Japanifik Definitely NOT Civilized!
Posted by Guy on July 1, 2009
The Link Between Civilization, Human Dignity, Moral Courage and Sociopolitical Will
It’s difficult to believe anyone could live in Japanifik for any length of time feeling they live in the “civilized” world.
Here, we have roads, albeit narrow single lanes where traffic is allowed in both directions, and stoplights, of course; there are cars and people to drive them, though most of them they have no idea how to drive.
There are police Koban (small police stations) on the main roads, staffed by policemen and women, who carry guns. But there’re no circumstances under which Japanifik could be thought of as a “first-world” city. No way!
Japanifik is a spoof of a “civilized” town. It’s like a Hollywood movie set, an old dilapidated 1920s type for that. The genre is a mix of horror, petty crimes, blunder, slapstick comedy and a tragedy.
My worst nightmare almost came true last month, when my son’e classmate and friend was hit by a speeding car outside their school. Kintaro was lucky to be alive, though he received a long list of injuries.
I have been looking around since to see if the police were doing their job, monitoring the road speed and stopping the lawbreakers. I saw none.
Here’s where the link between civilization, human dignity, moral courage and sociopolitical will becomes a tenuous one, if not perverted. Civilization comes to mean driving bigger cars faster, regardless of injuries to other people; human dignity transforms to biting the bullet, rather than complaining to the authorities [perhaps because the authorities take no notice]; moral courage becomes accepting your fate, rather than demanding value for your taxdollar (yen) by way of having the aggressor punished; and sociopolitical will, if you’re in the government or the policeforce, translates to preserving the status quo, allowing the moral stagnation to take its full course, until the next war.
In Japanifik three “types of life” don’t mean much: people who insist on being [sic] victims, at least in the eyes of the aggressors, children and foreigners.
Unfortunately, Kintaro falls into all three categories. Apart from being a perpetual victim because of the circumstances, he is a child and a foreigner. His father is a Japan-born Chinese, his mother just Chinese.
Perhaps, the collective attitude of Japan toward aggression, children and the Chinese has changed since the last century; however, no one said anything about that to the Japanifik.
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