I read it TJ. So what? Even in the article it says: <But the dead man's next-door neighbor, Yoshiaki Kita, 72, said the city had handled his case appropriately.
"He may have starved to death, but I believe he reaped what he sowed," Kita said. "He was still young, so he could have taken on any job to feed himself." >
I'm supposed to know the situation better than the neighbours? Better than the people handling his welfare payments?
Our neighbour, right over the fence, has been near death from starvation but currently chooses to eat [presumably with psychiatric medication helping]. An acquaintance killed himself with an exhaust pipe in a car. A young woman in our office in Antwerp walked on a train track on the foggiest night I have known and a train did come. A niece of my wife's jumped off Auckland Harbour Bridge and drowned.
Here's some ideological underpinning in the article: <In a way that the words of no living person could, the diary has shown the human costs of the economic transformation in Japan, the world's second-largest economy. Even as a widening income gap has pushed up welfare rolls in recent years, struggling cities like Kitakyushu have been under intense pressure to tighten eligibility. >
A widening income gap doesn't push up welfare rolls, unless there's a minimum wage or some such economic nonsense in which case, of course many people choose the higher-paying welfare than the work and the minimum wage. On welfare, they can collect the free money and do odd jobs and a spot of burglary, sell drugs and make even more money.
I would swamp NZ's government welfare system for Japan's tomorrow. In Japan, an old man chose to die [it seems to me]. In NZ, meal-ticket children are regularly killed by welfare bludgers and swarms of people are attacked or killed. If there was no free money coming, those children would be farmed out to somebody who cared, or wouldn't have been produced in the first place.
NZ taxpayers are paying for torture of children and there are plenty of people keen to dish it out to the children.
I'll worry about the hideous situation in NZ before I'll dissect a case in Japan which seems to be more a personal problem of the man involved.
As for the "shack" he lived in, it looks fairly ramshackle, but it would be nob hill in India. In Beijing, in the Hutongs, I saw lots of places which were worse. Have you used the public toilets in the hutongs?
To show how bad Japan is, you will have to do a lot better. By picking that as an example of how bad it is, you inadvertently show that if that's the worst, it's an amazingly good place.
Perhaps Japan should take over China and run it properly. Maybe the USA was wrong to stop their rampage a century ago. Chinese could learn Japanese fairly readily because the old written language is the same. When you phone Hu to recommend China get 450MHz OFDM surging, you could suggest he request China be made a part of Japan along the same lines as Tibet and SARs zones have been made part of China. Tell him NZ is interested too. Japan would soon sort out our welfare chaos and cruelty.
Mqurice |
