As much as pre-WWII Japanese imperial aggressiveness needed to be curbed, one secretly regrets its absence when reading such posts as this. I’m reminded of the Clavell novel “Shogun”, when behavior such as this was met with rather summary justice.

If an aggressive “foreigner” who punched out a polite store clerk was caught red-handed with millions of dollars of purloined jewelry — immediate beheading with a samurai sword would go far towards curing this particular brand of over-testosteroned “cojones”, don’t you think? If criminals want to go for the big bucks I think they should be forced to gamble their life for it.

One secretly longs for this, before the Japanese society goes further down our American road of indulgence of crime and criminals.

OK, enough wishing. Cue the mandatory hand-wringing over the underlying social causes of crime. Maybe the foreigner was merely upset about current Japanese support for US “imperialist” policy and was just doing his part to smash the “war machine”, blah blah blah…