I knew something was up this morning when I turned on NHK and I heard an English-speaking voice before the tube warmed up. Sure enough, there was another crazy shooting at a school in the States. Info is still hard to come by at this point, but it's only a matter of time before all the details come to light. Today, nobody at school bothered to ask, but I'm sure very soon someone will ask me about this disturbing incident. And, well, what can you do in that situation?
This doesn't much help the average Japanese person's image of America. Coming from a largely safe, gun-free society, such large scale killings seem hard to imagine (although Japan has certainly it's fair share of disturbing crime). Of course, you can see it in the news coverage too. Yep, "Gun Scoiety" it says in Japanese on the TV. Listings of previous school shootings scroll by, literally, like the opening to Star Wars. Violent movies exported from America probably don't help much either.
I don't have a gun. I've never fired a gun. To the best of my knowledge, none of my friends have or use guns. But still as the only available American, I will be asked to explain why it is exactly there are so many guns in America, why Americans apparently enjoy shooting each other, why these school shootings now seem to be a yearly event. I don't have any easy answers for these. I doubt that many Americans do. But these are the kind of things that happen when you go abroad to represent your country on the JET program(me).