heading towards ‘sakoku’
Yay, Debito does it again. An instructive list, fully illustrated, of everything that is so very wrong with Japan in its self-perceptions, prevailing feudalistic mindset, ingrained xenophobia, and shabby, arrogant treatment of outsiders:
Kim to ‘flyjin,’ a top 10 for 2012
By DEBITO ARUDOU
The Japan Times, Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2012Here’s JBC’s fourth annual roundup of the top 10 human rights events that affected Japan’s non-Japanese (NJ) residents last year.
The article is a bit too long to reproduce here and should, besides, be read alongside the accompanying cartoons, so I take the liberty of selecting only the concluding — and, to me, heartbreaking — lines:
2011 was the year the world realized Japan has peaked. Its aging and increasingly-conservative public is trapped in a downward spiral of economic stagnation and inept governance. It is further burdened by an ingrained mistrust of the outsider [JBC, Oct. 7, 2008 (<– my comment: this article too is a must read)] as well as by blind faith in a mythology of uniqueness, powerlessness as a virtue, and perpetual victimhood.
Japan has lost its attractiveness as a place for newcomers to live and settle, since they may be outright blamed for Japan’s troubles, if not ostracized for daring to fix them. Now, thanks to the continuous slow-burn disaster of Fukushima, anyone (who bothers to listen anymore) can now hear the doors of Japan’s historically cyclical insularity slowly creaking shut.
Well, I guess that very soon the Japanese will only have themselves to blame…
Readers’ feedback & comments on Debito’s blog.
