Guns aren't banned in Japan, although I think the Japanese gov't is perfectly happy letting the world think that.

And hunting in Japan is actually very good. There are only about 250,000 hunters in the whole country. And my friend says the locals are all pretty much just road hunters. They wait for a good snowfall to drive the deer down out of the mountains (and just about the entire country consists of mountains) then nail them. The guy who sent me the pics says if you just get up into the hills a little off the road, you have the entire place to yourself. You, and the half dozen or so other Americans living in Japan who've gotten licensed.

If you want to hunt in Japan, it's a multi-step process. First, you have to be legally residing in Japan. That includes US military personnel living there under the Status of Forces Agreement, as well as Japanese citizens and legal residents. You'll never hunt there as a tourist.

The Japanese have three categories of hunting licenses. Trapping, air rifle, and firearm.

The air rifle license is just about as restrictive as the firearm license, so I don't see any advantage to it. The trapping license allows you to trap animals up to and including deer and net birds.

To get a firearm hunting license, first you have to legally acquire a gun. This requires a gun license. The Japanese police administer firearms licensing. The best way to go about it is join a club. You have to pass a police background check and a medical exam (to make sure you're not crazy). The cops come by your house and see where you're going to store the guns. You have to take a written exam, which mostly makes sure you know the law about what you can and can't do with a gun. It's actually not to restrictive; you can take your gun and a certain amount of ammo on the subway. Then you go to a trap and skeet range and prove to an examiner that you can hit a target. Then you get a license and can buy a shotgun. Once a year you have to show it to your local cops to prove you still have it and haven't illegally modified it.

You'd be surprised at how many Japanese are target shooters. Both skeet and trap, as well as "benchrest" shotgun shooters.

If you own a shotgun successfully for 7 years without slipping your leash and running afoul of the law, you can then own and possess a rifle. You technically can own a handgun, but you have to get special permission which is really only given to olympic-level competitors and only for target handguns. But you have to store it with the police, not in your home. So the only people who "own" handguns are high-level competitors affiliated with the police or Self Defense Forces.

Hunting is regulated by the ministry of the interior. To get any kind of hunting license you have to take another written test, which is again all about the law regulating the activity. All the tests are in Japanese, by the way. The Japanese don't share our insanity in the US for licensing people who don't read or speak the language. They figure if you can't understand their police officers or their signs telling you what you can and can't do, they don't want you running around the country with a car let alone a gun. But you can arrange to have someone help you with questions you don't understand.

Once you pass the test, you're good to go. You do have to register with any prefecture where you want to hunt. You can register with as many as you like.

It's a huge pain in the butt, but if you go through the process the hunting's great. They have tons of wild boar, which cause a lot of crop damage in many parts of the country. On the three main southern islands there's a healthy population of Asian black bear. Just about every spring you'll read about some hiker in a national park just outside Tokyo like Hakone or Nikko getting killed by a touchy momma bear. On Hokkaido there's the same brown bear you'll find in Kamchatka or Alaska. Deer are all over the country, but get bigger as you go north. And there are a lot of pheasant and ducks. You'll see rafts of pintails even in downtown tokyo. And I don't know if the government still does this or not, but up until about 10 years ago the government paid a bounty for crows. Crows are a huge nuisance in Japan. They make the news just like the boar and bears do. I knew some guys stationed up at Misawa AFB who'd basically pay for there hunting expenses just by killing enough crows