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Japan's justice system is not like ours. In Japan, when a crime is committed, the cops go and find whomever they think did it and then interrogate that person until they confess. There is something like a 97% conviction rate in their courts, tied largely to this practice (Federal prosecutions here, which only go forward with overwhelming evidence are around 95%). If the Japanese police cannot find someone to badger into admitting guilt for a corpse, it is very often ruled a suicide.

The ratio of suicide to homicide in Japan greatly favors suicide, but the ratio is probably slightly biased in that direction by their crime investigation/prosecution procedures. My own opinion is that the population in Japan that is likely to do something as non-conformist as murder is highly likely to be involved with organized crime. An even less supported opinion is that while the influence of the "Yakuza" clans in Japan is not what it once was (some of that results from the blurred lines between mobsters and former mobsters (think Godfather 3), it is still sufficiently powerful to influence the classification of some deaths.

A really interesting example is Canada. Their murder rate before they had any gun control was about 1.5/100k in the 60s, rose to 3 in the late 70s, and then dropped to maybe half of that. The >50% drop sounds impressive, until you recognize that it went from "almost zero" to "almost zero, but still higher than it was".

I think that for all of the talk about systemic racism, the place where is really shows up is within the inner cities. This is ironically the topic that isn't discussed, but that hurts the most black folks. Big cities, often up North, shoved all of the black folks into specific areas designated to be ghettos, and were specifically aided by the Federal government in doing so. Maybe the only city where that didn't happen was Detroit, where Mitt Romney's dad specifically prevented it. Nonetheless, the results were predictable: a bunch of poor folks without education or opportunities wound up doing what they could to survive, which often involved making a bunch of horrible decisions. The people who made the worst decisions were rewarded the most (i.e. if you sling the most dope and/or murder the most people, you are the richest guy in the neighborhood), while cops tend to hassle folks for small stuff without solving the major crimes. The whole thing becomes a nasty cycle, where the one group that could restore order is hated (and not without reason), the group causing the immediate trouble is lionized, and most people are just stuck in the middle of it with a bunch of bad options. Nobody wants to be stuck in that, but if you were, how would you know what you were supposed to do to get out?

The problem persists because both major political sides benefit more from misstating the problem instead of acknowledging that the "enemy" has some valid points and that actual compromise is needed.