
- Police face internal credibility challenges with discipline cases hitting ten-year highs, including corruption involving tokuryu groups and recruitment difficulties amid labor shortages.
- Local initiatives like Adachi Ward’s Beautiful Windows Movement demonstrate that community-based crime prevention combining environmental design and volunteer mobilization can reverse safety deterioration.
