Desistance in Japan: culture and context

This research is an exploratory study of desistance in Japan, looking to understand the phenomenon through examination of cultural factors in an environment far removed from the Western basis of much work done in the field. The thesis is a contribution to an emerging sub-field of desistance that seeks to understand how context changes and affects the process of moving away from criminal behaviour. The content of the thesis illustrates the careful steps needed for effective cross-cultural examination in an environment with little existing research. The exploratory research required a methodology that reflected the need to cultivate environmental and context sensitivity in order to accurately observe and analyse desistance. Thus, this work provides the findings from a 15-month period of ethnographic lived experience in Japan, during which ethnographic participation and observation took place, alongside 50 interviews with academics, experts, probation officers, voluntary probation officers, volunteers at charities, peer-supporting former offenders, and active desisters. This ‘macro-to-micro’ approach provided multiple perspectives. Through a focused analysis of specific desistance environments, the work relays how various factors in Japanese society overlap in the creation of highly personal desistance processes. The work provides insight into one support centre for adults run by former offenders and volunteers, alongside the desistance narratives of a peer-support network of former youth offenders. Through this, it is possible to identify how specific cultural factors influence not just the desisters themselves, but also the social dynamics around desistance. This research concludes that the cumulative features of Japanese culture enable and influence desistance, indicating that national context is important in facilitating specific sub-national, local and sub-cultural conditions with which the desister interacts. However, there are also cross-national and potentially universal features of desistance, as seen in the previous literature, that stem from desistance being a navigation of social (and therefore cultural) dysfunction.