Spurious arguments

Kansai Scene (KS) is a great free monthly magazine that provides listings on events, concerts, festivals and exhibitions in Kansai. it’s available at many restaurants, pubs and nightspots in Osaka (i’m not sure where you can it in other parts of Kansai), and our lovely BOE has copies delivered every month for us to take.

i value KS most for its listings and the amusing personal ads, as well as valuable restaurant reviews and recommendations. it sometimes has good articles, although most often they’re okay, and rather frequently you get a terrible one or one that has the odd, very dubious sentence.

the KS article that i have taken greatest issue with is by far this month’s feature article “Unarmed Utopia”. The main aim of the article is unclear, although I think the writer is attempting to compare gun ownership and armed robbery – and the relationship between the two - in the USA and Japan.

That, however, is not the biggest problem in the article. The biggest problem would be the numerous fallacious arguments present – from start to finish, in fact. Many of them are only hinted at, in the way in which paragraphs are laid out; take for example the end of the first paragraph and the paragraph it’s followed by:

“Everyone seems to carry cash in Japan, but unlike America, why don’t they get robbed?

The law is simple in Japan: no one can bear firearms (or swords) under any circumstance. The only citizens allowed to possess weapons are police and the military, along with those with hunting licenses (albeit highly restrictive). With one of the world’s lowest crime rates, gun crime is consequently nearly nonexistent. Anti-gun lobbies proclaim Japan as the kind of nation America should be.”

I dont know if it’s intentional or not, but from a literary point of view, it can well be said that the writer implies that the low rates of armed robbery in Japan is linked to the illegal nature of the bearing of firearms simply by innocuously having that paragraph succeed the rhetorical question. That argument, of course, is ridiculous, as you definitely don’t need a gun to rob someone – a blade of any sort would suffice. And given the number of elderly people in Japan, a robber has plenty of targets which might not even require much use of force or threat at all.

In the middle of the article, the writer makes some explicitly expressed, horribly spurious arguments:

“The issue of how guns fit into the overall relationship between the people and the government still stands. It could be argued that Japan is a police state, with a population overwhelmingly compliant to searches and questionings when under suspicion. Evidently, the Japanese criminal justice system has complete authority and turns a confession rate of nearly 95%. With the prevalence of absolute government power, it seems people do not wish to defy authority by owning guns for personal protection. Most Japanese simply accept that there are essentially no rights to privacy because there is no right to bear arms.

This submissiveness in society comes easier to the Japanese than Americans because Japan is far more ethnically and economically homogenous. Moreover, they willingly comply with one of the most unyielding criminal justice systems of any democratic nation–guns or not, the Japanese are simply the world’s most law-abiding people.”

Like, HUH?

How could anyone make such grand leaps in reasoning? Japanese people do not own guns for protection because there is simply NO NEED TO. it bears absolutely no relation to them being generally deferent to authority!

And the assumption that rights to privacy equates to the right to bear arms – I have no idea how they could be in anyway be argued to be related (and as you can see, the writer didnt elaborate on that either). Besides, if i wanted personal protection, i could always carry a switchblade around, but i’m sure you wouldnt find many japanese people who do that.

As for the opinion that the Japanese are more submissive because they’re more ethnically and economically homogeneous – that’s an extremely racist line of reasoning. It’s precisely what the proponents of nihonjinron use as a reason for all the arguments that they make, arguments which so many scholars take issue with due to its racist attitude.

Besides, if we look at the American side of things, it’s not even like Americans own guns because they’re thinking “hey, i have the right to own firearms, and yes, let me now exercise that right and go out and buy a gun” -I’m sure it’s more because they feel the need for the supposed protection that a gun might provide, although if it really is gun ownership for the sake of exercising their right to do so, then I all have to say is that those people who think that way are grand idiots.