Don, thx for the profile, I felt you had a very deep understanding of how things went here and you had to have spent time to know the kinds of details you wrote about. I can't claim as much time here but I can see what you are talking about .
The article, sadly was very close to reality, scarily close to it indeed. Only one figure if I remember well, that I had trouble with though, namely that 2/3 of women between 20-30 had never married, something I felt was too high, maybe I just misread.
At the same time, while everything is dark around Asia right now it is easy to miss some (there is got to be some) good points. The kind of equality of opportunities here, be they in education or in the medical system (as far as receiving care) is truly quite a feat especially considering what things must have looked like after the end of the war and I would say that it is certainly to their credit. America still can't claim that they have reached the same level of equality of access to these services. The education system is oft criticized and I will be one of the first ones to add to the list of complaints, but the numbers speak for themselves here in terms of literacy, close to 99.8 % if I remember well. Basically, aside from the people who have immigrated only recently in their mid teens, everybody knows how to read and write, again in light of other industrialised countries' less shiny performance, a nice achievement.
I don't mean to reverse course here in my views. I still think that Japan is headed for major challenges, not the least of which will be to steer the economic ship into safer waters, but the sheer volume of bad news on Japan right now may also hide some pretty rotten corners of Western society as well. There is a great deal of "us" against "them" here, we "won" and they "lost" kind of feeling. A lot of the negatives that were outlined in the article you mentioned, I fully agree exist (experienced them first hand not long ago, personal though) but wouldn't you say that equally dire predictions could also be written about American society? Teen pregnancies? Illiterates? Violence (in high schools)? The Texas incident of the last week, racism, gangs and drug addiction problems? I mean the list goes on although I am not sure this forum is the best place to discuss them but what I mean is that society is wide and far ranging and while the tremendous performance of the US economy has hidden the cracks and swept the dust under the american carpet, here , the lackluster performance of their economy has exposed the worst there is in Japanese society. Burst a dam and what 's left is just of collection of dead fish, rotting stumps and roots with a little puddle of water in the middle where the survivors huddle ...
For me divining the future direction of their society, and with that the economy, is, from an intellectual perspective, a most fascinating endeavor; from an economic perspective, a possibly highly rewarding exercise.
Best to you both,
Stephan |
