Japan’s Premier Calls for Curbs on Handguns

TOKYO — Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa called Tuesday for a crackdown on handguns, in the latest expression of public fear that this bastion of safe streets is increasingly erupting in violent crime.

Despite a strict ban on the private ownership of handguns, a three-day spree of violent crime last week shook the public and set off hand-wringing editorials in major newspapers.

First, an amphetamine-crazed drifter shot a police officer to death, wounded another, seriously injured a homemaker and kidnaped a 3-year-old before finally being arrested the next day after a 1,400-officer manhunt.

That same day, Thursday, 40 police cars and a helicopter staged an unsuccessful, seven-hour chase in a Tokyo suburb after two gun-toting robbers made off with more than $4,500 from a pachinko parlor. On Friday, a disgruntled contractor shot and killed three construction company employees.

Such crime may be routine in Los Angeles--it’s unlikely that 40 police cars would be deployed to run down similar robbery suspects. But the graphic film footage was so rare for Tokyo that some TV stations devoted half-hour specials to the killing of the police officer, for instance, complete with a map of the drifter’s escape route and commentary on what it bodes for Japanese society.

And the crime statistics that are setting off alarms in Tokyo might be greeted with sighs of relief in Southern California. In May, for instance, Tokyo recorded seven murders among its 8.5 million people, compared to 65 recorded among Los Angeles’ 3.5 million.

Yet the Tokyo figure was the highest since record-keeping began in 1951, and it was decried in one Japanese newspaper as an “appalling total.” In an editorial this week, the Mainichi newspaper described the gun-related violence as “the growing Americanization of crime in this country” and surmised that the trend was inevitable given the “assimilation of that lifestyle across the Pacific into our own.”

In any case, what seems to be shaking the Japanese is the knowledge that the recent spree of gun-related crime was not committed by yakuza --which in turn has set off alarms that handguns are spreading beyond the world of tattooed gangsters.

In a roundup of 329 illegal handguns in March, one-fourth were held by people not associated with organized crime. Overall, police estimate that there may be 90,000 illegal handguns in Japan. Few, however, are confiscated. Last year, according to the National Police Agency, 1,032 handguns were seized, compared to 963 the previous year.

A spokesman said that most guns were smuggled in from the United States via the Philippines. However, smuggling rings from China have also been broken up in recent months.