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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (135437)	6/3/2004 9:26:31 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 281500

And speaking of Japan, I would suggest that any interested parties pick up today's USAToday and read the article on "Parasite Singles", young Japanese women who have decided not to get married. Fascinating article that has disturbing consequences for Japan's future and demographics. And it's a bit personal to me, because I've been dating one of these gals for the past couple of months. Until now, I hadn't recognized the significance of what she meant when she defined herself as a "social parasite" (jokingly, of course)... But it's truly a sign of social rebellion amongst Japanese women who are disatisfied with their traditional roles in that male dominated society. usatoday.com No sex please — we're Japanese By Paul Wiseman, USA TODAY TOKYO — Junko Sakai was nervously looking forward to a romantic getaway with the man she'd been seeing. But when they arrived at a seaside hotel last fall, her beau requested separate rooms. Stunned, Sakai nonetheless anticipated a late-night knock on the door. It never came. "Nothing happened," the Tokyo writer says. Nothing is happening with depressing regularity between Japanese men and women these days. Marriages, births and hanky-panky are all spiraling downward with troubling implications for the nation's future: A sagging birthrate means that fewer working-age people will be around to support a growing population of elderly; a social crisis looms. Only in Japan would a popular weekly newsmagazine deem it necessary to exhort the nation's youth to abstain from sexual abstinence: "Young people, don't hate sex," AERA magazine pleaded last month in a report detailing a precarious drop in sales of condoms and in business at Japan's rent-by-the-hour "love hotels." More and more Japanese men and women are finding relationships too messy, tiring and potentially humiliating to bother with anymore. "They don't want a complicated life," says Sakai, who has written a controversial bestseller, Cry of the Losing Dogs, on the plight of unmarried Japanese thirtysomething women like herself. And so, to an astonishing degree, men and women go their separate ways — the women to designer boutiques and chic restaurants with their girlfriends or moms, the men to karaoke clubs with their colleagues from work or the solitude of their computer screens to romance hassle-free virtual women. "Men don't want to spend time with their girlfriends, especially shopping," says Takayuki Mori, 40, a single man who works for a Tokyo advertising agency. He says he isn't dating. Better educated, more widely traveled and raised in more affluence than their mothers, young women no longer feel bound by the Japanese tradition that says a woman unmarried after age 25 is like a Christmas cake on Dec. 26 — stale. Men, meanwhile, seem intimidated and bewildered by assertive young women who are nothing like their moms. As a result of the disconnect between genders, Japan, just emerging from a long economic slump, is experiencing a social recession in:..............

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (135437)	6/3/2004 10:10:25 AM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<That made it much easier to "gameplay" what would have occurred had the US actually been required to invade the Japanese home islands. > War is not chemistry where you take 2 parts X and 1 part Y and produce Z. There's too much "gameplaying" posing as "knowing" now in Iraq and some people can't or won't quit when their "knowing" deviates from reality due to factual problems with their model. It is a waste of effort it is to TRY to convince people to the point where they get angry. My original point was lost relative to your world view and further discussion is probably pointless. Peace be with you. I close in saying that we should declare war on war and war making, not Iraqis, a nearly Stone Age agrarian people with a tiny fraction of our standard of living, and a population smaller than that of California. Saddam's removal after a decade of successful containment left a power vacuum and we seem to be clueless about how to fill it.