Police sketches with Edo-period roots help solve 500 cases in Japan a year: nat’l police

TOKYO — Police sketches were used to identify suspects and others in 514 criminal investigations across Japan in 2023, according to the National Police Agency (NPA). Now a fairly common part of police work, these sketches’ history in Japan may go back long before modern police forces began patrolling the country’s streets.

Police departments in Japan have sketch artist investigators who carefully listen to crime victims and witnesses to create composite sketches. These are not only of faces, but also of arm tattoos, key chains and other things.

By count at the prefectural level, Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) led the way with 114 such cases, followed by departments in Osaka, Kanagawa, Saitama and Fukuoka prefectures with 65, 61, 24 and 22, respectively. As of this May, the MPD had 358 investigators who produce sketches.

According to the MPD, the sketches are believed to have roots in the “ninso-gaki” of the Edo period (1603-1867), illustrations which were distributed to find missing people or suspected criminals.

Until around the mid-1970s, police mainly used montages of photos with different features resembling the people being described. The picture of a suspect in a fake white police helmet in the infamous 1968 “300-million-yen robbery” targeting a cash delivery vehicle in the Tokyo suburban city of Fuchu was one such famous composite photo.

However, complaints were raised about the method, including that it took a long time and the photos’ realism limited peoples’ imaginations. The use of composite sketches gradually spread, with research into sketch-based investigations underway in full by the end of the 1980s. One of the people in charge of photos at the MPD’s crime lab division in the 1980s reportedly began studying the techniques by, among other things, visiting a portrait artist in Ueno Park in central Tokyo’s Taito Ward.

According to the NPA, the number of cases in which composite sketches enabled police to take action against suspects in the four years before 2023 was 499 in 2019, 585 in 2020, 559 in 2021 and 532 in 2022 — hovering at roughly 500 per year.

In 2023, there were 8,787 cases in which sketches of involved individuals were created. By prefectural police department, Kanagawa Prefectural Police led the way with 2,125 cases, followed by the MPD with 704, Hokkaido police with 608, Saitama police with 603, Fukuoka police with 495 and Osaka police with 450.

(Japanese original by Kengo Suga, Tokyo City News Department)