A week before Halloween, officers from the Miyagi Prefectural Police stopped four high school students near JR Sendai Station on their way home. The boys were in different schools and different years. Asked why they were together, they said they had no particular reason.
The officers were juvenile development officers — police staff who approach minors on the street to keep them out of trouble. If they find drinking, smoking or other misbehavior, they contact the parents. No one was taken into guidance during that patrol.
Across the prefecture, police had taken 2,500 minors into guidance by the end of September, 190 more than in the same period last year. The breakdown is 1,319 picked up for wandering late at night, 457 for smoking and 186 for unhealthy amusement. Police attribute part of the rise to the spread of social media.
Not about catching children
Yoko Hasegawa, a juvenile development instructor at the prefectural police headquarters' juvenile division, said the purpose of street patrols is often misunderstood. "People strongly imagine that street guidance means catching children who are smoking or drinking, but that is not actually the case," she said. "The purpose is to find children with various problems early and connect them to appropriate measures."
Officers build trust through repeated conversation and try to nip delinquency in the bud, she said. That is why they walk the streets.
Cannabis at 13, then a place to belong
About 50 boys sent to the Tohoku Juvenile Training School in Sendai's Wakabayashi Ward by family court order are receiving correctional education aimed at returning them to society. One of them, held on suspicion of extortion and sent to the school for a second time, agreed to an interview. He had previously been arrested as a receiver in a special fraud scheme and had already left the school once.
“I first smoked cannabis in the first year of junior high, and through that I made connections with organized crime figures to buy drugs. The older guys I looked up to were doing it, and I thought not doing it myself would be uncool.”a boy held on suspicion of extortion
He could not break away from drugs, including stimulants and cocaine. "Using made me very short-tempered, and I would hit people or take their money over small things," he said. "I am sorry to the victims, but honestly I don't even remember what I did."
What drew him to drugs in the first place, he said, was a place to belong. He lost his friends in the first year of junior high and fell in with a delinquent group. "When I did something bad they praised me and said I was amazing, so I kept drifting toward them," he said. "It was more family than my family."
Groups that form on social media
Kohei Yamazaki, a juvenile case instructor at the prefectural police headquarters' juvenile division, said a comfortable school or neighborhood keeps a child grounded. "If a child has no place to belong, they find one in a delinquent group connected through social media," he said.
Groups formed online are loosely connected, Yamazaki said, and members slide into delinquency from the mood of the moment or from bad jokes. "Depending on the case it leads to serious crimes such as assault or robbery," he said.
Minors have been arrested in a series of cases in the prefecture this year. In one robbery resulting in injury, at a parking lot near Sendai Station, social media was what connected the arrested boys to the man they attacked. On October 22, three boys aged 16 and 17 were arrested on suspicion of assaulting a man in his teens, injuring him and taking 1,000 yen in cash. The case began when one of the boys posed as someone else online to contact the victim.
Police handled 397 minors in the prefecture under the criminal code in the last year, including children below the age of criminal responsibility. That is down to 20 percent of the figure 20 years ago. The number fell to 190 in 2022, during the coronavirus pandemic, and has been rising since, with the spread of social media seen as a factor.