It's possible for private citizens to have firearms in Japan (although difficult indeed for non-citizens), but generally only for sporting purposes. Those purposes can range from hunting (which I don't do) to target competition (which I often have, although I'd not been competing much for the last few years). Thus my self-defense firearms are stored (securely) at a house I have in the Portland area, while I have the long-range stuff (and one pistol...yes the Baer 38Super!) stashed at a range on Guam. I've made a fair few trips to the latter since I came to Japan; I hate the idea of falling out of practice.

I don't really mind being disarmed in Japan. It's an incredibly safe country.

Japanese politics are very, very "interesting" right now, btw. There's a change in Prime Ministers in the works, and it's been a bit chaotic. For a while, it looked like newly-elected head of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party (don't be fooled by the name: they're the right-wing mainstream party, with only the fringe Sanseito party being further right) Sanae Takaichi looking to have the easy inside track to the Premiership. But then her party's coalition junior partner, Komeito, ended that relationship over some earlier slush fund scandals on the part of the old oji-sans that run the show and some problems with Takaichi's pretty hardcore nationalist conservative stances. It then looked like Komeito'd end up being part of a coalition with the largest opposition party, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and a smaller centrist party, the Japan Innovation Party (JIP). That coalition would have had enough votes in the critical lower house to have a candidate beat Takaichi. But that coalition died a'borning, with "non-negotiable" differences in policy between the three members. Now Takaichi has formed an unexpected coalition with the JIP which has her only two votes short of the needed majority to put her in power. She's very much the front runner again!

I have mixed feelings about her. I don't mind that she's a "China hawk" (strongly pro-Taiwan and prepared to counter China's bullying tactics in regional geopolitics) or her position on Japan's re-armament. But her connections to ultranationalist groups is a problem (some of those folk are bad news...), and more importantly, some of her fiscal policies are likely to be inflationary, something Japan needs to avoid. The former stuff is a bad look; the latter is dubious policy. I kinda like that she'd be the first female Prime Minister for Japan...but I'm really not the symbolism type, as I suspect you might (correctly) assume. We'll see what happens...and in the next few days!