On July 22, The Japan Times ran an article with the headline, "Crime set to hit postwar low this year, first-half data shows." In it, the National Police Agency reported that the number of criminal offenses is on track to fall below 1 million for the first time since World War II ended, down from the all-time high of 2,853,739 cases in 2002. Crimes in the January-June period are down by 9.3 percent compared with the same period last year, with only "intellectual" crimes such as fraud and card forgery increasing, by 5.1 percent.

The public had less than a week to absorb this felicitous news, and then came the first reports of the shocking slayings of 19 residents by a former worker at a care facility for people with disabilities in Sagamihara, near Tokyo. It is one of Japan's worst mass murders in modern times. (The 1938 murder of 30 people by a 21-year-old man in Okayama Prefecture remains the worst.)

While no single Japanese magazine dominates crime coverage, one that's long stood out for its incisive reporting is Shincho 45, a monthly published by Shincho-sha. Shincho 45's August issue contains an article by award-winning journalist Kiyoshi Shimizu titled, "Listen, you criminal" — words aimed at the man who abducted Yukari Yokohama, then age 4, from a pachinko parlor in Ota, Gunma Prefecture, in July 1996.