Japanese Harmony

I've been thinking about this topic for quite some time now, and even though the events I'm going to describe happened already some while ago, I still like to tell about it.
Around the beginning of december (or maybe even at the end of november) the whole class had to write a letter in Japanese that we would send to the "Letter to the Editor" section of a Japanese newspaper. We were free to choose our topic, but I soon found out that there were certain limits to this freedom. The topic I choose was "Is Japanese society so harmonious as it seems?". We could just write a short letter, so I didn't deal with the topic in-depth, but the general contents was the following:
Japan is known or likes to be known as a harmonious and peaceful country. In reality, this is reflected by a low crime rate and absolutely no violence during for example sport games (when I went to a baseball match in Tokyo, there wasn't even a police force present, just some security guards, whereas in Holland soccer matches are almost always surveyed by armed police forces). However, in movies, cartoons and anime, violence can take very explicit and extreme formes. Next to that, the sex industry is flourishing in all of its facets, and organized crime, in Japan known as the yakuza, has a strong foothold in political and corporate affairs. Now that was something I really shouldn't write about, expecially not if it was to be published in a newspaper. Not that a letter with such contents would have any chance of being published, but the teacher tried everything to let me change what I wrote. She used argumets like "But Japanese people already know about it, this isn't something that's new to the reader", but of course to me that was the whole point in mentioning it. Instead, I should better write about recent incidents of schoolchildren being kidnapped, violated and murdered on the way home from school. However, if those are incidents, does it really say something about Japanese society as a whole?
Of course everybody dissaproves of these kidnapping-incidents, but surprisingly most Japanese take the sex industry, the violent entertainment industry and the powerful yakuza for granted without asking too many questions about it. Apparently, Japanese society is just as harmonious as you want to see it.
In the end, I only changed the word "yakuza" for "organized crime" and send my letter to the Asahi Shinbun. Of course it was not published, but maybe that's all the better for my own safety ; )