Those are really great questions, Gathercole. I will do my best to sketch out some preliminary answers.
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1) Are all non-Christian Japanese people going to Hell? Most people I met while living in Japan were very nice and it doesn't seem right to send them to Hell.
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I can't speak for the whole Church. Certainly there are those who believe that no one will ultimately be condemned. They are on very thin ice, I think, if they believe those who reject Christ are going to be saved, especially against their wishes. Those who have never heard the Gospel? They will be judged according to the light they have.
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2) As an example of not being familiar with the Bible, in Matthew 19:9, Jesus is very clear about divorce. He says, "I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery." Why do Protestants believe divorce is permissable? When I've asked Protestants about this, they usually don't believe me that Jesus said such a thing unless I show them the passage.
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They must be Methodists. That is a pretty darned hard scripture to miss. The answer is found in that same place, a couple of lines later. Jesus also said that divorce and remarriage had been permitted among the Jews because of their hardness of heart. Hearts haven't softened noticeably over the centuries.
I am not aware that there are any Christian denominations that ever totally prohibited divorce. Divorce is not the problem. Remarriage is. Later, in speaking to the very new Christian communities which were struggling to know what to do when one spouse was a Christian and the other not, Paul talked about letting the non-Christian spouse leave, if he wanted to. He also defined the characteristics of a Christian husband and wife and where one or the other has been woefully wanting, this has made divorce (and subsequent remarriage) possible.
To take the obvious example: no woman has to stay with a man who beats her. He is not acting as a Christian husband must. In such a case, churches have held that the marriage itself could be set aside as invalid and remarriage is then permissable. While Catholics still have a formal annulment process, protestants have shown more willingness to tolerate some very questionable practices in regard to this question.
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3) If you showed me a person being tortured, like is happening right now in many oppressive regimes, and I had the ability to end their suffering with little or no effort, I would definitely do it. Wouldn't this be the right thing to do?
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Yes, absolutely.
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If it would be, why doesn't God do it?
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Much better educated, more moral people than I have tried to tackle the problem of evil. They usually write books. I am not going to be able to do much here.
If free will means anything, then God cannot interfere with our use of it, continually. If nothing else, our reaction to evil tells us, or should, something about ourselves and the world we live in. If this world, this life is all we have, and there is no ultimate purpose, then what is the problem? Evil is the way things are and we had just better suck it up. But we can't, can we? The question is: why not?
I have read here many times that atheists don't need a God to have morals. I do not find any of the reasoning persuasive. We have seen too many times, just in our own century, that it is not morality that fills a vacuum but power. And power is not maintained by adherence to the 10 commandments or any other moral code we have had offered to us.