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Social workers with only an individualistic understanding of empowerment will easily end up as moralising agents rather than as facilitators for their clients. It is in the complex interaction between a given socio‐material situation and the individual capacity to interpret and act that one finds the key to an empowerment worthy of its name. This presupposes two things: that social workers have as a part of their education theoretical knowledge about organisational structures, and that they themselves have been empowered in ways that give them practical competence to act in relation to situations. They need the competence to identify the complexities of interests and power relations in society. The implication of such a recogni‐tion should be clear for the education of social workers: the ideology of empowerment has to be contextualised. To discuss this topic the author makes a distinction between an individua‐listic and a relational perspective and between social problems conceived of as a ‘lack of money’ vs. a ‘lack of meaning’.

If increasing crime seems to be an unavoidable concomitant of rapid urbanisation, Japan might be an interesting exception. Both statistics and research tell us that Japan is a modern, rapidly urbanised society with little crime. This article raises the question if, and eventually in which way, one may talk about Japan as a low crime nation. Is there anything of criminological interest to learn from Japan? After describing the Japanese society along five analytical dimensions the answer to this question is that while in the West we can talk about “community lost”, in Japan we should rather talk about “individual lost”. At the individual level the obliteration of the self is the price to be paid for less crime. However, at the collective level Japan might teach the West a lesson. If crime is regarded as actions committed by outsiders, then Japanese society has succeeded in linking the individual to a group context which most likely functions in a crime preventive way. Instead of endless crime preventive programs of “social engineering”, the West should pay more attention to basic sociological insights concerning collective obligations and identities. In this regard we might look to Japan.

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