From Indiscriminate Violence to Polycrisis: Rethinking Societal Resilience

Lessons Learned from Recent Attacks in Taiwan and Japan

On the eve of Christmas and the New Year in 2025, the world experienced a shared psychological trauma. In mid-December, Taipei’s MRT system and surrounding shopping districts were shaken by an indiscriminate attack involving arson, smoke devices, and knives, the first incident of this kind in more than a decade. In the same month, Japan experienced chemical and knife attacks at industrial facilities, while shocking shooting incidents occurred at Brown University and MIT in the United States, Bondi Beach in Australia, and a bar in South Africa.

How can the societies of Taiwan and Japan, often regarded as among the safest and most polite in the world, emerge from these shadows? More importantly, how can they rethink public safety and preparedness through the lens of a resilient society?

Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Indiscriminate Violence

In searching for cross-cultural reference points, Japan offers a particularly relevant comparison for Taiwan. According to Research into “Indiscriminate Cases of Mass Murder and Injury.” published by the Research and Training Institute of Japan’s Ministry of Justice (2013), indiscriminate attacks are defined as acts of violence committed in freely accessible public spaces, without clear motives, targeting unspecified passersby using weapons or other means.

Even in the absence of large-scale attacks, Japan has experienced a growing and puzzling phenomenon known as “butsukari otoko” (intentional bumping). This behavior typically occurs in crowded streets and subway stations, where attackers deliberately collide with women, vulnerable individuals, or foreigners. Such incidents, which may result in serious physical injury, are random in nature and difficult to detect or document.

In 2018, a blurred surveillance video from Shinjuku Station drew public attention to the issue. In a 2019 online survey conducted by the Japanese media outlet Sirabee, 26.2% of respondents reported having been intentionally bumped. Five to six years later, personal accounts shared through English news, travel forums, and expatriate communities have continued to circulate on social media across Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong, reinforcing the perception that such indiscriminate violence is not isolated.

The New Normal of Polycrisis

In a risky society, these random incidents are not isolated. They are compound, multi-domain risks that can trigger cascading effects, leading to what is increasingly described as polycrisis. In 2021, Japan’s Keio Line experienced a horrifying Halloween attack in which a man dressed as the Joker from “Batman” injured 17 passengers and set fire to a train car. Halloween celebrations, heightened political emotions during an election period, and panic within the transit system unfolded simultaneously. Three parallel realities unfolded simultaneously within the same timeline. This convergence resembles the film “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” playing out in real life and leaving societies unprepared for the speed and complexity of overlapping crises.

Because polycrisis spans multiple locations and jurisdictions, detection and tracking are extremely difficult. Attackers often plan both their attacks and escape routes in advance, allowing them to move seamlessly between environments. The Taipei incident involved residential arson as well as assaults in the MRT system, on public streets, and in shopping malls. Firefighters initially responded to a residential fire, while emergency calls only reported “someone releasing smoke” in the MRT. Connecting these disparate events to a single attacker in real time proved nearly impossible, limiting law enforcement’s ability to prevent subsequent harm.

Polycrisis involves diverse stakeholders and cannot be addressed by law enforcement or public safety agencies alone. Its cross-boundary nature often results in fragmented information flows among stakeholders. Addressing issues that traditional single-risk analysis tends to overlook, such as indirect risks, butterfly effects, and feedback loops between systems, has become a critical challenge for agile communication, resource coordination, and capability-building in today’s risk society.

Risk as the Foundation, Agility as the Capability

For more than a century, the concept of “Chinese substance, Western function” has reflected a cultural tension within Chinese intellectual discourse when integrating Western ideas into Chinese society. Even the “I Ching” (Book of Changes) emphasizes change, agility, and risk interpreted in modern terms, however, Confucianism with its focus on social order, duty, and ethical behavior has traditionally discouraged excessive risk-taking across much of East Asia.

In both academic business curricula and corporate practice, risk management has long remained a “forgotten corner,” lacking holistic awareness and experiential learning. Risk management is not limited to documentation or assessment; it also includes pre- and post-event risk treatments such as acceptance, avoidance, transfer, and mitigation. As AI dramatically reduces the time and resources required for preliminary risk analysis, the effective implementation of risk treatments has become more critical than ever.

During the pandemic, the global rise of resilience studies represented an evolution of traditional risk management. While risk management focuses on pre-event analysis and post-event survival, resilience management emphasizes post-event thriving. In the aftermath of crises, agility becomes a decisive factor for both short-term survival and long-term sustainability. Exercises and drills are no longer scripted performances; they are practical tests of survival capability. To address random acts of violence, Japan conducts on-site drills in schools, hospitals, and train stations, including the use of “sasumata” (man catchers) to practice isolating attackers armed with knives.

To effectively address the complexity of polycrisis, including indirect risks and cascading effects, stakeholder needs must be incorporated into routine planning, supported by cross-sector drills and exercises that bridge information and resource gaps across systems. For Taiwan or other Confucian-influenced societies in East Asia, embracing risk as the foundation and agility as the capability offers a practical pathway toward building a more resilient society.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ming-Chang (Bright) Wu

Ming-Chang (Bright) Wu is the 2024 Top Agile CEO award winner and the 2023 ISC2 Mid-Career Professional Award (APAC). With his focus on business continuity and cyber risks, Wu recently has applied agility and resilience to address AI and cyber risk issues. He is a speaker, mentor, and facilitator for the BCP workshop at APEC Taipei from 2014 to 2017 and for the workshop at APEC Korea in 2021. Bright has recently contributed to Disaster Recovery Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek Chinese, EETimes, Harvard Business Review Complex Chinese Edition, ISSA Journal, and SEMI Standards Watch. His resilience book was selected as the 2020 “Book of the Month” recommended by the National Academy of Civil Service in Taiwan.