Bad Foreigners

A couple of weeks ago in Hiroshima, seven-year-old Airi Kinoshita was abducted and murdered on her way home alone from school. A few days ago, a Peruvian national, Juan Carlos Pizzaro Yagi, was arrested for the crime. Predictably, much has been made of the fact that this man is a foreigner. The TV news magazine News Station went on about his inability to speak Japanese well. I'm sorry, but do people here actually believe that language skills are associated with psycho behavior? One of the mothers at my daughter's school had much to say about the creepy Filipino who hangs out at a park near her house. (Or maybe he is actually Japanese; she's not quite sure.) And the government has set up a task force to deal with the problem of letting foreigners who might commit crimes into the country. Sure, it might have been helpful to know that this Pizzaro guy had served time in a Peruvian prison for child molestation before issuing his visa, but most of the heinous crimes in Japan are committed by Japanese. I'm willing to bet that another seven-year-old girl who disappeared on her way home alone from school whose body was just recovered in Ibaraki, was killed by one of her fellow countrymen. Maybe we should accept that there are perverts of all nationalities in the world and reconsider the wisdom of letting small children walk the one or two kilometers home alone from school.