Text Box: David Potter Nanzan University and Stephen C. Richards Northern Kentucky University We read with interest Noriyoshi Takemura's assessment of the state of critical criminology in Japan in the Spring 2000 issue of The Critical Criminologist. Its inclusion with the follow-up to Bruce Arrigo's article and Gregg Barak's report on his cross-national research was timely. It also prompted us to comment on what we see as issues that the three articles collectively suggest. CONSERVATIVE CRIMINOLOGY Takemura notes that Japanese criminology largely consists of theory and methodological approaches adopted from translations of Western, particularly American, academic sources. Many American theories do not necessarily fit the Japanese context and may only support conservative criminology, criminal justice ideology, and state sponsored criminal justice agendas in Japan. In particular, it reinforces a mainstream criminological paradigm of Japan as a crime-free country, one with a homogeneous, cooperative culture with a relatively low crime rate. The criminal justice system is characterized as a continuum of benevolent bureaucracies, well integrated with community norms, with little corruption or official violence, as illustrated by the myth that the police force enforces the law effectively and with a minimum of coercion. The use of western quantitative methods, in conjuncture with the closed nature of criminological research, in which official statistical data are only available to scholars at large universities conducting government sanctioned studies and from which critical scholars are excluded, also contributes to the conservative limitations of Japanese criminology. Moreover, critical scholars do not find outlets for their research. On these two points, we would suggest that the situation in Japan is rather like that of the United States: the discussion in "Critical Criminology and the Mainstream: Issues of Publishing Critical Scholarship" raises a number of similar points. NEAR SCHOLARS Another problem with Japanese criminology raised by the Takemura article, also evident in American universities, is the employment of "near scholars," former government workers who retire from criminal justice agencies to take academic positions. In the USA, we have academics who are former police officers or prison administrators writing textbooks and conducting research funded by government agencies. We also have numerous criminal justice practitioners employed as temporary faculty teaching courses in law enforcement, criminology, and corrections at many universities. The result is a "colonization" by Text Box: criminal justice professionals of criminology and criminal justice departments. This is particularly true of many community colleges and four year universities that employ part-time adjuncts teaching law enforcement and criminal justice courses in "bargain basement cop shop" departments. Conversely, some research universities that demand faculty pursue external grants create "ivory tower cop shops." AMERICAN HEGEMONY One result of the transmittal, more or less directly, of American theory and research agenda to countries like Japan (this is as much the case in political science or sociology as it is in criminology) is that scholars in the United States risk becoming victims of our own hegemony. We get back the images of Japan outlined above that are driven by our own mainstream research agenda (e.g., Ames, 1981; Castberg, 1990; Johnson, 1996). Much of the research on Japan by American scholars, exclusively in English, uses the United States as either an explicit or implicit comparative case. For example, Bayley's "Heaven for a Cop" (chapter title in Forces of Order , 1976; see also, Baley, 1994) is as much narrative about the problems of American law enforcement as about whether Japanese policing provides a better alternative model. The standard comparison is especially clear in the work by criminal justice practitioners (Parker, 1984; Westerman and Burfield, 1991; Thorton and Endo, 1992). This is not to say that mainstream scholarship are uncritically positive about the Japanese criminal justice system. Important criminological works consider issues outside of the official perspective (Ames, 1981; Miyazawa, 1992), as do those by activists and critical scholars outside of criminology (Herzog, 1992; Human Rights Watch, 1995). Political scientists have also considered the relationship between criminal justice agencies and the coercive power of the state (Apter, 1984; Katzenstein and Tsujinaka, 1991) or the relationship between politics and crime (Potter, 1997; Knepper and Potter, 1998; Potter, 2000), but these do not take an explicitly critical criminological approach to the problem. DEVELOPING CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY IN JAPAN What can be done to develop critical criminology in Japan? First, we encourage Japanese critical criminologists to carefully consider Takemura's suggestions. Second, if access to official criminal justice statistical data is unavailable to scholars not affiliated with government agencies, the alternative then is to create your own. Quantitative data can be generated by closely examining government publications and newspapers articles. While these secondary sources leave much to be desire, and the statistics may be incomplete and difficult to verify, the numbers can be used to compare past and present, and to suggest trends. Third, we suggest it is important to think beyond numbers by penetrating the labyrinth of courts, jails, and prisons, to observe and interview criminal justice workers, defendants, and especially prisoners. Japanese criminologists need to develop Text Box: Exporting Crit Crim Across National Boundaries: More Thoughts About Japan & Beyond