Drawing on interviews, published personal accounts and academic studies, Grossman investigates the psychology of killing in combat. Stressing that human beings have a powerful, innate resistance to the taking of life, he examines the techniques developed by the military to overcome that aversion. His provocative study focuses in particular on the Vietnam war, revealing how the American soldier was "enabled to kill to a far greater degree than any other soldier in history."
Grossman argues that the breakdown of American society, combined with the pervasive violence in the media and interactive video games, is conditioning our children to kill in a manner similar to the army's conditioning of soldiers: "We are reaching that stage of desensitization at which the infliction of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment: vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it." Grossman, a professor of military science at Arkansas State University, has written a study of relevance to a society of escalating violence.
The book has apparently been translated into Japanese. I wonder what readers in Japan would have made of a passage in the introduction. Grossman talks about rising rates of violent crime which he says is a "process...occurring around the world in nations that are exposed to media violence. The one exception is Japan". He expands:
If you have a destroyed immune system, your only hope is to live in a "bubble" that isolates you from potential contagions. Japan is an example of a nation living in a "violence bubble". In Japan, we see a powerful family and social structure; a homogenopus society with an intact, stable, and relatively homogenous criminal culture (which has a surprisingly "positive" group and leadership influence, at least as far as sanctioning freelancers); and an island nation with draconian control of not just guns but many other aspects of life.
This the Japanese have very few cultural, social, "forebrain" violence-enabling factors working against them, so we do not see nearly as much violence in their society. But they (like any nation that has a significant number of citizens with "acquired violence immune deficiency") are like weapons, sitting loaded with the safety off, just waiting for someone (another Tojo?) to pull the trigger.
The bottom line is that Japan can "accept" a higher degree of midbrain violence-enabling in the media because that variable is being held down by all the other factors, For a while. But this restraint can defy gravity for only so long. Certainly, their recent terrorist nerve-gas attacks have been sufficient to cause some soul-searching as Japan examines the degree to which media violence is causing its citizens to accept violence as a viable alternative.
It's not the first time someone has alleged that Japan is a ticking time bomb. You sometimes read or hear people wondering just how easy it would be for Japan to reacquire the mania of the wartime years.
In a sense, Grossman has to make this case against Japan otherwise his whole theory of the evils of a diet of media violence breaks down. I've had a look on the web to see if anyone has picked up on his assertions but haven't found anything.
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