Kiyoshi Murata    Department   Undergraduate School  , School of Commerce    Position   Professor
Date	2012/06/22
Presentation Theme	Social Acceptance of CCTV in Japan
Conference	KRETA 2012: "Security, Ethics, and Justice: Towards a More Inclusive Security Design"
Promoters	International Centre for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW), Universität Tübingen
Conference Type	International
Presentation Type	Speech (General)
Contribution Type	Collaborative
Publisher and common publisher	Kiyoshi Murata, Yohko Orito and Andrew A. Adams
Details	Despite the controversy among knowledgeable people,ordinary Japanese seem to accept or at least not to resist the deployment of CCTV systems. In fact, a wide and rapid spread of CCTV in public, semi-public, semi-private and private areas (Adams, 2007) has been witnessed in 2000-10, even though there is neither national regulation of CCTV deployment and usage nor significant case law to limit them. Considering that there is a strong sense of information privacy in Japan which has long been a part of the culture (Adams et al., 2009), it is unlikely that Japanese people have no concerns about the privacy and surveillance issues of CCTV. This study investigates what lies behind the proffered justifications leading to social acceptance of the widespread use of CCTV considering the Japanese traditional sense of society and morality. Abe (1995, 1999) insists that an ordinary Japanese person lives, at least mentally, not in society but in seken which is a small world defined by the relationships with those towards whom the person feels mutual obligation and empathy. Inoue (2007) points out that the Japanese sense of morality is closely related to norms in the small world; one's behaviour is disciplined so that it conforms to the norms of seken as seen by people in the seken. Through the process of industrialisation in Japan, the seken concept was modernised. Urban society, by nature a cluster of strangers, was reconstructed as a collective seken entity defined primarily by long-term business relationships (Murata and Orito, 2010), and the Japanese sense of morality was maintained in this modernised seken. However, the bursting of the bubble economy in the early 1990s broke up this modernised seken, and the moral impact of the gaze of the people in one's seken was significantly weakened. In the current socio-economic situation, the electronic eyes of CCTV may be considered as an alternative to human eyes.