Gunman arrested after taking at least 1 hostage at post office in Japan

Tokyo — Japanese police captured a gunman Tuesday who had holed up inside a post office with at least one hostage for more than eight hours, the country's NHK television network reported. The broadcaster said the hostage, a woman who works at the post office, was rescued.

The man entered the post office with a gun in the city of Warabi, north of Tokyo, an hour after a shooting at a hospital not far away in the city of Toda, in which two people were wounded.

Police said it was possible the two incidents were related. 

"At approximately 2:15 pm today (0515 GMT), a person has taken hostages and holed up at a post office in Chuo 5-chome area of Warabi city... The perpetrator is possessing what appears to be a gun," the city's authorities said on their website earlier. "Citizens near the scene are urged to follow police instructions and evacuate in accordance with police instructions."

Police urged 300 residents in the nearby area to evacuate, broadcaster TBS said, as police surrounded the post office.

Images on television showed the man inside the post office in a baseball cap and a white shirt under a dark coat, with what looked like a gun attached to a cord around his neck.

Violent crime is vanishingly rare in Japan, in part because of strict regulations on gun ownership. As CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reported last year, the country's tight gun laws have surprising origins in the United States. 

When the U.S. occupied Japan after World War II, it disarmed the country. Americans shaped the legislation that took firearms out of the hands of Japanese civilians. To this day, that means getting hurt or killed by a gun in Japan is an extremely long shot, and Japan has one of the lowest overall murder rates in the world.

But recent years have seen violent crimes, including gun attacks, make headlines in the country, most notably the assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe in July last year. 

Abe's accused assassin, Tetsuya Yamagami, reportedly targeted the politician over his links to the Unification Church.

In April a man was arrested for allegedly hurling an explosive towards Prime Minister Fumio Kishida as he campaigned in the city of Wakayama. Kishida was unharmed.

The following month a man holed up in a building after allegedly killing four people, including two police officers and an elderly woman, in a gun and knife attack. Masanori Aoki, 31, was taken into custody at his house outside a farm near the city of Nakano in the Nagano region, police said at the time.

In:
• Gun
• Shooting
• Hostage Situation
• Gun Laws
• Japan