The Specter of 3D-Printed Guns Rises in Gun-Free Japan

Yoshitomo Imura, a 27-year-old employee of the Shonan Institute of Technology, was arrested for 3D-printing guns, and the incident quickly made headlines around the globe. Japan’s firearm laws are extremely restrictive compared to the US—unless you’re a cop or in the military, you’re not allowed to own a handgun. So it raised plenty of eyebrows when Imura made a very American-seeming call for more gun rights in a society where guns and gun deaths are nearly non-existent.

The arrest itself unprecedented, the Japan Times reports, because it’s the first time the country has had to apply its gun control laws to firearms made by 3D printers. And violations in general are exceptionally rare. In 2008, there were just eleven gun-related homicides in the entire county. In the US, there were over twelve thousand.

Without 3D printing, it’s really difficult to buy a gun in Japan. Handguns are off-limits, and if you want to buy a rifle, you have to first obtain three separate permits, attend educational lectures, and pass a test on gun safety. After you finally get your gun, you have to get a separate permit from the police to purchase ammunition. Rick Sacca, an American living in Shizuoka, told the Japan Times that the extensive background checks by police would be considered a violation of privacy in the US since police interview employers, neighbors, friends, and even local government officials.

Contrast this with the lax laws in many US states, where gun violence is rampant. In Texas, you don’t need a permit to buy a gun of nearly any kind, although you do need a permit to carry it with you. In Georgia, a now-infamous “guns everywhere” law allows citizens to carry their guns in public places, from movie theaters to schools, without any kind of government oversight. Unsurprisingly, researchers have linked the relaxing of gun control laws to an increase in gun-related deaths.

So how exactly did Imura get the idea or the means to print firearms in Japan’s highly restrictive and gun-shy environment? The blueprints were downloaded from an overseas server, according to local news reports. The case will again bring attention to Cody Wilson, the 25-year-old cryptoanarchist on the forefront of the 3D printed gun movement in the US, and whose Defense Distributed organization is likely the source of the blueprints that Imura downloaded.

“In a way that people say, like, you’re being unrealistic about printing a gun. I think it’s more unrealistic now, especially going forward, to think you could ever control this technology,” Wilson once told Motherboard. So it’s pretty clearly not just the open source gun blueprints that Imura uploaded. Wilson, for his part, has already commented on Imura's arrest.

"Yoshitomo Imura is a person of strong character and virtue under unfavorable circumstances," he wrote on the Defense Distributed blog. He expressed with his work only virtue, but this virtue is ostracized by his society. He performed his work in the open, without suspicion, fear or dishonor. That he must harvest persecution and calamity for his creative and intrepid instincts is an indictment of his tame and mediocre society."

Echoing Wilson's views—as well as a prominent belief of American gun rights advocates nationwide—Imura reportedly wrote in an online post that “the right to bear firearms is a basic human right.”

The pro-gun ideology that Imura is espousing is not characteristic of postwar Japanese culture, according to scholars like Anne Alison. In her article “From Ashes to Cyborgs”, which focuses on Japan’s rise to technological and economic prominence in the post-war years, she writes that after the atomic bomb and subsequent de-militarization of Japan, the nation has had a distinctly ambivalent relationship with potentially destructive technologies and their potentially disastrous consequences.

So it makes sense that Imura’s suspiciously American-sounding crypto-libertarian call for more gun rights would stir concern, and not just because in the US, tens of thousands of lives are lost every year to gun violence. It might also be the rising specter of yet another destructive technology, taken as a potentially destabilizing threat to Japan’s social order.