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Kaya Masters

Jun 30 • 88 tweets • 12 min read Twitter logo

For about 8 centuries, from the Heian period until the end of the Sengoku period, just about every man in Japan carried a sword. The Sengoku period, especially, was complete hell for Japan. The entire island was a mess of little warring feudal states led by powerful warlords.

Some vying for control of a unified Japan, others fighting just to survive. In the late 16thcentury, one man came very close to achieving his goal of unifying the country – Takeda Shingen.

Unfortunately for Shingen, he met an untimely demise as he was advancing on Kyoto, and had no children worthy of picking up the mantel, so his attempt sputtered and died, leaving Oda Nobunaga safely free to secure the capital.

Oda Nobunaga went on to become the first of the three great unifiers of Japan, and one of the things he did to ensure nobody would stir the pot again was call a sword hunt.

While he feared betrayal by samurai loyal to other warlords, he feared peasant uprisings even more. A specific group of peasants proved highly problematic—the ikko-ikki.

This group, backed by Jodo Shinshu Buddhists, opposed the entire concept of rule by warlords, and was comprised of peasants, monks, and merchants.

Entire thousand-page tomes can (and probably have) be written on them, but the important thing to note is that they were commoners, and there were a lot of them. And so Oda Nobunaga confiscated their weapons.

This was one of several sword hunts that occurred in the late 16th century, as successive warlords confiscated the weapons of the commoners to ensure their rule stayed unchallenged. Only the military was allowed to have swords (and bows, and spears, and guns).

The warlords weren’t even sneaky about their reasons. Here’s the official decree from Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s sword hunt of 1588:

And so Japan has no real history of an armed populace in the last four hundred years. Guns just aren’t a thing that everyone has, or wants, or thinks about that often.

Culturally, society is quite structured, there is a societal contract that most everyone agrees to, and for the most part the citizens of Japan get along with one another and with their government.

Japan was also isolated from the rest of the world for hundreds of years following the Sengoku period.

They were not exploring new frontiers, setting up new colonies, or interacting with new civilizations. They closed the doors, perfectly happy with what they had, and lived very insular lives.

On the other side of the world, in the same century, Europe was undergoing massive changes. Political, religious, even demographic. Constantinople had fallen, Martin Luther had torn the church asunder, and civil war and unrest churned across the continent.

Losing access to the Bosporus Strait forced mainland Europe to look to the sea to continue the flow of spice and goods from the far east.

Explorers discovered the Americas, and people concerned about the state of society on the European continent suddenly found a place to run to, to try and make a better home in the perfect image they had in their mind.

Settlers swarmed the shores of the Americas. These were hearty folk—they had to be.

It takes a special kind of person to throw away everything they have in their ancestral homeland and sail across the ocean with little to their name but a shovel and a spare set of trousers, to try and make a better life for themselves and their families.

And that personality—that drive—is definitely something passed down from generation to generation by the settlers who came here. The Americas—North America in particular—were settled by the most independent-minded risk-taking Europeans of the lot of them.

And one of the best tools of survival, to fight off bears, cougars, natives, other colonists? Guns. Every man, woman, and child knew their way around a gun, and it was just a standard tool on the farmstead, no rarer or more out of place than a shovel or a saw.

The Continental army was not just a bunch of ragtag peasants with firearms (though I’ve heard some speak of it that way).

It was a real army with real training and real soldiers that was mostly comprised of the armies of the various colonies, supplemented here and there with volunteers and local militias.

When the war was over and the colonies had won their independence, they recognized that letting the populace remain armed was a fine check on the powers of an abusive government, and so they enshrined the right to own weapons into the constitution of the new nation they founded.

America, a nation founded by pioneers in a dangerous land, surrounded by foes and having just thrown off a global military superpower, saw great value in the armed citizen and had no real reason to fear them, since they’d helped in the effort and they all wanted the same thing—

to mostly be left the heck alone and make a better living for themselves and their families.

Fast forward a few centuries.

It is legal to own a gun in Japan. That may surprise you! You have to get one license per gun, and they can be denied for just about any reason. Most of them are issued for collectors of antiques. This same licensing system applies to other weapons too, by the way—like swords.

The government knows exactly who has what gun at all times. Curiously you can buy all the ammunition in Japan you want. But culturally, the Japanese citizenry has had no reason to own weapons.

There’s no dangerous frontier. They’re amazingly resilient to invasion by external forces. And everyone mostly just wants to get along.

It is legal to own a gun in America. This won’t surprise anyone.

You have to have a license to carry one concealed in some places, and there are various background checks you have to go through each time you purchase one, but you can stockpile as many as you want for any purpose whatsoever.

As of 2017, there were 0.25 guns in Japan per 100 people. In America, by contrast, there were 120.5 guns per 100 people. That’s more than one gun per person, on average. For every man, woman, and child. There are a *lot* of guns in this country.

How does that compare to crime rates? Let’s focus just on homicide. And not homicide-by-gun, because getting murdered is getting murdered. How safe is it, in general?

In Japan, the annual homicide rate is 0.26 per 100,000 people. In the United States, it is about 20 times higher: 4.96 per 100,000. The US is statistically a much more dangerous country to live in. These stats don’t lie.

Now, we can dig into them and see that, well, it’s only certain AREAS where the homicide rate is that high, and that’s true, but it’s the same in Japan. Most of Japan is safe. I’d argue most of the US is safe.

But in those areas where it’s NOT safe, you are significantly more likely to get killed dead in the US than in Japan.

Well, the US has scads more guns than Japan, so that’s got to be it, right? Put a pin in that thread for a moment.

Even with a murder rate 20x that of Japan’s, America isn’t even in the top 20. El Salvador holds the gold medal on this one, by the way, with a whopping 52.02 murders per 100,000 annually. Good lord. They must have EVEN MORE guns than the US, right?

El Salvador has 12 guns per 100 people as of 2017.

Yes, a 10th of the guns that the US holds but 10x the amount of murder. Ten. Times. So guns don’t directly correlate to the existence of a high murder rate. How about Brazil, 16th down on the most homicides annually with a rate of 26 per 100,000? 8.36 guns per 100 citizens.

Now, these stats so far have referred to guns of *citizens*, and not counting what the governments have. Let’s look at that real quick, to cover all our bases.

Japan government: 252,000 guns in the hands of police. That’s 0.2 guns per 100 citizens. About the same as the private owner stat.

American government: 1.6 million guns in the hands of police. That’s 0.49 guns per 100 citizens which is significantly less than the private owner stat.

Americans are vastly better armed than their government, as far as guns go, as opposed to the Japanese who are on roughly even footing.

Where am I going with all of this? Well, we’ve seen that, in a vacuum, a higher number of guns does not directly correlate to a higher amount of murder. A lower amount of guns does not directly correlate to a higher amount of murder.

I think, fundamentally, this is a cultural difference.

America is a country founded by risk-takers who lived in incredibly dangerous places and needed their guns to protect themselves.

Japan is a country lived in for millennia by the same people who for centuries closed the doors and just hung out with each other riding out the earthquakes and drinking saké.

They are fundamentally different people.

Growing up in the south in the US, I had a lot of exposure to guns. My dad had a rifle, and he even took me out to show me how to use it a few times, much to my very Japanese mother’s chagrin. Guns were everywhere.

I know this isn’t typical of all places in the US, but it was my experience. On the flipside, when I would spend long stretches in Japan, guns were nowhere to be seen outside of movies and toys. One interesting fun fact—toy guns in Japan still look like real guns.

They don’t have to be all weird neon colors. Probably because the odds of the cops assuming you’re holding a REAL gun instead of a TOY gun, and the risk of deadly escalation, are pretty low there given how few guns there are.

But Japanese people *love* guns. They don’t see any need to own them, and I’ll be honest—they don’t *have* any need to own them. Any time my relatives would come visit us, however, we’d take them shooting and they were a riot.

Couldn’t get enough. Spent more on ammo for a week-long visit than we’d spend in years otherwise.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I’d say the lack of an armed citizenry is a perfectly fine thing—for Japan. For its current situation. They’ve been extremely fortunate to have a mostly benevolent government and no real threat of invasion where having an armed citizenry would be necessary.

They don’t have a high crime rate and they don’t have a lot of dangerous wildlife to fend off.

And I’d say the prevalence of guns in America is *also* a perfectly fine thing. For its current situation. Crime rates are higher because, culturally, we’re a different group of people. We’re wilder. We take more risks.

And that creates a certain vibe in the social fabric that, while not exactly *encouraging* crime, definitely leads to more of it. And so we arm ourselves against thieves, murderers, rapists, grizzlies, cougars, and Canadian invaders.

We cannot judge ourselves based on how anyone else lives in this regard.

I will say this—if anyone talks about wanting to take your guns, they probably want to subjugate you and are afraid of you. That, at least, is consistent between the US and Japan. Culturally Japan took a very different road than America.

They suffered through a lot, went on a wild colonizing spree, and got absolutely demolished in World War 2. And now they’re a pretty prosperous country. But it took over 300 years for them to get to that place from the gun confiscation moment.

If they took all of our guns away, we’d still have to deal with the crime that’s rampant in our culture but without any of the best defenses, and the government would have nothing to fear from total subjugation.

I’m not sure America could survive 300 years of that like Japan did. Because, fundamentally, we’re just not the same people.

Are there things we *can* do in America? I think so. Most of it comes down to one idea that seems to get bandied about every time there’s a mass shooting but nobody seems to want to act on: make incarceration for mental illness a thing again.

Lock people up who show these tendencies in extremes. Get them help. I know the systems can be abused. Find ways to monitor them and help them that aren’t so easily abuseable, but we do have a serious mental health crisis.

But that’s not where most of the violence comes from in America. Freak mass murderers account for a seriously small percentage of all murders annually. No matter how bad you think it is, it’s not as bad as the raw homicide numbers all up.

Brace yourself.

Look at that chart for a second.

Women, on average, just don’t get shot all that much. Men get shot a lot more.

And black men get shot *twice as often* as white men.

50% of all homicide (not just gun) victims in the US are black. But only 13.3% of the US population is black. That is a stark disparity. But the fact that they each comprise half of all annual homicides is going to make a lot of the math simpler going forward.

Who’s doing the shooting?

Well, roughly 12% of annual homicides are classified as black-on-white or white-on-black homicide. So that means most homicides are white-on-white and black-on-black. Let’s dig into the interracial homicides first, however.

In 2015, 16% of white victims were killed by black perpetrators, while 7% of black victims were killed by white perpetrators. In raw numbers, that comes out to 500 whites killed by blacks and 229 blacks killed by whites.

Black-on-black homicides were roughly 40% of the homicides for that year. 2380 out of 6000. White-on-white homicides accounted for 2574 of that 6000. So, raw numbers wise, everyone’s killing roughly the same amount of their own race, ~2500.

But, remember, as a percentage of total population, there are 13% black compared to 80% white. Which means, as a percentage of their respective populations, far more black people are murdering other black people than white people are murdering white people.

Here’s where I have to be extremely careful.

I do not think this has *anything* to do with race.

I think it’s culture.

Unfortunately in a lot of places those end up being synonymous, since we tend to sort ourselves with people we share experiences with. There is no monolithic White Culture or Black Culture or Japanese Culture or Salvadoran Culture.

The very idea drives me nuts and is another thing I’ll do some longwinded tweetstorm on at some point. But because like attracts like, cultures do tend to follow racial lines in broad strokes in places.

Something about Japanese culture keeps the homicide rates low (but the suicide rates are off the charts).

Something about White American culture keeps the homicide rates somewhere between Japanese and Black American rates. (but ditto on the suicide rates—white males are especially at risk here).

Something about Salvadoran culture keeps the homicide rates at exceedingly terrifyingly high rates, top in the world.

There are white cultures with higher and lower homicide rates. Black culture with higher and lower homicide rates. Asian cultures with higher and lower homicide rates. Hispanic cultures with higher and lower homicide rates. Race is not cultural destiny.

But perhaps we should look into these cultural differences and see if we can figure out what it is that’s leading to varying degrees of violence, to see if there’s anything we can do about it.

Sorry to not wrap this with some epic conclusion or call to action or even a coherent final thought—gun violence is real. It’s a problem in lots of places that I’d love for us to make less of a problem to the extent we can.

I could live happily in Japan the rest of my days and never miss my gun rights. I could live happily in America the rest of my days and happily carry every day. I could probably never live happily in El Salvador. But still.

And even in places where gun violence is minor? Like in Japan? Those people were somebody’s father, mother, son, daughter, and then some. We can never eliminate all evil, but we should treat our discussions of such things with the proper respect.

As easy as it is to drag David Hogg, and he deserves it sometimes, blasting him with sick Twitter burns for his views on gun violence aren’t doing anyone favors. He’s got deep emotional reasons for his feelings on that, and we need to treat that conversation with respect.