There’s a sad statistic that’s on the rise in Japan these days: divorce.
The combination of the country’s rapidly aging society, high stress levels and a new law that enables a woman to claim up to half of her husband’s company pension is causing the number of older couples getting a “vintage year divorce” to rise.
When I was an English teacher, I taught a wide range of students, including a fair number of housewives, and I remember being surprised by the venom some of the women were capable of spitting when discussing their husbands. I didn’t understand at the time that at least some of this husband-bashing was part of a Japanese social custom you might call “out-humbling each other,” as women try to show that they have the most worthless, lazy husband in the room. (Japanese mothers and grandmothers will do the same thing when discussing their own children with others, having competitions to see whose kids were the most baka, and I’ve had to expressly forbid this kind of talk in my own home.)
The divorce rate in Japan is still comparatively low — currently around 2.2 per 1000 people per year, compared with 4 in the U.S. and 2.6 in the U.K. — but finding someone who is batsu-ichi (lit. “one strike out”) is a lot more common than it has been in the past. Coupled with the trend of women either marrying much later or not at all, it Japan has some tough issues to face as the 21st century progresses.
Check out this surreal story over at Danwei about a Chinese writer who visited North Korea, returned to China, and published a book about what he saw there, only to have the book banned from bookstores and wiped from the Web after the NORKS complained to the CHICOMS.
The first “trouble” it ran into was when a retired Chinese Foreign Ministry official called up the Foreign Ministry to report that The Real DPRK had “problems.” This individual had not read the book and did not go online; he had heard the audio version on Beijing Radio. When the Foreign Ministry received this old cadre’s report, it immediately telephoned Xinhua Lipin Book Co. to request a copy of the book for review. Xinhua Lipin couldn’t ignore this request, so it sent off a copy of The Real DPRK by courier to the Foreign Ministry. The company was quite nervous at the time, but then more than a month passed without the Foreign Ministry making any movements. This indicated that the book had its approval.
The real “trouble” for The Real DPRK began in the first part of July, 2008. The embassy of the DPRK in China sent a letter to the Chinese Foreign Ministry demanding that it halt circulation of The Real DPRK. The Foreign Ministry handed this matter over to GAPP, which issued an order banning the book.
However, “banning a book” is ultimately a process. At first, The Real DPRK was only taken off the shelves of major book stores. On 17 July, the DPRK embassy sent another letter to the Foreign Ministry, under the impression that many places in China were still selling The Real DPRK. So GAPP pressed bookstores across the country to remove book from their shelves.
Regarding the Sept. 2 article “The ‘gaijin’ debate: Arudou responds”: Debito Arudou’s claim that the word “gaijin” is racist not only borders on whining but also smacks of something that could only be brought up by a white person. I’m part Japanese and part black, and I’ll tell you right now that I would rather be called a “gaijin” over “nigger” any day.
Arudou sounds like someone whose whiteness got him special treatment in the United States. He sounds as if he must have been shocked when he went to another country and realized that being white there wasn’t the same as it was in the U.S. All of a sudden, he was in the marginalized category normally reserved for nonwhite minorities.
I have news: “Citizenship” does NOT make one part of the Japanese race, no matter how much one wishes it. In the eyes of the Japanese, Arudou is a gaijin. Japan is not where he is from. Arudou appears to be going through a major identity crisis. To think that one can walk into another country, change citizenship and then expect the whole country to accept one not as a foreigner but as a fellow Japanese is something ripped out of the pages of Western colonialism.
As reported over on Japan News Junkie the video below has been causing quite an uproar on the Japanese Internet.
It features two female Nagasaki University students who perform a dance (and flash a little upskirt) to a tune from the erotic game TimeLeap in front of the Atomic Dome in Hiroshima
Some are saying it it is insulting to the souls of the people who died in the A-bombing of the city. Others are saying it is no big deal.
According to the statement, Pyongyang has not only decided to suspend the disablement of its nuclear facilities, but is even “considering a step” to restore the facilities to working order.
The U.S. Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) has announced a new policy that will require its golfers to learn and speak English for face suspension of their membership.
“Why now? Athletes now have more responsibilities and we want to help their professional development,” deputy commissioner Libba Galloway told The Associated Press. “There are more fans, more media and more sponsors. We want to help our athletes as best we can succeed off the golf course as well as on it.”
Players were told by LPGA commissioner Carolyn Bivens that by the end of 2009, all players who have been on the tour for two years must pass an oral evaluation of their English skills or face a membership suspension. A written explanation of the policy was not given to players, according to the report.
Though the new rule applies to all players regardless of national origin, Korean players on the LPGA feel as if the new rule is aimed squarely at them.
“The LPGA could come out and say they only want 10 Koreans, but they’re not,” [said Angela Park, a Korean-American who was born in Brazil], according to Golfweek. “A lot of Korean players think they are being targeted, but it’s just because there are so many of them.”
British bank HSBC has been accused of the modern mortal sin of (Gasp!!)”cultural insensitivity” for an ad campaign that uses the image of a sumo wrestler in posters like the one shown below.
A spokesman for the Japan Society, said: ‘My colleagues don’t like this advertisement, and you can understand how some Japanese people in the UK would find this ad offensive.’
The head of the British Sumo Federation, said: ‘It looks terrible and it is insensitive to have made him up to look Japanese. It wouldn’t have been too difficult to get someone over from Japan who could adopt the proper athletic pose. I turn the page quite quickly when I see it. The whole thing is bloody awful. I’d like them to drop the advert. For a company that size, I would have thought they could use a little more judgment. They’ve shot themselves in the foot.’
The director of the Anglo-Japanese Society of Wessex, said the advertisement ‘insulted the honour of a nation, ‘ and: ‘The fact that the picture depicts a sumo wrestler who is not actually a sumo wrestler but has been made up to look like one would be considered a high insult to the Japanese community. It is culturally insensitive.’
Mrs: JP says: “I don’t see anything wrong with it. If people are so small that they get upset over something like this, we’ll never make any progress in dealing with the larger problems of the world.” (She also made a remark about the people who complain about such things having size problems in certain parts of their anatomy, but we won’t go into that here.)
Click here to read a first-hand account of a blogger who was on hand during some of the demonstrations currently going on in South Korea against the importation of U.S. beef. Fascinating stuff.
It even contains a video by a young gaijin woman who apologizes (in Japanese) for an earlier video in which she accused Japanese of racism towards foreigners, based on what she read on Debito’s sight.
Debito has a lot of misinformation on his site, especially regarding the extent of racism and manifestations of racism in Japan. The girl in the youtube below is an American living in Japan, and is an English teacher studying Japanese in her spare time. She been posting video blogs on youtube for sometime, and thanks to the fact that she is a white girl that is trying to speak Japanese, she gathered a Japanese following.
At some point she came across Debito’s site and decided to give a speech on youtube about human rights and Japanese racism towards foreigners in Japan. In her summary of the video, she included a link from Debito.org. The selection of topics are all from Debito’s site so it is obvious that she got her “opinions” from there.
