I think a lot of places were at various points in time, right? It's always a little easier to paint with a broad brush and lump hundreds of years into a single statement when you're talking about the history of "foreign" places that we don't learn the history of very deeply in western education. For Japan in particular, it's hard because a big part of the Meiji nationalist movements was to recast Japanese history with a heavy focus on the "bushido" and an arguably manufactured version of some points in the country's history that _were_ undoutably bloody. That yarn-spinning from 100+ years ago has actively shaped how the rest of the world thinks about Japanese history. Western governments during WW2 were happy to take that narrative and paint the entire history as blood-soaked and brutal to dehumanize their enemies. But it's not hard to find evidence of how many long stretches of internal peace existed in Japan. After the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate there was 250 years of more or less continuous peace internally. Arguably continental Europe from the middle-ages onward is more fractured and bloody in total than Japan was in the same period. Classical Greece was a zillion times more bloody.