That would certainly seem the null hypothesis. But how do you separate culture and government? Our culture would never tolerate the Japanese criminal justice system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Japan) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_Japa...).

From the first page: "In 1989 Japan experienced 1.3 robberies per 100,000 population, compared with 48.6 for West Germany, 65.8 for Great Britain, and 233.0 for the United States." There's that two orders of magnitude again.

Suppose crime in America has halved since 1989. (It hasn't.) From the Japanese perspective, wouldn't a writer still seem a little odd in exulting over the conquest of crime? When there are still two orders of magnitude more robberies?