Does Japan’s Police Force Fire Too Rarely?

On the evening of August 4, 2026, in Kawachinagano, Osaka Prefecture, a police officer fired at a sixty-year-old man who was approaching officers with a knife.

The officer warned him, “I’ll shoot” and “Put it down,” then fired an initial warning shot into the air. When the man continued to advance, the officer fired a second round. It struck the man in the left side of his chest. He died at the hospital, and the announced cause of death was hemorrhagic shock from the gunshot wound.

Osaka Prefectural Police said that the case appeared to meet the legal requirements for firing but that the details remained under investigation. Kansai TV’s detailed report, TV Asahi’s report

Watching the footage, many people will think that the officer might have been stabbed had he not fired.

Others will ask whether, given that a person died, there truly was no other option.

Both reactions have reasons behind them.

But if the discussion is confined to the few seconds captured by the question “Should the officer have fired?”, it misses the most important issue.

A police bullet is not justified only at the instant the trigger is pulled.

Its legitimacy must be tested at least three times.

The first test comes before shooting becomes necessary. How far did society go to prevent the dangerous encounter, and did it give officers time, distance, equipment, information and alternatives?

The second comes at the instant of the shot. Was there an imminent threat to life? Could a lesser use of force have stopped it? Was the force used proportionate to the danger?

The third comes after the shot. Is the case left to the police’s own account, or are the evidence preserved, the decision opened to independent review and citizens given a meaningful way to challenge it?

This article compares Japan, the United States, England and Wales, and Germany.

Its purpose is not to rank which country has the “best” police.

It is to read differences in shooting numbers as evidence about the society that creates a need to shoot and the institutions that make a single shot legitimate.

This article is based on information published by August 9, 2026. Osaka Prefectural Police was still investigating the details of the Kawachinagano case, and this article does not determine whether that individual shooting was justified. National statistics also use different definitions and reporting periods—such as “firearms discharge,” “shots at persons” and “death caused by police”—so their raw totals are not directly comparable.

What happened in the Kawachinagano shooting?

According to news reports, at around 7 p.m. on August 4, several callers reported that “a blood-covered man with a kitchen knife is acting violently.”

Five officers arrived. The man was reportedly several meters away, carrying a knife and moving toward the officers, and did not obey their warnings.

A police sergeant first fired a warning shot into the air. Immediately afterward, he fired a second shot toward the man.

Reports said the footage also appeared to show the man stabbing his own body after the shooting. A forensic autopsy, however, determined that the cause of death was hemorrhagic shock from the bullet wound to his chest.

Two errors must be avoided when thinking about the case.

One is for those of us repeatedly viewing video from a place of safety to behave as if we possessed more usable information than an officer forced to decide within seconds.

The other is to treat the fact that the scene was dangerous as a reason why scrutiny is unnecessary.

The possibility that officers faced grave danger and the need to investigate the state’s use of lethal force can both be true.

Protecting police officers and investigating their gunfire are not opposites. A review system capable of establishing the facts also protects officers who acted lawfully from lasting public suspicion.

When may a Japanese police officer use a handgun?

Japanese police officers do not have unrestricted discretion to shoot at people.

Article 7 of the Police Duties Execution Act permits an officer to use a weapon when there are reasonable grounds to consider it necessary for arresting an offender, preventing escape, protecting oneself or another person, or suppressing resistance to official duty—and only to the extent reasonably necessary under the circumstances.

The use of a weapon in a way that harms a person is further limited, in principle, to cases such as lawful self-defense or necessity, or circumstances in which a person who committed a serious offense resists or flees and cannot otherwise be arrested. e-Gov, Police Duties Execution Act

The Rules on the Use and Handling of Handguns by Police Officers arrange advance warnings, warning shots and shots directed at a person in stages.

As a rule, an officer gives warning before firing. When a warning shot is an appropriate means of stopping a person, the officer may fire the minimum necessary number of rounds in a safe direction. But a warning shot is not required first when the danger is imminent or when warning is considered unlikely to stop the person. e-Gov, Rules on the Use and Handling of Handguns by Police Officers

Notably, these rules do not require the cinematic sequence of “shooting the leg to disable the suspect.”

Limbs are small, moving targets, and a missed round can endanger a third person. By the time a handgun is used, its purpose is not to punish someone less severely. It is to stop an imminent danger.

The legitimacy of a shot therefore cannot be determined solely by where the bullet struck.

It requires a time-based reconstruction of the distance between the person and officers, the type and position of the knife, the speed of approach, the response to warnings, bystanders, cover, possible retreat and the equipment available.

A global comparison: the numbers reveal institutions, not national character

The latest published figures differ greatly in scale.

Country or region	Basic model of police armament	Example of the latest published figure	Caution when reading the number
Japan	Uniformed officers generally carry handguns	Individual incidents such as this one are announced, but a national annual series directly comparable to the British definition is difficult to identify	Statistics on “firearm incidents” do not necessarily isolate shots fired by police
England and Wales	Most officers are not routinely armed; specially trained firearms officers are deployed	In the year ending March 2026, there were 17,584 armed operations and 9 incidents in which police fired at people	The 9 is a count of shooting incidents, not deaths
Germany	Officers routinely carry handguns	In 2025, firearms were discharged at people in 77 incidents and official statistics recorded 16 deaths	Figures aggregate sixteen federal states; definitions and finalization dates can differ
United States	Officers routinely carry firearms; agencies and rules are decentralized	At least 1,201 people were killed by police in 2025, with 95 percent killed by gunfire	This is a death count, not a count of firing incidents, and it is a nongovernmental compilation rather than a complete federal dataset

Sources: UK Home Office, “Police use of firearms statistics, April 2025 to March 2026”, report based on German Police University statistics, 2025 Police Violence Report

The table does not permit the conclusion that Japanese officers are cautious while American officers are aggressive.

Police do not decide in a vacuum.

The chance that a civilian has a gun, the quality of information received with a call, the time until backup arrives, the number of responding officers, vehicles and shields, less-lethal equipment, connections with health and welfare services, and the legal consequences after firing all shape decisions at the scene.

The Small Arms Survey’s 2017 estimate put civilian-held firearms at 120.5 per one hundred residents in the United States and 0.3 in Japan. These estimates are not a real-time ownership rate, but they show that officers in the two countries face profoundly different background probabilities when assessing whether someone may have a gun. Small Arms Survey, “Civilian Firearms Holdings, 2017”

When an American officer conducts a traffic stop or responds to a domestic-violence call, the possibility that the other person is armed is far more realistic than it generally is in Japan.

The officer must therefore consider the risk of being shot before seeing the other person draw a weapon. Civilians, in turn, know that police are considering them potentially armed, and tension rises.

Widespread gun ownership does more than increase the number of weapons available to criminals.

It creates a society in which police and civilians mutually predict that the other may shoot first.

This is an armament of mutual expectations, larger than the character of any individual officer.

If Japanese police fire less often, the achievement should not be credited solely to restraint at the scene. Strict gun regulation has also made the expectation that a civilian is carrying a firearm exceptionally rare.

England and Wales: not eliminating police guns, but dividing the situations in which they are used

Most police officers in England and Wales do not routinely carry firearms. Incidents assessed as especially dangerous are assigned to specially trained armed officers and armed-response vehicles.

In the year ending March 2026, police conducted 17,584 armed operations but fired at people in nine incidents.

The most revealing fact is not simply that nine is a small number.

It is that armed response is institutionally separated from ordinary policing.

Threat assessment, command responsibility, specialist training, negotiation, containment and documentation can be built into the process before a shot. College of Policing guidance calls, where possible, for distance and time, early negotiation, evacuation from the surrounding area, cover, less-lethal options and attention to a subject’s mental condition and capacity to communicate. College of Policing, “Armed deployment”

The model cannot simply be copied into Japan.

Unarmed first responders can themselves face grave danger, and some incidents will not wait for a firearms team to arrive.

Yet the British arrangement poses an important question.

Can the time before gunfire be designed by an organization, instead of leaving the entire outcome to one person’s reflexes?

Germany: routine armament does not make the country another United States

Like their Japanese counterparts, German police officers routinely carry handguns.

Nevertheless, German police fired at people in 77 incidents in 2025, with 16 deaths recorded in official statistics—a scale far below that of the United States.

The difference demonstrates that police shootings cannot be explained by the single binary of routinely armed versus unarmed.

At the same time, Germany recorded 21 deaths from police gunfire in 2024 and 16 in 2025, prompting debate about a rise in shooting and police encounters with people in mental crisis.

Nor does providing a supposedly less-lethal weapon such as a Taser automatically reduce handgun use. If the structure of response remains the same, an additional tool may merely enlarge the menu of force available to police.

Equipment alone cannot import an institution.

Shields, capture poles, Tasers, protective clothing and body cameras may all matter. But no object becomes safe merely because it is not called a handgun. Its use still requires rules about distance, command, the danger being addressed, the intended outcome and what happens if the tool fails.

Weber: the state monopolizes violence, not legitimacy

In “Politics as a Vocation,” the sociologist Max Weber described the modern state as a human community that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”

The sentence is often misread to mean that state violence is inherently legitimate.

Weber’s point was not that the state automatically possesses moral rightness. It was that the state occupies the central position in deciding whose force is lawful and whose becomes a crime.

When a civilian carrying a knife injures someone, the act is treated as a crime.

When a police officer injures someone with a handgun, the act may be an exercise of public authority if statutory requirements are met.

The difference cannot be reduced to a uniform or a job title.

Police force must be connected to law, training, command, necessity, proportionality, records and subsequent review.

When those connections fail, state violence approaches something different: not legitimate violence, but violence that only the state has permitted itself.

The state may monopolize authority to use a weapon. It cannot own the rightness of that use. Rightness must be demonstrated anew in every case.

Shklar: an officer’s fear and a citizen’s fear do not carry the same institutional weight

In “The Liberalism of Fear,” political philosopher Judith Shklar placed the cruelty and fear produced by power among the first political evils to be avoided. Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear”

The fear felt by an officer approached by a person carrying a knife is real.

People watching later must not trivialize it. Police officers have a right to protect their own lives and a duty to protect other people.

Yet the officer’s fear and the fear of a civilian facing a police gun are not institutionally symmetrical.

On the officer’s side stand the state’s weapon, organization, communications, backup, arrest powers and a legal system capable of authorizing the shot. The civilian has almost no way to challenge the officer’s judgment in that moment.

This asymmetry produces a heavier burden of explanation on the state.

That does not mean beginning with the assumption that an officer is lying.

It means that the side entrusted with the greatest force must give the fullest account.

If review ends with “the officer was afraid too,” fear becomes both a cause of firing and an immunity shielding that firing from scrutiny.

The answer is not to deny fear.

It is to provide training and equipment that reduce error within fear, and afterward to test how the fear corresponded to the objective danger.

Pettit: even a proper shot can become domination when no one may challenge it

Political philosopher Philip Pettit defines freedom not simply as the absence of interference, but as the absence of subjection to arbitrary power.

Even if a ruler is benevolent and happens not to interfere, we are not fully free when that person could intervene at will and we have no effective way to contest the decision. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Republicanism”, Philip Pettit, “Republican Political Theory”

Applied to policing, the legitimacy of a shooting cannot depend only on whether the officer acted in good faith.

Was the basis of the decision recorded?

Were video, radio traffic, emergency calls, positions, distances and ballistics preserved?

Can the person affected or the bereaved family seek an explanation?

Can an institution outside the police examine not only possible illegality, but also deficiencies in training and equipment?

Are findings published in a form the public can question?

Without these conditions, citizens may have to accept that “the police investigated the police and decided that the police acted properly”—even if the shot was in fact justified.

In England and Wales, deaths and serious injuries caused by police gunfire are among the grave incidents referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct. The IOPC can conduct an independent investigation using footage, radio and phone records, testimony, policies and expert opinion. IOPC, “Investigations”

The British system has itself faced criticism over delay and decisions, and the mere existence of an independent body does not manufacture trust.

Still, it matters that investigation by someone other than the police is part of the normal procedure rather than an exceptional concession.

The state’s bullet is not made legitimate when it is fired. It gains the opportunity to become legitimate only when citizens can question it afterward.

The UN standard: the objective is not to kill a person, but to stop a threat to life

The United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials limit firearms to circumstances such as defense against an imminent threat of death or serious injury. They say intentional lethal use may be made only when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life. OHCHR, “Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials”

The crucial point is that the purpose is not to kill the person.

The purpose is to stop the threat to life.

Even where the force used carries a high likelihood of death, the decision must center on necessity—not punishment, revenge or anger.

This shows that the declaration “the shooting was proper” can refer to two distinct levels.

The first asks whether the officer had reasonable grounds at the scene to choose gunfire.

The second asks whether the state had built a system, before and after the incident, that could have reduced the need to kill.

The first can be satisfied while the second still needs improvement.

A legal finding that an individual officer acted properly does not conflict with reform aimed at resolving a similar encounter without gunfire next time.

Japan needs neither a moralistic “never shoot” nor immunity to “shoot whenever necessary”

Japanese debate can divide into two extremes.

One says that because a person died, the officer should have avoided shooting at any cost.

The other says that because a person approached with a knife, firing was self-evidently proper and that review itself will make officers dangerously hesitant.

Both simplify the scene.

Situations can arise in which hesitation costs the life of a citizen or officer.

At the same time, if the word “dangerous” becomes a blanket authorization for lethal force, the requirements of necessity and proportionality become empty.

Japan needs more than demands that individual officers be brave or careful. It needs the following institutions.

1. Publish nationally standardized firearm-use statistics every year

Using common definitions, publish the number of occasions on which officers aimed handguns, fired warning shots, fired at people and discharged individual rounds; injuries and deaths; weapons carried by subjects; signs of mental crisis; availability of body-camera video; and investigation outcomes.

Because shootings are rare, Japan cannot learn if the information from each case disappears.

Rarity is not a reason to avoid statistics. It is a reason to share every case nationally.

2. Automatically refer deaths and serious injuries to independent investigation

The inquiry should examine not only criminal illegality but also command, equipment, staffing, call information, negotiation, emergency treatment and lessons for training.

Even when an officer acted lawfully, a conclusion delivered by an institution outside the police is better able to protect trust in that officer and the organization.

3. Expand pre-shooting choices through both equipment and operations

Police need shields, protective equipment, training to create distance and use cover, multi-officer response, negotiators and cooperation with medical and mental-health teams.

Distributing less-lethal equipment is not enough. Rules must cover the person involved, the distance, surroundings and the danger if the tool fails.

4. Preserve the process of judgment, not only video

Body cameras matter, but a camera shows only one line of sight.

Emergency calls, radio traffic, commands, positions at the scene, the interval between warning and firing, and medical aid should be integrated so that investigators can reconstruct what officers knew, what they predicted and how they decided.

5. Do not make review synonymous with punishment

If every shooting is treated only as scandal, people at the scene become defensive and may hide information.

Accountability for deliberate or grave violations must be separated from the learning process that identifies improvements even in lawful cases.

The objective is not to choose between protecting an officer and protecting a citizen.

It is to raise the probability that both will return alive the next time an officer and citizen meet in the same circumstances.

Conclusion: the most legitimate bullet is the one society prevented an officer from having to fire

We cannot fully inhabit the seconds experienced by the officer in Kawachinagano.

Even with video, we cannot recreate the exact distance from the knife, the fear of its approach or the possibility that the officer or a colleague would be injured.

That is why easy condemnation is wrong.

For the same reason, debate should not close with an equally easy declaration that the shot was proper.

In Japan, where police gunfire is rare, each shot tends to be treated as an exception.

An exception has two opposing effects.

Because it is rare, it receives intense coverage.

Because it is rare, comparable data and independent review systems are less likely to develop.

Japan must overcome this paradox of rarity.

The low level of police firearm use is an important achievement.

But if it is explained only by saying that Japanese officers are excellent and restrained, we overlook the social conditions that reduce shooting: gun regulation, public safety, training at the scene and cooperation from residents.

We also lose sight of the responsibility to investigate each case thoroughly precisely because there are so few.

A shot must be justified three times.

Before it, did society try to avoid the encounter?

At the instant it was fired, did the officer use the minimum force necessary to protect life?

Afterward, did the state open that judgment to public scrutiny?

None of the three is sufficient alone.

A police force that does not shoot is not one in which officers simply suppress the impulse to fire. It is one in which society creates the conditions that allow officers not to fire.

And when a bullet truly had to be fired, its legitimacy must not remain enclosed within the police’s own words.

The most trustworthy police force is not one that never makes an error.

It is one whose greatest power can withstand being questioned by the society that granted it.

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Frequently asked questions

When may a Japanese police officer fire a handgun?

An officer may use a weapon when there are reasonable grounds to consider it necessary for arrest, prevention of escape, defense of the officer or another person, or suppression of resistance—and only to a reasonably necessary extent. A shot that harms a person requires narrower conditions, such as lawful self-defense or necessity, or a situation in which a suspect in a serious crime cannot otherwise be arrested.

Why not aim at the legs of a person carrying a knife?

Limbs are small and mobile, making them difficult targets, and a missed bullet can endanger a third person. Gunfire is not a step intended to inflict a minor injury. It is a last resort for stopping an imminent threat to life. Review must consider distance, movement, surroundings and available alternatives, not only the body part struck.

Why is police gunfire so different in Japan and the United States?

Many factors matter, including law, police organization, training and racial and regional inequality. The civilian gun environment is especially important. In a society where another person is much more likely to have a firearm, officers may assess a threat as lethal earlier. The difference cannot be explained by personality alone.

Do all British police officers work without guns?

No. Most ordinary officers in England and Wales do not routinely carry firearms, but specially trained armed officers and armed-response vehicles are available. Northern Ireland has different conditions, and officers there routinely carry firearms.

Was the Kawachinagano shooting justified?

Osaka Prefectural Police said it appeared to meet the requirements for firing, but the details remained under investigation as of August 9, 2026. A final judgment should not rest on video alone. It requires evidence about the call, distance, warnings, the man’s movement, available equipment and ballistics.

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Questions raised by this case

Why do we so often treat protecting an officer’s life and independently investigating that officer’s gunfire as opposing goals?

In Japan, where shootings are rare, should nationally standardized statistics and third-party review accompany an individual announcement that a shot was “proper”?

Can a society in which civilians possess large numbers of guns reduce police shooting without also changing civilian gun ownership?

When the state possesses the power to take a life, what ultimately legitimizes that power: law, the officer’s judgment, an independent institution or public acceptance?

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References

• Yahoo! Japan News article supplied for this analysis
• Kansai TV, detailed report on the shooting
• TV Asahi, “Man with knife dies after police shooting”
• e-Gov, Police Duties Execution Act
• e-Gov, Rules on the Use and Handling of Handguns by Police Officers
• OHCHR, “Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials”
• UK Home Office, “Police use of firearms statistics, April 2025 to March 2026”
• College of Policing, “Armed deployment”
• Independent Office for Police Conduct, “Investigations”
• Analysis based on German Police University’s 2025 statistics
• 2025 Police Violence Report
• The Washington Post, “Police shootings database 2015–2024”
• Small Arms Survey, “Civilian Firearms Holdings, 2017”
• Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”
• Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear”
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Republicanism”
• Philip Pettit, “Republican Political Theory”