Japan’s Spate of Unusual Crimes Leaves Police at Loss for Answers

TOKYO — It has been an extraordinarily busy few days for Japanese police, who are investigating a series of unusual crimes that have further chipped away at this nation’s image as a relative sanctuary from violence.

A bomb filled with nails exploded Saturday in a park in Sapporo on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. The blast injured 10 people at a festival, including a teenager who was critically wounded by a nail that pierced his chest.

A jewelry store in Utsunomiya, about 60 miles north of Tokyo, was set ablaze Sunday. Six employees were killed.

A parcel delivered to a Tokyo law office exploded Monday, injuring a secretary and her boss, an attorney who serves as vice chairman of an anti-violence committee of Japan’s bar association.

And envelopes containing small amounts of radioactive material, later determined to be unharmful, were mailed to Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori and several government agencies, accompanied by letters requesting an investigation into alleged sales of uranium to North Korea.

The nature of the crimes has left police and social experts bewildered.

“I’ve never heard of radioactive stuff being mailed to anyone or a bomb in the park,” a National Police Agency spokesman said.

He noted that Japan’s best-known crimes--the Aum Supreme Truth sect’s 1995 sarin-gas attack in a Tokyo subway, which killed 11 people and injured more than 5,500, and the left-wing Red Army’s 1974 bombing of a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries office building, which killed eight and wounded 165--had “clear political agendas.”

Arson cases are few and far between here. In the seven years that police have kept statistics, there have been eight incidents involving fatalities; the worst was last year, when seven people died in a blaze at a mah-jongg shop.

Some social experts blamed Japan’s repressed society and jealousy for the current spate of crimes.

“In a nutshell, people are irritated,” said social commentator Ryoko Ozawa, who often appears on Japanese television news programs. “We used to attach more importance to our social obligations than to our own rights, but now the social values have changed and we have lost our virtue. People tend to claim their own rights instead of performing their obligations.”

Takahiko Furuta, director of Aomori University’s Institute of Modern Social Studies, speculated that a jealous young person may have planted the bomb in a garbage collection area at Saturday’s Yosakoi (Please Come Over) festival that a group of students started a decade ago.

A clearer motive--robbery--was cited in the jewelry store arson. Police arrested a 49-year-old suspect whose noodle shop reportedly had failed, and said more than $1 million in merchandise was taken.

No suspects had been arrested in the other cases.

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Makiko Inoue of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.