The link between urban regeneration or redevelopment and the introduction of video surveillance has been well documented by many different authors in Britain, in particularly Roy Coleman in Reclaiming the Streets. It seems that the link is strong in Tokyo too. This new CCTV scheme in the front of Nippori railway station in Arakawa-ku is not only clearly part of the social and spatial restructuring of this area, it is an essential part of the new image, with the new entranceway celebrating the security cameras as much as the area’s name. This is the area we were told by Shinjuku officials had only three cameras, whereas in fact it has the princely total of ten! In retrospect the Shinjuku people seemed to be rather condescending towards Arakawa-ku.
There’s been a story developing for a while now on the US-Canadian border. This used to be one of the most casual and friendly of borders, indeed there are families stretched across both sides and in many places the border meant only slight differences in the price of some goods…
But no more. There might be a new president, but Obama seems to be allowing the Bush-era plans for strengthening the border with Canada to continue. There are now CCTV towers being erected, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) patrolling, and new much stricter passport regulations and customs and immigration checks. As usual this seems to be being done with a kind of macho indifference to the opinions of the Canadians that is making the US actions doubly unpopular.
If this seems like some kind of sci-fi nightmare then then most crazy, Philip K. Dick-style element is to be found on the Michigan-Ontario border at Port Huron, where the Sierra Nevada Corporation, a US military aerospace company, has launched a tethered balloon camera (the company calls it an MAA (medium altitude airship) pointed at the town of Sarnia across the border. This isn’t even an official scheme, it’s a private company trying to sell this insanity to the Department of Homeland Security, and naturally the Mayor and citizens of Sarnia are angry about this international violation of their privacy, and many of both sides of this border think that this intensified security as an attack on the trust that exists between Americans and Canadians.
So what are Sarnians doing? They are giving the cameras something to look at, that’s what. More specifically they are planning to drop their pants for a mass ‘moon the balloon’, which in these days of ever more insane surveillance schemes seems just about the only possible response.
We had an enlightening interview, which will give me much to analyse later, with three senior officers from the Seikatsu Anzen Bu (literally, ‘Everyday Life Safety Division’) of the Keisicho (Tokyo Metropolitan Police). Interestingly, this division that was created as a result of the Seikatsu Anzen Jourei (Governor Ishihara’s 2003 Tokyo Metropolitan Government ordinance) and which deals with all the community security and safety initiatives, including CCTV, is separate from the Chiki Bu (the community division) that is responsible for the koban neighbourhood police box system.
Like almost everyone in authority we have met here, the police were convinced that they were not doing surveillance in using the cameras. They also confirmed that almost all of the CCTV systems operated by shoutenkai (shopkeepers’ associations) are not monitored and are simply recorded. They also stressed their deep concern for privacy and the rights of citizens and said that data from the police-operated cameras – of which there are around 150 in Shinjuku (the largest system with 50 cameras in the Kabukicho entertainment district), Shibuya, Ikebukuro, Roppongi and Ueno – was only kept for 7 days unless there was a specific reason to retain it. This is a legal requirement not just a police guideline. The police cameras are monitored both in local stations and in a central control room, but we were told that it was strictly forbidden for us to visit (unlike every other city in which I have done research) as everyone who enters has to be pre-enrolled in the police iris-scan security database.
We talked a lot about the history of the development of CCTV and of community safety initiatives in Tokyo, and Governor Ishihara’s absolutely central role in backing video surveillance became very clear (it’s a shame he has so far refused an interview with us!). What was also particularly interesting was that the police themselves did not think that apparently obvious ‘trigger events’ were as important as it might seem. For example, they claim that the police only really began considering the use of CCTV cameras not after the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo underground but because of the influence of G8 summit security. One officer specifically mentioned the Gleneagles summit (which was just starting when terrorists attacked the London transport system), but this was in 2005, well after the TMG had already introduced CCTV, and after which the Tokyo police have not introduced a lot more cameras. So I don’t quite understand their point. It may become clearer once I have the complete transcripts… They also claimed that it was the Tokyo police rather than Japan Railways themselves or the Tokyo Metro authority who insisted on installing CCTV in the Tokyo transport network after the Aum attacks.
The officers talked a lot about community involvement. They dismissed the objections to their public space CCTV systems for several reasons, not least as I have already mentioned that they were not doing ‘surveillance’, but more importantly because they claimed to have done extensive consultation with local community groups, businesses etc. The claimed that they could not do anything without this support. This may have been true for Kabukicho, which was undoubtedly afflicted by an influx of Chinese gangs in the 1990s, but we heard from the local government of another ward that is being lined up for one of the new volunteer-based child safety camera systems being introduced from 2010 that they were given no choice by the police, and that local people were not happy about it. The problem is that this local authority don’t want to be interviewed further about this as they are in a rather delicate position over this new system.
(Thank-you very much to the officers from the Seikatsu Anzen Bu for giving us their time)
Far from the skyscrapers and bright lights of Shinjuku, where we had our last interview on community security and safety development (anzen anshin machizukuri), Arakawa-ku is a defiantly shitamachi (‘low-town’ or working class) area to the north-east of Tokyo just north of Ueno and outside the Yamanote-sen JR railway loop line that has for much of the last 40 years defined the boundaries of the richer parts of the city.
Bordering the Ara river and split by the Sumida river, it was traditionally a marshy place liable to flooding. It was also a place with a large buraku (outcaste) population and Minowa (in the north of the ward) contains the mournful Jokan-ji (or Nagekomi – ‘thrown-away’) temple, where prostitutes who died in the Yoshiwara pleasure district were cremated. The place has been hit hard by disaster. It was levelled twice in the the Twentieth Century, first by 1923 Kanto daishinsai (Great Kanto Earthquake) and then again by the firebombing in the last years of WW2.
Nevertheless, its rough, industrious, hardworking spirit has continued, and these days, despite the march of secure manshon (high-rise housing) down the post-war avenues, it remains a place full of small industrial units, especially recycling businesses and clothing wholesalers and manufacturers in Nippori, small bars and family restaurants, and lots of ordinary housing, even some of the last remaining dojunkai (early concrete public housing) constructed after the earthquake. It’s also the starting point of the last remaining tramway (streetcar line) in Tokyo, the Toden Arakawa-sen. I like it a lot and it’s where my wife and I have lived in Tokyo in the past, and where we still stay when we return (there will be more pictures in a later post).
It was natural then to turn our attention to the place as a case-study area, mainly because it is so different from Shinjuku and the other areas that have gained so much attention from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s recent initiatives. We met with three officials from the Community Safety section of the local administration: the boss and two guys who had been seconded from the city police and the fire service respectively. The boss was full of enthusiasm for the direction that Arakawa-ku has taken, which although they don’t use the term ‘machizukuri‘ is far more about real community involvement than some places that do.
The HQ of Arakawa community safety
Arakawa has no comprehensive CCTV strategy, although the police do consult with the developers of large new buildings on its installation. That’s not to say that they don’t have a certain degree of ‘CCTV envy’ of those places with the latest high-tech gadgets that Arakawa can’t afford, but they are not dazed by the glamour of cameras and are realistic about both the limitations of CCTV and the appropriateness of such systems for their city. Instead they concentrate on using and enhancing the natural surveillance capacities of the local communities. They make a great deal of use of volunteers, retired police officers and ordinary local people, who do their own patrols, including the delightful wan-wan (‘woof-woof’) patrol which, judging from the posters, involves mainly older female residents and very small dogs! Participation in the various community initiatives is encouraged through the use of techniques like professional rakugo (traditional comic monologue) performances in schools and community centres. They also run community patrols in miniature versions of police patoka (patrol cars), which not only look more friendly but unlike the US-style police cars can get through much narrower streets.
The cute community patrol cars
However these diverse community projects are being stitched together in quite an innovative way, with the use of small anzen anshin sutashion (security and safety stations), which are a bit like community versions of the police koban, the miniature two-person police boxes which dot the city. Indeed the officials referred to them as minkan koban (‘people’s koban’). These small help stations, staffed mainly by ex-police don’t just provide ‘security’ information, they also deal with social security in the broader sense, offering help for older people with benefits, for example. In almost all cases, they have replaced koban that were closed by the police. So one could argue that this is essentially the local authority being forced to pick up the bill for services that used to be provided by the police and at the same time is actually losing real police service. However, the strategy overall is a valiant attempt to make ‘community safety’ less an issue of exclusionary security and more one of inclusivity and community development, more a natural and intimate part of everyday life that does not involve new forms of external control.
Of course, crime isn’t really a massive issue here anyway. Arakawa has consistently had the second or third lowest crime rates of all the 23 Tokyo wards. But even since the introduction of these initiatives, crime has fallen still further from the relative high point it reached a few years ago. And hardly a CCTV camera in sight…
CCTV cameras prevent crime, do they? Well, they certainly don’t if it’s the cameras being stolen! This was in Florida, and I seem to remember that back in the mid-90s when video surveillance was first on the rise in the UK, this kind of thing was no uncommon…
Anyway, I know one should never condone crime, but with all the same ill-informed pro-CCTV propaganda being spread in the USA as was used in the UK back then, I am at least enjoying the irony…
BBC’s Newsnight current affairs programme has used the Freedom of Information Act to ask almost 100 Local Authorities in the UK how many video surveillance cameras they operate. There are some really nice graphics here, which demonstrate what a ridiculous number of cameras we have, and particularly the way in which CCTV is becoming seen as ‘normal’ in all areas, not just big cities.
This brings up the discussion we were having earlier in the year with David Aaronovitch of The Times and Paul Lewis of The Guardian (see here, here, here, here and here!), who claimed that members of Surveillance Studies Network had knowingly fabricated figures. In fact these were scenarios and broad guesstimates and never presented as anything more than that. Newsnight in common with most media doesn’t get this either and thinks that its survey means that “there are almost one million fewer CCTV cameras in the UK than previously thought.”
However there survey was only of Local Authorities. It did not cover private systems in public open space or quasi-public space like transport systems (railways, buses and the underground) and shopping malls, let along cameras in private space. The guesstimates made by Clive Norris and Mike McCahill way back in 2001 included all cameras in public space. Norris and Gary Armstrong’s little scenario of being spotted by up to 300 cameras a day most certainly included purely private ones too – as did a real life version of the same kind of scenario conducted by The Times earlier this year – in fact, private cameras covering public space were almost twice as numerous as state ones. So in fact there are probably many more CCTV cameras than “previously thought.” The important thing is that there is almost no control over their proliferation whether nominally ‘public’ or ‘private’ and, as I wrote the other day, almost nothing apart from conscience that seems to be stopping operators from using ‘augmented’ CCTV because extra functionality like audio comes as standard on camera units these days.
For me, of course, the really interesting figures are the international comparative ones: that there are more cameras operated by the average London borough than by the whole metropolis of Tokyo. Yet in other ways, the figures are probably closer – Tokyo is as comprehensively covered as London in terms of public transport. Nothing is quite as clear-cut as it seems if you restrict the research to one type of camera system. Still, thank-you very much to the Newsnight researchers for performing a useful public service!
However, an interesting thing to note in this supplementary report by transport correspondent, Michael Dresser, on the paper’s blog, is that the proposal apparently came about because CCTV cameras these days come with sound-recording built in, and that other transit authorities in Cleveland, Denver and Chicago use it. The MTA administrator responsible for seeking the legal opinion on audio surveillance is quoted as saying “It’s something that’s becoming the standard of the industry.”
So, if I am reading this right here, important policy decisions that have major implications for privacy are being treated simply as technical issues because the technologies that are being purchased have the capabilities. It’s only in this case because the MTA sought a legal opinion that we know at all, let alone that anyone objected. So how many other transit, police or urban authorities or commercial venues in how many places are now regularly using the audio capabilities of cameras without ever having considered that this might be a problem? And what other built-in technical capabilities will simply be used in future simply because they are available? What about the Terahertz Wave scanning that I covered earlier on?
Fascinating and disturbing news from the MIT Technology Review blog that a team of researchers appears to have cracked the problem of how to produce cheap, effective Terahertz Wave (TW) cameras and receivers. TW are found between infrared and microwave radiation, and produce what we called in A Report on the Surveillance Society, a ‘virtual strip search’, as they penetrate under layers of clothing but not much further, and can thus produce images of the body ‘stripped’ of clothing. Thus far, they’ve been used on an experimental basis in some airports and not really any further afield.
This is largely because of the way that TW waves have been detected up until now has basically been a bit of a kludge, a side-effect of another process. This has meant that TW equipment has been generally quite large and non-portable (amongst other things).
However one Michel Dyakonov of the University of Montpellier II in France has followed up theoretical work he did in the 1990s, with a new larger team, to show that tiny (nanoscale) ‘field effect transistors’ can – and they are still not quite sure how exactly – both produce and detect TW. The details are in Technology Review, but the crucial thing for those interested in surveillance is that:
the output is ‘good enough for video’; and
‘they can be built into arrays using standard silicon CMOS technology’ which means small, cheap (and highly portable) equipment. This could be an add-on to standard video cameras.
I’m getting a genie-out-of-bottles feeling with this, but is it really as damaging to personal privacy as it feels? Does this really ‘reveal’ anything truly important? Or will it become something to which we rapidly become accustomed, and indeed with with which we quickly get bored? In some cultures, specially those that regard covering the body and modesty as being god-given, this is clearly going to present massive challenges to social and moral norms. It seems to me that there is also an immediate conflict with current constitutional and legal rights in several jurisdictions, not least the US Fourth Amendment right not to be subjected to warrantless searches and the European Convention Article Eight on the right to privacy.
But it seems that unless such a technology is banned, or at least particular commercial implementations, we’re about to cross another Rubicon almost before we’ve noticed it has happened. Ironically bans on technology can only really be effective in states where intensive surveillance and state control of behaviour is practiced. In other places, I am not sure banning can be effective even if it were desirable, as in reality, a ban simply means reserving the use of the technology to criminals, large corporations which can afford to flout laws, and the state.
As well as trying to interview officials at national and city level here, I am also looking at a few different areas of the city, including Shinjuku, where I have done some work before. Shinjuku is a central ward of Tokyo that includes the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) buildings, part of a growing high-rise district, possibly the busiest railway station in the world, one of the most extensive entertainment districts in the city (not just Kabukicho, the conventional ‘red light’ district, but also a lot of gay clubs and bars), and substantial Korean and Chinese communities.
We had an interesting interview this week with the two officials seconded from the Metropolitan Police Department (keishicho), to run the efforts in Shinjuku (as usual there is a lot more than I can summarise here). We met in the Emergency Control Room, a cramped space full of monitors old and new, walkie-talkies and lots and lots of yellow telephones. We had a brief chat about emergency planning, but as we there to talk security and surveillance, we moved on.
Anzen anshin (or bohan) machizukuri (community safety (or security) development) in Tokyo derives from a TMG ordinance (jourei) of 2003 which encourages all ku (city wards) to implement it. The main reason was that recorded crimes had reached a record high in the city in 2002 (I’ll consider crime figures in Japan and their reliability in another post). There were a patchwork of existing community safety organisations but these appear to have been separate from the chounaikai (local community associations). What the 2003 ordinance did was to make community safety the responsibility of the chounaikai with co-ordination, information and encouragement from the ku administration.
The Shinjuku authorities are very keen on this, much more so than some others, for example, Arakawa-ku where we are living and which I am also examining, which tends to rely on much more conventional policing. This may be a matter of money (Arakawa is nowhere near as wealthy as Shinjuku), but it may also be down to the attitudes of the public and local state officials. This kind of community safety work is time-intensive, and requires a substantial commitment in order to carry out things like citizen patrols (which seem to be one of the core elements).
We also talked about CCTV, which Tokyo started to implement in 2003 as well for the same ostensible reasons. Of course Kabukicho is one of the city-centre pilot areas (along with Ikebukuro, Shibuya, Ropongi and the later addition of Ueno), with over 50 cameras operated by the city police. Given their position it is hardly surprising that they had little time for talk of a ‘surveillance society’ (or indeed even the idea of ‘surveillance’ – the word kanshi provokes quite a strong reaction here – no, no – they are definitely not doing surveillance). They also talked about the co-ordination of shoutenkai (shopkeepers’ association) CCTV systems. It seems that despite their large numbers, these systems are generally not monitored, i.e. there is not control room and no-one is watching. The officials were also certain that the shoutenkai operators themselves were not even allowed to view footage without permission from local police. This is something I will have to investigate more as I have read in the past of shoutenkai representatives claiming the opposite – that they had to give permission for the police to view footage. It seems that both shoutenkai and chounaikai are being encouraged to install CCTV systems, and there are grant systems in place – basically one third comes from the city, one third from the ku, and one third has to be found by the organisation itself from its members.
This means that coverage is very uneven and tends to be restricted to wealthy and / or particularly committed –kai. Shinjuku has many, many shoutenkai systems. Nippori, in Arakawa, in contrast has three cameras – not three systems, but three cameras…
(Thank-you very much to Mr Takahashi and Mr Yabe for their time and patience with my questions).
The slightly left-leaning Asahi Shimbun newspaper had a pretty balanced if uninspiring editorial this week on the spread of CCTV cameras in Japan. The English translation is available here.
The most important thing in the editorial is the recommendation of national laws for CCTV. This would be better than in the UK for example, where there still isn’t any national regulation of CCTV except for the Data Protection Act. The paper’s suggestions are:
transparent operational procedures with ‘rigorous conditions’ for the sharing of images
third party oversight for police cameras and a ‘help desk where people can complain about being caught on tape’
This is a start, but only a start, and the second one would probably prove completely unworkable especially if cameras become more widespread. It would be rather better for some kind of permission system to operate, where cameras were seen as an exceptional response to a proven need. The paper is already accepting the normality of CCTV cameras in public spaces regardless of the evidence of their effectiveness- which it acknowledges is equivocal (in fact it’s generally much worse than that in the UK) or indeed the wider social impacts.
CCTV cameras prevent crime, do they? Well, 
ubisurv 