Gregory, even if 40% of South Koreans were the hardest-core evangelicals in the world, that would still make the country largely non-Christian.
You’re conflating some not entirely accurate reports of the prevalence of evangelical Christianity in South Korea with the percentage of people reporting to be nominally Christian when asked. You’re also asuming that born-again, evangelical Christianity in South Korea is like born-again evangelical Christianity in North America. South Korea most certainly is, as Lee points out above, more religious than Japan. That said, South Korea is still substantially less religious than any Western country. If you were to visit there, you’d find that the number of people actually practicing a religion is a lot lower than the number of people nominally belonging to a religion.
As for Japan, over 200% of the population is registered as belonging to a religion (yes, that’s 200%), yet it is exceedingly difficult to find anyone who professes to be religious.
I’m not saying that religion causes crime, but the two countries with the lowest crime rates in the world are both overwhelmingly secular.
John Samford, Yokohama High School, or any other place where there is extensive interaction between the US military and Japanese civilians, is far from a good measure of how predisposed the entire populace of Japan is to violence. Beyond the broad, sweeping, unsupportable generalization of the entire population, if the Japanese are “inclined toward violence,” they hide it very, very well. Even including the suicide rate as murder (which is ridiculous), Japan has a very low crime rate overall and violent crimes are quite rare.
“Any fool can pull a trigger and often does.” But not in Japan (or South Korea, or Germany, or the Nordic countries, or. . .) If you actually study Japanese history, instead of picking up tidbits out of context, you won’t find hacking up peasants to test swords to have been an everyday practice, even among the tiny percentage of people who could have done it. Besides, taking something from nearly two centuries ago and using it to tar an entire people now is deeply unfair.
