Public Safety
Japan is known as a “safe country” among the foreigners visiting Japan. For example, foreigners are surprised that “even if you lose something, it will come back to you most of the time”, or “it is safe for young woman to walk alone at night”, and “people sleep in the train without any caution”, leading them to highly praise Japan as “the safest country in the world” compared to their own country. Additionally, looting or riots do not take place at disaster-affected area stores even at wide-scale disasters such as the Great East Japan Earthquake. Overseas media showed scenes of disaster victims waiting in a line to receive their relief supplies.
Safeness Ranking of Cities
Tokyo ranked 1st place followed by Osaka in 3rd place for “Safe Cities Index” announced by “The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)”,the research and analysis division of UK Economist Group. The report covers 60 global cities and includes 57 indicators in 4 categories of “Health Security”, “Digital Security”, “Infrastructure Security”, and “Personal Security”. Tokyo has ranked 1st place for three consecutive years from 2015 to 2017.
EIU “Safe Cities Index”
Robbery / Murder Rate
Of the criminal cases in developed countries as of 2016, Japan has a significantly lower incidence number in all murder rate, robbery incident rate, and theft incident rate when comparing number of incidents per 100,000 population to United States of America, Germany, United Kingdom, and France, four other developed countries.
Ministry of Justice “2019 Crime Report”
Global Peace Index
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) announces the “Global Peace Index” which ranks countries according to their level of peacefulness. Countries are ranked after comprehensively evaluating both internal indicators and external indicators. Internal indicators are those such as crime, number of deaths from internal organized conflict, internal conflict situation, ease of access to weapons, political terror, likelihood of violent demonstrations, and number of suicides. External indicators are such as relations with neighboring countries, nuclear and heavy weapons capability, number of deaths from external organized conflict, and number of refugees and displaced persons as percentage of population. Japan is ranked 9th in 2020 ranking.
OCHA “Global Peace Index 2020”
