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Um... yes we do read the news (I have 4 news wires devoted to Japan alone on my google page). This story is several months old.
Japan is still one of the safest countries in the world. However, the newspapers like to focus on the lurid and the few crimes of violence they do have seem to be overly lurid. They also tend to repeat the same story multiple times with variation making it seem as though more is happening.
And since its a very small country packed with people all closely related that tends to amplify their anxiety when someone goes mentally haywire.
When I used to live in Houston, the number of murders per week in that city exceeded the number of murders per YEAR in the entire country of Japan (and Houston only had six million in the area as opposed to Japan's 90-something million at the time). The same was true for property crime and other 'non-violent' acts. It might be instructive to compare the rate of various crimes in California to Japan ( similiar number of people).
News headlines can be deceiving, Do some research on the actual stats. yeah people are people... but not exactly. It depends on the amount of individual investment in community.
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