DEMOCRACY WITH A GUN; America and the Policy of Force, by Fumio Matsuo, translated by David Reese. Berkeley, California: Stone Bridge Press, 2007, 306 pp., $26 (cloth)

As a child in wartime Japan, Fumio Matsuo, now a journalist, and his family were nearly wiped out by U.S. incendiary bombing of regional cities. He shares the general Japanese trauma over the U.S. atomic bombings. Based in and out of the United States for around 40 years as a Kyodo correspondent, he seems to have made it his life work to find out why Americans who seem so genuinely proud of their democratic origins are so addicted to force — to guns at home and bombs abroad.

In a curious mixture of history and in-depth interviews with leading U.S. players he begins with the Pilgrim Fathers and the struggles of the early British settlers to survive in what is now the United States. Gradually we see their utopian ideals replaced by "America's underlying DNA of the use of force" as they set out to defeat the native American tribes; the British in the war of independence; French and Spanish forces in what is now U.S. territory, Mexico; Spain again (in a grab for Spanish colonies); and now anyone seen as hostile in the outside world. Matsuo finds a nation "convinced of its own rightness and righteousness, and willing to act unilaterally to secure, and impose, its lofty goals of peace and freedom."

Looking for reasons behind America's gun culture, he begins with a close analysis of the much-quoted Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution used constantly to legitimize gun ownership: