A common way to calculate the murder rate in a place is to divide the total murder rate by 100,000 inhabitants. On this account, the rate in Brazil, for example, is 22.3 deaths per 100,000 people. The calculation is often useful to facilitate comparison between different countries. But not in Japan.
That’s because the number of murders like that of former premier Shinzo Abe this Friday (8) is so low that at least since 2006 the murder rate per 100,000 people can be rounded to 0. Or, to be more exact, 0.25, according to the most recent data compiled by the World Bank, for 2020.
In concrete terms, in 2020, 318 people were murdered in Japan. For comparison purposes, in the same year in Brazil 50,000 people were killed. The Japanese data is from GunPolicy.org, a University of Sydney project that monitors access to guns around the world. The entity also points out that in 2018, the most recent number of the survey, 9 people were shot dead in the country, like Abe this Friday. According to Japan’s National Police Agency, the country recorded 10 firearm incidents throughout the past year, and only one of them left a person dead.
For Pedro Brites, an expert in Asia and professor of international relations at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, the attack “is shocking for the whole of Japanese society not only because of the representation that Abe has” in Japanese politics, the longest-serving prime minister in the country, “but because it was a public shooting, in the middle of a political discourse,” he says.
Since it was defeated in World War II, when it fought alongside Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Japan has gone through a process of demilitarization — it was even banned from having an army — and has moved towards a pacification of society, says Brites. In recent years, especially with the increase in tensions with China in the region, the country has been investing more and more in external security, but still maintains severe restrictions to control access to weapons internally.
According to GunPolicy.org, Japan prohibits civilian possession of automatic, semi-automatic and handguns. Rifles and shotguns are authorized in special cases for hunting or collection, but those who apply for this license must go through criminal background checks, mental health and drug addiction records, and it is necessary to take theoretical and practical classes to learn how to use them. equipment — where a minimum of 95% accuracy must be achieved in shooting lessons.
In addition, if there is a history of domestic violence in the family, the license may be revoked. Each registration allows possession of a weapon, but there is no ammunition restriction. Once the license is obtained, it is necessary to inform the authorities where the weapon will be kept, in a locked place, which will be inspected by the authorities. The ostensible carrying of weapons in public places is prohibited.
The assassination of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, however, was not carried out with a conventional weapon, controlled by the government, according to the little that is known about the case so far. According to local media, the weapon used in the crime is homemade.
For Brites, a professor at FGV, “perhaps the very belief in the security of Japanese society made it difficult to imagine such an event,” he says. According to TV channel Nippon, when Abe was talking to hundreds of voters at the door of a train station, only a specialized armed police officer was guarding him on Friday, in addition to local agents from the city of Nara, where the crime took place.
The episode raised concerns about the safety of officials in the country. “Anyone could have hit him from that distance,” Masazumi Nakajima, a former detective, told Japanese TV. “He needed to be covered on all sides,” said Koichi Ito, a security expert for the NHK TV channel.
That’s because, although Japan is among the safest places in the world, the country also has in its recent history other attacks against politicians, such as the attempted coup in 1936 that killed two former premiers. Shinzo Abe’s own grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, prime minister between 1957 and 1960, was stabbed days before leaving power as he left the official residence – he survived the attack.
In the same year, Inejiro Anasuma, leader of the Socialist Party of Japan, was killed by an ultranationalist militant with a samurai sword, shot in the abdomen. In 1978, days after being elected prime minister, Masayoshi Ohira was the target of a knife attack by a right-wing militant, but the attacker was intercepted before he was able to approach the prime minister.
Prior to Shinzo, the most recent shooting murder of a politician in the country had taken place in 2007, in the death of Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Itoh, killed by a Yakuza member during his fourth term re-election campaign.
