Okay I'll give that "Imperial rule" in the literal term, isn't a good way to put it - but the people were under the full control of their feudal lords, their daimyo, and other terms, from almost the beginning. One of them won and became the Emperor, thus "uniting" them and ruling over all the daimyo's somewhere around the 1600's yea, but my point was not the term, but rather how they've lived - being under "Feudal" rule has no more "rights" and "freedoms" than being under "Imperial" rule. For the average person nothing changed between the rule of a diamyo and having an emperor, they still lived under their diamyo's thumb; they submitted to someone being in power. And even in their home lives, the entire family was kind of subordinate to the father and mother, and they to theirs, and on and on until there was a "tradition" of respect for elders that still exists today. As a person, pretty much no matter who you are in Japan, you honor your parents and your family name, you honor your history, your "goodness" - which is also part of their religion as well - Shinto (like 80%) which is very much like Buddism (which is pretty much what the rest of them follow,) both are religions that teach inner peace as a path to "salvation" as it is.
You're incorrect on the latter though; the sword, and later, gun control measures came into being because the Emperor wasn't happy with his underlings rebelling against him/her and thus disarmed their warriors, the samuri, in an effort to prevent being overthrown (again) - the /people/ had absolutely nothing to do with that decision at all. Not that they would care, because as I noted, and as was my point, they've been under the thumb of someone pretty much since they came into being as a civilization - and before they were "Japanese" they were "Chinese," not exactly known for their "freedom" either. Quite simply put, Asian's are, in general, a less "independent" sort, they don't mind being told what to do. Their traditions, religion(s), and over-all culture teaches them that they follow instruction, follow ritual, etc., and so they do. Not having to make such political decisions frees them up to find their "inner peace" or whatever, which I suppose is what you seek as well (Seriously maybe you should move to Japan, I have friends there and they love it. Of course they're uber capitalist over there so bring some cash.)
Anyway, my bottom line was that being "violent" or even "free" isn't really a part of their ideology, it's not socially acceptable to be violent, it's not socially acceptable to do crimes, it's not socially acceptable to step out of line, its not socially acceptable to fail either. That is /not/ the US in any way shape or form, we're damn near polar opposites culturally/societally. So to compare the violence here with the violence there, while completely ignoring the cultural, and even religious, differences is quite frankly, stupid.
As for executions in "industrialized nations", uhm... So what about Japan? They have over a hundred people on death row right now and not two months ago dropped the floor boards out from under some guy. Like 150,000 people signed a petition to have these guy's hung - because a single so-called "accidental murder" (aka one that takes place during a robbery) isn't usually given the noose. Was three guys, the one guy surrendered because if you surrender you don't get executed, so he ratted the other two out saying he'd just planned to rob her and the other two decided to try to rape and murder her. (She wasn't raped, the other two stopped that.) Anyway, the third one is also serving life because the people didn't push for his execution, which I find a bit odd because those two admitted they were hanging on either end of a rope around the poor gals neck trying to strangle her, but the one who executed had beat her head with a hammer, "at minimum 30 times" according to the police, trying /unsuccessfully/ to kill her before they found the rope, so I guess that's the line for the people's outrage. But I digress.
Singapore and South Korea are the other two "industrialized nations" who have executions. We could also debate that China should be included in the list of "industrialized nations" that still practice execution (like a lot, over 550 last year.) For perspective, Texas has put a grand total of 528 to death since 1976 and the total for all of the US since then is like 1,400...
Execution is only legal in 19 states, it was abolished in mine before we even became a state because the people felt it was being used racially. A friend of the family wrote a paper on modern diversity in Alaska and found the racism/capital punishment link during his research; really interesting/sad stuff, back in the 1930's the people of one of our larger cities today, lead by a US marshal, petitioned President Roosevelt to pardon a Native who'd been sentenced to hanging for killing his mother-in-law, but the president denied it. This poor guy was represented by the mayor of the city the crime occurred in and by all accounts the mayor just kind of blew off the case. The marshal I mentioned above wanted to witness for the guy, basically that the guy and his mother-in-law had been drunk for like four days straight celebrating a great fishing season and were both totally off their rockers the night she died, but the Mayor didn't even present the marshal's statement to the court/jury, much less put the Marshal on the witness stand; the marshal went to the mayor to press to go on the stand in the natives defense but it was too late, the jury had given their sentence. The Mayor didn't even show up to present closing arguments for the poor guy; just sickening >.< There's also report that the marshals had never, and had no idea how to, build a scaffold to hang someone so they had to call down to the lower 48 for instructions and check out library books, but they didn't want to know "who did it" so they fanagaled in extra dummy pull's so they wouldn't have to know who actually killed the poor guy, because not one of them felt he should be put to death. The native wrote a farewell letter to the marshal that basically said, I know you tried, it's not your fault. A young reporter who was invited to witness the execution wrote a heart-wrenching piece about it, but he refused to publish it because he felt the whole thing was horrible; his piece was found after he passed away and given to a local museum. We Alaskan's were keenly aware of a racial issue with death penalties up here by the early 1940's; one of our senior judges on our Ninth was a big voice for eliminating capital punishment because of the racism connection. Thus we said, nope, not going to play that game anymore. We became a state in '59.
Anyway, Alaska isn't alone in it's stance on execution, like Michigan's constitution actually forbids executions, and I'm pretty sure Hawaii never had legal executions either. In more "modern" times, SCOTUS ruled that execution was only allowed for murder back in the 70's (at least in the civil arena, the Feds can execute for certain crimes. There's also some kind of loop hole around raping a kid so you could possibly get executed for that if you were in one of the capital offense states.) The US also expressly forbids executing anyone with mental deficiencies (I think it's IQ70?,) no one under the age of 18 at the time of the crime. There's a bunch of other qualifiers on it being sentenced too. Texas is the big one for capital punishment, they don't like to **** around down there, they do like three times as many executions as the next highest number of executions state (don't remember which sorry.) California has the most on death row, but does the least executions (I believe.)
So I mean looking at the country as a whole, that variety of opinion and who has capital punishment and just about anything else you can form an opinion on, it's kind of a reflection of who American's are. We're a diverse and independent people with a lot of differing opinions and "morals" across the country. Which was my point in your comparing the crime rates - we are nothing like Japan, our people are not like the Japanese. We are /different/ and that's part of why our crime stats are /different/ from theirs.
If you want to talk about getting our crime rates under control, then lets talk about all the stupid shit we lock people up for. If you want to talk about gun crime, then lets look at /who/ is committing gun crimes and /why/ they are doing it. If you want to talk about gun control, then say /that/ and put it in the context of /reality/, not some fantasy world where Americans and Japanese are cut from the same cloth and culture.
Though I might suggest a new thread for that discussion, because we're terribly OT here
