I'm an infantry soldier with the 101st Airborne Division recently returned from Iraq, right now on leave (I haven't taken a vacation in three years and basically got told by everyone to get lost for 30 days) ... my uncle loves this forum and gave me a hardcopy of this thread to read. Some of the responses put out had me so puzzled I felt compelled to reply.
I was born in Japan, and spent much of my life there. Most of my father's side of the family is still there. Having moved stateside, at times over the years I've heard from the American side of the fence how Japan is a "peaceful society" because there are "no guns" and have listened to the Japanophiles and peaceniks gush over how "America would be so much better off if it were like Japan." It makes my teeth crack thinking about it.
Japan is, and always will be, first and foremost a martial society. On every level of its society is an emphasis on austerity and self-sacrifice that few other nations can match. From the education system that divides its kids into "red" and "white" teams that battle each other on the schoolgrounds, to the dynamic between honor and shame that guides the behavior of every individual within the society at ever level, Japan emphasizes collectivism for one purpose: Achievement. Mate that to an absolute reverence for tradition and the willingness to abase oneself completely for the collective, and you have what most outsiders would consider to be mass psychosis. Japanese officers used to kill themselves for falling out in road marches. Japanese schoolkids still kill themselves for failing to get into the top universities. Failure - especially the public sort - is irredeemable in Japanese eyes, and thus the status quo of "law and order" is maintained because Japanese are far more likely to internalize their aggression (i.e. suicide) than to engage in external acts of violence that shame their families.
When the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi started the "Great Sword Hunt" in 1588 and took away firearms and edged weapons, he did it to the general populace and the private militias of the religious sects, but not the samurai. He moved the warriors into the towns away from the countryside, and razed vast numbers of fortresses. He did this because for decades, the Japanese warrior clans were blasting each other into oblivion. Guns weren't even in the country until brought in from overseas in 1542. Within a few short years, there were more matchlocks in Japan than in all of Europe combined, and the Japanese had introduced refinements both to the weapons themselves and to tactics, using volley fire long before Europe.
In the space of a few short years, the warrior clans were being bled dry. Battles like Nagashino in 1575, where the Takeda Clan lost 10,000 of its irreplaceable finest warriors, were becoming too commonplace. Japanese martial tradition and brutally efficient firearms use were keeping the warriors engaged in battle too long, and the result was massacre. Hideyoshi saw that Japan could not survive more civil war, and that is why he did what he did. The caste system and the separation of the castes was strengthened to keep the peasantry from being drafted en masse as "ashigaru" (lit. "light-foots") by the warrior clans so that the farming communities would not collapse from decimation, something Hideyoshi as the son of a peasant understood keenly.
The fabled Japanese "politeness" is something born out of both the court ettiquete of Kyoto (my birthplace) and the society that developed after the first unification of Japan in 1590. With so much death and destruction in a nation that has always had maddening population density, the development of strict norms of behavior was the only way that people could ensure a way to make sense of a world where death could come at any time. Kyoto and the Imperial Court, being the epitome of Japanese culture, then became a model for interpersonal relations that has endured to this day (like the bows and the soft language). The fabled "kirisute-gomen" (lit. "License to Cut Down") that samurai had was strictly regulated. Drawing your sword made you accountable to the local authorities, and a warrior who could not justify why he killed a productive farmer who belonged to the regional lord was dealt with extreme prejudice (especially when the warrior in question couldn't make restitution, or worse, tried to run).
Japan had historical conditions which necessitated the removal of firearms from the entire populace - not just the peasantry, but the samurai as well. The population density, the martial traditions, the complete submergence of the individual to the "cause" and the sheer refusal to quit and admit to failure, ensure that violence in that nation will always be one step away from apocalypse. This is why the social controls are so strong and the "police state" model is dominant there. The Japanese police are entirely different from the American model. First of all, after 1868, the samurai were stripped of the right to bear their swords in public, vast numbers of the warriors became, in a word, cops - because pre-1945 that was the only way that they could bear swords in public. The police also lived in the neighborhoods they policed - and as such, became local burghers that everyone went to for assistance and adjucation of disputes (which they were doing anyways). Cops in Japan traditionally rely on social pressure to get things done, not on force. Legion are the cases of parents bringing in errant children (even adult children) guilty of a crime to the local police. When the Japanese police do use force and apprehend, criminals are essentially given a choice: Repent for the disgrace caused to society, or "face the consequences." Refusal to admit to wrongdoing means that you are essentially disavowing your ties from your family, and by extension, the entire society. This means conviction rates remain astronomically high, regardless of guilt or innocence, and prisoners in the Japanese prison system who display insufficient "remorse" are essentially nonhuman and treated as such. Remember, tradition is paramount in Japanese society, and the pillar of that society is respect. Displaying lack of respect is the highest insult imaginable and in the old days meant parents would literally murder their kids if they talked back, so as to remove the shame from the family.
Of course, now in the new "modern" Japan, "individualism" (really just mindless egotism and hedonism in disguise) rules, so tradition goes into the burn pit. Not that I've EVER heard of anyone being whipped with a bamboo cane with saltwater on the rear end (sounds like Singapore to me) ... or beheading (sounds like China in the old days) ... or life in prison (which, because of how jacked up Japanese laws are after the American Occupation got through with them, is almost impossible to get).
As for the Second World War and racism commentary ... I'm not full-blooded Japanese. Even worse, I pass for it (unlike my mother, who gets spotted right away) unless they look very closely at my mannerisms. So having gone through what that means in the "old" Japan, what I have to say on the Second World War is ...
One should remember that the Japanese military after 1868 was mostly run by those of peasant origin ... this was especially true of the Imperial Army, which tended to attract recruits of a lower caliber than the Imperial Navy (which, after Japan's spectacular victory over the Russian Fleet at Tsushima in 1905 became THE service to go into for the gentry) ... the Japanese Imperial Army was instrumental in propagating the racist ideology of various nutjobs and warping both the Shinto religion and the Bushido code to serve their egotistical needs. A convergence of the worst sort imaginable came to place, where a bunch of lunatics trying to "one-up" their social status ran the military into a series of atrocities and a confrontation with the United States. Japanese society before the Second World War had virtually no real contact with the mores and values of other nations. So, they projected their own - and thus they considered surrendering troops as scum, and civilians who were subjugated as just the same. The Fascists in power, mindful of their own lowborn origins, intriduced their "racial purity" notions that made everyone equal before the Emperor - bringing the old warrior aristocracy to heel, but also ensuring that the violence done to other nations would be unconscionable.
The hilarious thing is, of course, when the United States defeated Japan, the old rules on assimilation of state-by-state that worked in Japan's Warring States Period that limited destruction of the countryside kicked in - making Japan, in effect, a completely willing vassal state. In a nutshell, this meant the Japanese people considered themselves the property of the American people - which is why Gen. MacArthur was greeted as a new Shogun by miles and miles of silent, bowing Japanese lining the road in when he landed at Tachikawa Airbase and drove to the center of Tokyo. Which is why the Japanese completely, eagerly, and wholeheartedly changed their society within a decade to adopt absolutely everything American, from food to dress to culture. Which is why the Japanese haven't ever come to terms with what they did in the Second World War - because Gen. MacArthur excused them from it during the Tokyo Trials. Hard questions like that got lost in the shuffle to put as many anticommunists back into power (read: Fascists) in the Japanese government as quickly as possible.
The sad thing of course, is that the Japanese mindset works against them in this. The Japanese as a norm do NOT hold grudges. The society is so geared to eliminating contention that an apology once made is considered final. The one chance for bringing the Japanese to terms with Bataan, Nanjing, and all the atrocities by the chemical warfare unit Unit 731, was the Tokyo Trials. And that was it. Once the traitors who led the Imperial Government died in execution, as far as the society was really concerned that was the end of everything to do with the war. Hence, you don't hear Japanese society say much about Marines collecting Japanese skulls as trophies, the incineration of civilian masses in Tokyo by B-29 raids, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Which is why bring up atrocities from that era to your average Japanese, with or without copious documentation, usually results in a blank stare. They agree war is hell, they got nuked twice, they've dismantled their military, and they live as an American vassal state, so what more could the world want?
Really though, to bring this post back to topic, I think the Japanese are below the surface, the same people they've been for centuries. The hedonists have always been there in the margins; the single-minded aggression that typifies the Japanese approach to problem-solving is as always, still there. Giving these people guns is a real bad idea. They're not Americans; their traditions work against them. You'd see a lot of suicides, and I can just see the motorcycle gangs switching from edged weapons to semiautomatics clipping people all over the place. They wouldn't know how to stop or care unless the police stepped in real, real hard ... and the end result is a police state so much more totalitarian than what the arming of the citizenry was meant to prevent. RKBA isn't going to work in Japan, but that doesn't mean it's a paradise or a shining example, regardless of what the idiotic anti-RKBA crowd says. Japanese-style disarming and control of the citizenry would never work in the States. They just play with a very different set of cards in Japan.
Anyways, that's all I think I have to say on Japan and gun control there ... thank you for reading this overly long tract ... and I hope you're glad that you live in the good ol' USA (or what's left of it ... I think the good things vanish more year by year) ... have a good one. Peace out.
. My buddy is a very open-minded fellow and our correspondence has me wondering, how can all this be? 
