Maybe being
number 7 on the list is a little disappointing, but on looking carefully it seems that Japan has actually got safer compared to last year when it was number 4, however other countries have got even safer and overtaken it.
The numbers appear to be largely made-up anyway, including things like public perception of crime (
not actual crime) which probably has more to do with media attitudes than reality. Perhaps the funniest is the military assessment. The UK, being recently/currently engaged in a number of wars (ie travelling around the world and killing people, probably in breach of international law in at least one case) gets a fairly high score of 4 out of 5 for its "military capability". Whereas Japan has its laughable "self defence force" that first wouldn't go to Iraq because it was too dangerous for them, and then had to be defended by the Dutch when they did dare to go (and rumour has it they also paid large sums to local militia as bribes to avoid coming under attack). For this rather pathetic display of military prowess they get a maximum score of 5!?!?!
Of course there has been some unpleasant rhetoric here, such as moves to renounce the pacifist constitution and allow first-strike attacks on foreign countries "
when an attack is certain" (like Pearl Harbor, for example). But that's hardly
military capability, and takes place against a background of North Korea "testing rockets" in the general direction of Japan. Surely it doesn't compares to the UK and USA actually bombing random people.
I'm surprised by the "respect for human rights" where Japan supposedly outscores the UK, as I didn't think Japan really believed in the concept. A Japanese govt minister is recently on record as saying that they didn't want to go down the Western route of allowing too many human rights or they would get "
human rights metabolic syndrome" (contrary to that newspaper article, the speech did not cause any great shocks here, it was just business as usual). Off the top of my head, Japan has no general laws against racial discrimination and refuses to enforce
CERD despite pretending to sign up to it over a decade ago, it is renowned as a haven for child kidnappers and refuses to adopt the Hague Convention on child abduction, the courts have a conviction rate generally reported as about 98% or more relying largely on forced confessions extracted over 23 days in custody with negligible legal rights, it accepts orders of magnitude fewer refugees than comparably rich nations...the list of human rights transgressions is a long and inglorious one. I would never pretend the UK is perfect, but it's really hard to fathom how it could rate worse than Japan on any rational assessment of this factor.
