Hello Mary Cluney,
Your post is very interesting. I agree 100%, Japan's halt is not due to governments lending too much or too little, doing this or that to the yen. They are stuck because the political system is corrupt and the education system is rotten. There is a triumvirate of the Liberal Democratic Party politicians, the gangsters and real-estate/construction capitalists. Talk about cronies! These three overlap and are lifetime buddies. So why don't the Japanese people wake up? Well the education system teaches them to obey not to question, to memorize rather than to analyze to agree rather than to oppose. The science education from the bottom to the graduate schools is scandalously underfunded. Japanese university graduates widely believe that the blood types A,B,AB,O are closely related to personality. All of this all, stems from the fact that they never really had a revolution so the individuals are not used to any rights or power or effectiveness. The education system is rotten because it is feudal. Your typical high school graduate has never I mean NEVER participated in a debate. Obedience pays off. If you want something made perfectly don't go to the US or China or India or etc. Go to Japan and the obedient perfectionists will make sure that you get what you want, if possible with even more precision than you need. Some of my dearest friends are in Japan; I really feel sorry for their plight. The Chinese I know are noticeably more inventive than the Japanese, with the same characters in the written language. Chinese used to say the sky is high and the emperor is far away. In other words the emperor is not that relevant, In contrast, Japanese used to say that the emperor is God.
If the economic progress of China comes to a halt it will be because of corruption, not the language. JMHO.
Malcolm |
