Japan’s Dark Day

The world isn’t getting any safer. Nor its people any less disturbed, apparently.

In America, a country with more guns than people, the public has become numb to gun violence, its sensibilities worn down by mass shooting after mass shooting, one after the other, day after day. Anesthetized by the regularity of mass murder and a collective inability to do anything about it, Americans have by and large acquiesced to a situation that’s not unlike daily life in countries where terrorism is endemic.

Going to the grocery store in America is dangerous. So is going to school. So is attending a public event. The odds of being shot and killed doing any of those things shouldn’t be appreciably higher than zero, but they are. Shootings are so common that even those involving school children have a relatively short shelf life in the news cycle. The dictionary definition of “shelf life” is “the length of time for which an item remains usable, fit for consumption, or salable.” That’s what tragedies are in America. Items for use (by opportunistic politicians and special interest groups), consumption (by a public that harbors a perverse fascination with calamity) and salable (by a media apparatus which, over the years, devolved into a collection of hopelessly partisan tabloids).

Almost no other nation on Earth — rich, poor, developed, underdeveloped or otherwise — suffers from that affliction. Because many mass shootings in America have no readily identifiable motive at all, not even one couched in religious delusions, there’s a very real sense in which America is a total anomaly. Rarely are terrorist acts committed in, for example, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Somalia carried out with no explanation whatsoever. It’s all senseless violence, of course. And at the most basic level, it’s all equally tragic. In America, though, there’s often not even a pretense to purpose — not so much as a vague allusion to a rationale, however ludicrous or bizarre.

If the US looks anomalous even to people residing in relatively dangerous locales, America’s “city on a hill” appears positively deranged to other rich, developed nations. Nations like Japan, where gun ownership among civilians is nonexistent (figure below).

If we could craft some manner of composite score indicative of the warlike capabilities of a given nation’s populace in consideration of both the number and the type of firearms owned, the US would surely be even more of an outlier and Japan even more so at the other extreme.

As regular readers are aware, I try to offer something in the way of value added when it comes to news I’m compelled to cover, but not necessarily qualified to speak definitively about. I’m not Japanese, nor am I a student of Japanese politics beyond what I’ve learned over decades immersed in geopolitics and markets. To be sure, that’s a lot of learning, but it doesn’t confer upon me the credentials I’d need to write a proper obituary or deliver anything like a definitive take on Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated Friday, in a stunning attack that one Op-Ed columnist said “will scar Japan forever.” All I can hope to do is contextualize it via a world off-kilter and the juxtaposition with the US.

Abe was killed Friday at a campaign rally for Kei Sato, an LDP member up for re-election during this weekend’s Upper House vote. He spoke for less than a minute before being shot twice by a fortysomething former Maritime Self-Defense Force member wielding a crudely fashioned, homemade firearm.

In all of 2021, there were just 10 shootings that contributed to death, injury or property damage in Japan, according to the National Police Agency. The total number of deaths across those 10 incidents: One.

Needless to say, everyone, everywhere, both in Japan and around the world, was still in a state of utter shock on Friday. Condolences poured in from a veritable who’s who of the international community.

Abe was, of course, Japan’s longest serving prime minister. He resigned in August of 2020 citing health concerns.

Locally, the adjective is “incredulous.” “I can’t believe something like this can happen here,” was a common refrain. One law professor who spoke to the media Friday said that perversely, the fact that these sorts of incidents are exceedingly rare in Japan made it “easy to execute.” I’m not sure “execute” was the best word choice. Maybe something was lost in translation.

The last assassination of a Japanese prime minister with guns occurred in 1932, when Tsuyoshi Inukai was killed by Navy officers as part of a plot to engineer a war with the US. The conspirators also planned to kill Charlie Chaplin.

Abe’s grandfather, former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, was targeted in 1960. He survived, though. “If I wanted him dead, I would’ve just killed him,” his assailant said later. He had a knife, not a gun.