Tokyo Dispatch: Feeling Inexplicably Safe
The Frontier Psychiatrists reports from the least edgy place I've ever been
I have traveled to Japan for the first time in my life. I'm here for Brain Stimulation, an academic conference in Kobe, Japan. The day I am writing this sentence I woke up to 5 academic publications accepted to journals or conferences in one day. That brings me to 7 for the year, which is still a far cry from the 18 I co-authored last year. I had help! So, so much help. One co-author, in particular, Amna Aslam, has done a remarkable job helping accelerate the flow of publications from my group, and I am very thankful. Others (in no particular order) like Irfan Handoo, Danielle DeSouza, Anthony Sterns, Fred Ma, Loren Larson, David Carreon, Nolan Williams, Colleen Hanlon, Carlene MacMillan, Burton Tabaac, and Kenneth Shinozuka helped me co-author academic paper after paper in the past year! Science is truly a team support!
Today’s article is not about academic success— a fleeting feeling if ever there was one! It’s about a feeling you can’t quite grasp till you are living in the midst of it.
It is the feeling of being safe. I have lived in a relatively safe city, New York, since 2011, and longer before that. It’s generally not a place I feel threatened. It’s diverse—which actually makes me feel quite a bit safer. I’ve learned to internalize the situations around me. I have friends who are queer and trans. When there are black, brown, and queer people at ease in my vicinity—am pretty confident it’s a safe space for us all.
This has felt less and less true, of late. The news tells of humans immolated on the subway. The citizen app blowing up on Carlene’s phone—there was a shooting in our neighborhood? Once, the mugging on the street she was alerted to was…me! I was fine, don’t worry.
Recently, I can’t help but clock, when I wake up to a view of then Williamsburg bridge, how many people would be trapped if one bridge went down. Or two. Or all of them. It's vulnerable.
I am vulnerable. My children are vulnerable. I’m never going to get a gun—I know how that ends for people like me. The most likely victim of gun violence is yourself, with with your own gun. The police are also threatening. I worry not just for my patients—particularly my black patients, some who have psychotic illnesses—but for the officers who might stop them, armed with weapons that can deliver trauma to those on both sides of a bullet fired. One side dies, quickly, the other tears their own mind and family apart with an 800% or greater rate of PTSD. No one wants or needs to be involved in a shooting, when not outside of a war zone.
Japan is a place with very little violent crime, and even less gun violence. As a student of the ways people die—Japan has a history of higher suicide rates than the most of the rest of the world. It's on the order of 34/100,000 compared to the 17/100,000 in the US, when last I looked. Japan? It has problems with despair. One things Japan doesn't have is a threat to me from gun violence. The total number of deaths in the entire country of Japan in recent years is less than the number of publications I authored last year. It’s less than the number I authored and were accepted for publication this morning. In one day, I published more papers today than all the people Japan’s crime syndicates killed by gunshots in all of 2023.
Now, It might be easy to dismiss the constant threat one feels living somewhere like New York City. For comparison sake, Tokyo actually has almost twice as many citizens as NYC, at 15,000,000. But maybe New York is extra dangerous? How about a small city like Rochester, NY, where I went to medical school?
It has more people shot in the depths of winter than Japan does in an entire year.
In Japan, I feel very safe. It's culturally different, for many reasons. Don’t ask me to explain San Rio Puroland, for example.
Or whatever is up with Cinnamonroll, who wears coffee on his head, or on my daughter’s head?
However, when it comes to gun violence, you don’t have to image a safer world—you can just visit Japan, and experience it for yourself.