couversaka comments

Bangladesh seems too poor and incompetent to do much of anything. The best option for foreigners is to avoid the place completely. Don't visit, don't invest, don't buy their products. If they want to hack their foreign guests to pieces, then so be it. They've chosen their course, and we should act accordingly.

Other reports say that many of the 20 dead hostages were hacked to death with machetes. They weren't even given the brutal dignity of a quick death via gunfire.

Isn't this the second attack on Japanese citizens in Bangladesh in under a year? As I recall, a Japanese man was gunned down in Bangladesh back in October, too.

For whatever reason, Bangladeshis appear to hate the Japanese. Very sad.

Trinidad has an extremely high murder rate. That country needs to pull itself together, for its own sake as well as the safety of visitors.

Well interestingly enough, the 10 deadliest school massacres/shootings in modern times were ALL perpetrated by self-proclaimed "Islamic" militants. From Beslan to Peshawar to Iraq to Kenya to Syria to several incidents in Nigeria. Every last one. Other "secular" school massacres don't show up until a ways further down the list.

And the Oregon individual apparently described himself as "biracial" rather than "white."

It's hard to ascribe much rationality to Islamic fanatics. Boko Haram actually killed several North Korean medical volunteers during a raid in northern Nigeria a few years ago. Not because of North Korean policy, but because they just wanted to kill anyone who looked like an outsider. The same is probably true in Bangladesh. They don't see "Japanese;" they see "East Asian," and that's enough to trigger their violent tendencies.

The Koda Shosei case took place in 2004, during the Koizumi administration. The Saito Akihiko case was the following year, in 2005. Both were carried out in Iraq.

Shame on Bangladesh. Japan has contributed billions of Yen in development aid and sent thousands of experts on everything from water purification to high-yield agriculture to help the Bangladeshi people over the past few decades.

And THIS is how Bangladeshis thank the Japanese?

Ingrates. Cut off the aid and tell any remaining Japanese in that nation to come home. They obviously aren't wanted over there.

Good. I would add that no one from a nation with a murder rate higher than that of Japan has any firm basis upon which to condemn Japan's approach to criminal justice. Accomplish what Japan has accomplished in terms of public safety, and then perhaps your critiques will be meaningful. But before then...

It is odd how conservatives in the US traditionally used to be associated with nationalism and national pride, and now they are tripping all over themselves to outsource their nation's interests to a foreign country - and furthermore, condemn those who are wary of doing so!

Japanese tourists keep getting murdered in the Islamic world - Syria, Iraq, Yemen, now Tunisia. And others have been taken captive in other Islamic nations and ransomed. At a certain point, you have to accept the fact that the Islamic world doesn't like you very much.

Englanders should be ashamed of themselves for producing murderers such as the "star" of this video. What the heck is wrong with your country and its educational/social systems when your people are turning toward ISLAMIC EXTREMISM of all things? Pull it together, England. Shame on you.

The Philippines murder rate is EXTREMELY high by East Asian standards, about 25 (yes, twenty-five) times higher than Japan's murder rate. Law enforcement and investigational standards tend to be extremely low, as can be seen in everything from the country's constant jail escapes to incidents like the Hong Kong bus massacre.

It is best to avoid that place entirely until the Philippine people choose to get their act together.

Oh, sure, the coins are "gone"... into the guy's secret accounts! Come on. How dumb does he think we are?

This is what happens when law-abiding citizens are forbidden from protecting their own lives with firearms. Had she been armed, it's very possible the assailant would be the only dead one in this sad story.

Romanian people seem to hate the Japanese for some reason. A young Japanese tourist was also brutally raped and murdered by a Romanian man in Romania itself in 2012.

The only types of firearms which a Japanese citizen may acquire are rifles or shotguns.

Sort of. There are a few very limited routes to legal handgun possession in Japan. The most common one is to become a competitive pistol shooter who participates in or trains for international events. But by "most common" I still mean rather uncommon, since the total number of pistol licenses granted on that basis is barely 100 nationwide, as I recall.

What gun crimes? Well I guess that poor gyoza guy got shot in Kyoto a couple months ago, but aside from that...

Ecuador has serious crime problems. Its murder rate is almost FIVE times as high as the US rate, and the US is already extremely violent by developed-world standards. There's simply no excuse for that to be the case. And you can't use "poverty" or "income disparities" as an excuse, either - countries with even worse poverty problems such as India have much lower rates of murder.

The residents obviously don't trust Obama to manage the base relocation correctly, and based on Obama's performance in office thus far, they are wise to take that approach.

All rates are per capita. Ecuador's per capita rate per 100,000 has been at or above 20 in recent years, while the US rate was 4.7 last year.

Why even bring the US into this madness

As a useful point of reference. For rough comparison purposes, US murder rate = 3X Canada or 5X England. So if some other country like Ecuador is 4X the US, that would translate to 12X Canada and 20X England.

There's really no excuse for Ecuador to have such a high crime/murder rate, and yet it does. Its murder rate is actually more than four times higher than the US rate, and the US already has the highest rate in the entire developed world. That's shameful.

Sad how Obama has turned out to be a total disaster of a president for the states.

It's kind of silly to see people from western nations with murder rates higher than that of Japan trying to argue that the death penalty "doesn't work." It seems to "work" reasonably well for Japan, if the murder rate is your metric...

This is always the risk in Japan - as I recall, the deaths from the Niigata quake from 2004 came from mudslides and landslides as well, with structures away from hillsides suffering relatively limited damage. It's very difficult to mitigate those risks entirely, since hills are always in a state of geologic evolution.

The most critical areas along certain roads have very expensive netting or deep-driven piling systems in place, but that's impractical for all but a handful of sites.

Apart from the United States, Japan is the only major industrialised democracy to use capital punishment.

South Korea? Taiwan? Singapore is not the biggest country in terms of population, but its economy is in the top 40 (usually #35 or 36 in overall nominal GDP rankings).

Brazilian prisons really depend on how much money you have. They are extremely corrupt; well-off inmates often have their own apartment-style units with cellphones, internet, and even firearms. It's a continuous source of scandal (reports on these things pop up every few months in O Globo or other media outlets), but nothing ever seems to change.

It's sad how Obama has squandered Bush's hard-won victory in Iraq.

Any particular reason Japan is keeping Asahara alive for so long?