Monday, July 22, 2019

What a Japanese crime might remind us.

A horrific event, by any measure.

But also one that points towards something.

In the debate on violence, people who know next to nothing about Japan, frequently cite Japan as an example of a society that "has no guns" and therefore "has no violence".

Neither is true.

On guns in Japan, you can in fact own firearms in Japan.  Unfortunately for those trying to research it in the US, the data on Japan is so overridden by inaccuracies that its almost impossible to get accurate data.

Firearms in Japan are strictly controlled.  I don't have the full data either, and I'm not particularly inclined to research it, but you can own rifles and shotguns in Japan, bare minimum.  Most of these are owned for hunting, in so far as I'm aware, but there is also target shooting in Japan. The percentage of use, i.e., whether more firearms are owned by hunters or target shooters I'm also not aware of. But I am aware that both classes of ownership do in fact exist.

Okay, so what's the point?

The point is that cross cultural discussions on crime are pretty meaningless as to specifics.

Japan does have low firearm ownership and it also has low firearm violence. That doesn't mean that Japan is violence free, or ever has been. Indeed, it has more to do with firearms being quite outside of Japanese culture.

Indeed, Japan was a medieval country only up until the very late 19th Century.  It was a rural culture as well, but a highly controlled one.  This largely meant that the carrying of any weapon at all was largely the privilege of people in in officialdom or associated with it, in some fashion.  It also means, because of this, that Japan's weaponry was fairly primitive up until its crash late 19th Century militarization, which in turn means that it never had a significant domestic firearms market.

That's why the Japanese have the approach to firearms that they do.

It's also why the Japanese have a fascination with edged weapons.  Indeed, Japan is odd in that it still gets mass attacks with edged weapons, the traditional Japanese weapon.  FWIW, the Japanese government made it illegal to carry a sword after World War Two.  The fact that they made this illegal shows you that people were in fact doing it, and indeed Japan has the distinction of being the only country in World War Two other than the Soviets to really use very many swords (the Red Army's cavalry also carried swords in the form of sabers, their traditional weapon).  Even Japanese criminals, who are not nice, don't use firearms much, even though they don't spend their time cuddling kittens instead.

Japan certainly has crime, and it has mass crime.  This is one horrific example.  But it's not alone.

Japanese crime is Japanese, although in something like this there's something recognizable  I don't know what this guy had against anime and I'm not going to research it either.  But the lesson is, citing a radically different culture for criminal law ideas, is usually pretty pointless.

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