Firearm Frolic Forbidden at Home : For a U.S. Vacation Blast, the Japanese Go Gunning

They come for a real American vacation, many of them with only a few fragments of English at their command. One of them is “Disneyland.” Another is “Grand Canyon.”

And one is “Dirty Harry.”

Honeymooners, merchant sailors on leave, students on spring break, businessmen with free time--thousands of visitors from Japan, as well as some from South Korea and New Zealand--are scheduling a new stop on their U.S. itineraries: the gun ranges of the Wild West.

For adventuresome tourists titillated by shoot-’em-up movies--the kind where “high-caliber” often refers to firepower, not to cinematic quality--indoor target ranges from Oakland to Las Vegas and San Diego have taken on an allure that eclipses even the Magic Kingdom.

“They say it’s like putting the cream on the cake for them,” said George Osborne, who manages the Chabot Gun Club near Oakland. “They’ve gone to Yosemite, they’ve gone to Disneyland, and most finish up here. They go home with the highlight in their minds.”

For visitors, there is the extra tang of doing something that is forbidden back home, in countries like New Zealand, where real handguns are rigidly controlled, or--like Japan and Korea--virtually outlawed outright.

“It’s a thrill, and frightening at the same time,” said Victor Kagawa, owner of South Bay Target Range in Torrance, where up to 20% of his clients are Japanese tourists. “Don’t you always want to do something you’re not supposed to?”

Small wonder that homeward-bound Japanese may climb aboard planes carrying unlikely souvenirs: shell-casing key chains, or carefully rolled paper silhouette targets punctured with bullet holes that they have put there. And the curious headgear that shows up in their vacation snapshots might be the familiar black mouse-eared beanies from Disneyland--or it might be the protective ear guards worn on a firing range.

“They take pictures of themselves holding that gun, with the glasses and hearing protection on, and the gun in their hand,” said Charles Navarro, range director of American Shooters Supply in Las Vegas, where a whole family of tourists will pull up in a cab to take a break from gambling and lounge shows. “Their smile is ear to ear.”

For package-tour fees of $20 to $60 or so, visitors can plink away with the gat of their choice, from a .22-caliber to the old U.S. Army-style .45 to the fabled .44-magnum they know from television and movies.

Television Prop

“This is the one (gun) Ponch uses in ‘CHiPS,”’ Masashi Takahashi instructs clients of his San Francisco sports tour business. “This is the one James Bond uses. This is the one Dirty Harry uses.”

All kinds of Japanese visitors end up at firing ranges. Japanese movie stars have been known to come to practice to give realism to their performances; detective-story writers come to gather authentic details for their work, and Japanese policemen, limited to 24 practice rounds a year, come to hone their skills--even on their honeymoons, Takahashi said.

“I always ask them why,” said Walt Trask, range master at Santa Anita Firing Range. Most say, “It’s because they see the movies--and they’re amazed so many Americans have and hold guns.”

America may be “cowboy country,” as magazine writer “Cat” Okano remarked as he tried his shooting hand on a recent visit. But there is an intense gun fascination in Japan, a nation disarmed of handguns and swords since the postwar occupation. An entire magazine is devoted to expensively detailed, high-tech fake weapons, some of which run to hundreds of dollars and only shoot plastic pellets a few yards.

This Is Real

But here, they can wield the real thing. Takahashi said that once they’ve fired “the big .44-magnum, they say, ‘Oh, this is it. This is America!’ ”

Kaoru Tokunaga, 31, would rather be shopping, she admitted.

But this was her first trip to America, and she was game to try her husband’s favorite sport at a Monrovia gun range.

Within seconds, she had blasted a competent cluster of .22 bullet holes into a bull’s-eye target no bigger than her two fists.

“Very nice!” said marksman Ted K. Arai, a former private investigator who organizes gun-range tours and teaches shooting to lawmen and women. Her husband, Kenji, 35, smiled approvingly.

She had shot plastic bullets from a toy gun at home, but the noise and the kick of the real thing surprised her. She spoke through Arai’s translation, but she understood one English question--her favorite American movie? She blushed, and pronounced it with delicate care: “Terminator.”

Even Before Disneyland

The Tokunagas and six other Japanese--including honeymooners So and Mika Sato--would visit Disneyland “of course,” but first they had come to the Monrovia range, where scenes in the movie “Lethal Weapon” were filmed and star Mel Gibson’s picture hangs on a lobby wall.

“Some people just like to shoot,” confided Saka Takeo, a sushi chef who moonlights with Arai’s tours. “No Disneyland, no Knott’s Berry Farm--just shooting, five or six days.”

But only two or three in this group had ever shot real guns before, and Arai herded them all into a blue-carpeted classroom for his lecture on gun safety, a mandatory part of the $60 three-hour excursion.

“We don’t believe in just ‘blam blam blam’--I don’t like that,” Arai said. “We professionally teach about the safety of firearms.” He suddenly pointed a revolver, its empty chamber hanging out to the side, at a man in front. “You’re scared, right?” he demanded. “Never never never never” do that, he told the group.

Supervision Important

Most ranges are adamant about supervising novices, and although they say foreign visitors listen to instructions more attentively than the American male first-time shooter, who tends to brag and swagger when it comes to guns, “I make sure I have someone stay with them,” Navarro said, “when they don’t speak English and you’re not real sure they understand.”

Arai said two Japanese tourists died target-shooting in Hawaii last year, both reportedly unsupervised. One, Arai heard, felt his pistol jam, and peered down the barrel. As he did, Arai said, the gun unjammed.

At the Beverly Hills Gun Club, where the many Korean visitors are often brought in by relatives who live here and have shot before, “there are some things you can do well the first time, and shooting isn’t generally one of them,” range master Kent Fletcher said.

Most are content to “shoot maybe a couple different types of guns, get their picture taken with the gun on the range, and they’re happy as a clam about that,” Fletcher said. “If they can hit the target, so much the better.” And “they want pictures taken with the instructor,” or want their targets signed “Good Luck” or “Good Shooting.”

Dirty Harry Style

Invariably, they ask to shoot “the big-bore magnums, but we try to steer them away from that,” Kagawa said, “because they can’t handle them. There are very few people even in the U.S. who can handle those guns.”

Foreign tourist business at San Diego Indoor Range and Court Sports has increased notably in the last four or five months, said manager Bob Latham, an increase that coincides with the strong yen and a rash of “action movies.”

“Of course, they like trying the large calibers, .44 and .45; they always talk about it, they’ve seen all the Dirty Harry movies.” And “they do go through an excessive amount of rounds--they don’t get the chance to do it (often), so they like to get a lot of shooting in.”

But the Japanese have no lock on the tourist market. In Beverly Hills, it is New Zealanders who often spend the most money, Fletcher said. When some Air New Zealand crew members showed up recently, they stayed for two or three hours.

Pistol ownership in New Zealand is tightly restricted. A handgun license--entitling the owner to take a pistol between his home and a private shooting club--requires membership, monthly testing, intense training, background and character checks and a one-year waiting period, according to Senior Sgt. C. Jones of New Zealand’s firearms coordinator office.

“I can’t remember a handgun accident” in New Zealand, Jones said. If target ranges were for hire to the public, as they are in the United States, he said, “I think every man and his horse would go in and have a shoot.”

If their friends could see them perforating targets at the Monrovia range, Arai’s tour group of eight agreed, they would be envious. “It’s exciting and something I can never do in Japan,” newlywed Sato said.

But despite the allure, some visitors seem wary of being seen flouting a deeply rooted social standard, dating from Japan’s first gun control laws in 1910 and reinforced at intervals since the end of World War II.

No Publicity

“I’ve been told point-blank by (Japanese) tour operators, if there’s any reporters or TV . . . the (tour) bus will just not stop,” said Dave Illig, vice president and general manager of the Target Range in Van Nuys, where Japanese visitors often come and demand privacy--and get it.

Part is “the old cliche about saving face,” he explained. “Anybody seen with a gun in Japan is always a criminal,” and the tourists who come to his range would sooner “stick their heads in a hole before they would let a picture of themselves shooting a gun.”

Even the Uzi, identified in movies with terrorists--”they all ooh and aah all over it, but then again say, ‘Don’t tell anyone I was holding it.’ ”

For them, Illig said, it can be like a visit to the brothels of Nevada--it may be legal, but that doesn’t mean you send a post card home.

Shozo Tanabe, president of Southern California Sport Tour, said perhaps only 5% of his 5,000 yearly visitors shoot guns, and the rest want to play golf or drive miniature racing cars. In Japan, “The yakuza (gangsters) have the handguns.” If his clients were photographed with handguns, they fear people could think “we might be yakuza because we have a gun too.”

Surprised by Noise

But the only thing that was “scary” for college student Tokura Daisuke--whose favorite action movie is “The Untouchables”--was the noise and recoil jolt of the .38 he fired. Now that he was used to it, he hoped to come back to the Monrovia range and shoot some more, “even every day” of his vacation. Takahashi, in San Francisco, understands the feeling. “Some people are scared--half scared, half challenged.” But “after they shoot, they feel really special.”

The Japanese-born Takahashi, a big-game hunter and spear fisherman, has been trying for years to enliven tourist fare for his compatriots. “This country has many exciting tours--sky-diving, white-water rafting.” Nonetheless, for the “young, old, kids, everything is the same: Yosemite, Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm,” he recited.

“But people want something different. Mine is very different. They feel more like what America is. That’s why all my customers are satisfied. They say, ‘I did something different from other tourists.’ ”