(Station de Tokyo: Un véritable symbole national...)
Everybody Is Talking About...
Early this morning, Mr. Makoto Oda, an anti-Vietnam-War movement hero in Japan, died.
(http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/heroes/oda.html)
It was symbolic as both the socialist party and the communist party of Japan decreased the number of their Upper House members in the yesterday's election in Japan.
In Japan, traditionally, being liberal has meant to be looking on North Korea and China or the Soviet Union, all autocratic states leveraging Marxism, with favor.
However, an ex-TV female caster with official endorsement of the ruling party LDP got into the Diet, though she had been severely under fire for her past attitude to voting in elections, namely too much abstention.
The Liberal Democratic Party for the first time lost its leading party position in the Upper House, though Prime Minister Mr. Shinzo Abe is reportedly determined to keep his position.
(http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070730dy01.htm)
* * *
Everybody associated with rich Israelite Americans in New York seems to be talking about China and India, as if the two countries were born friends of liberty and democracy in addition to market economy.
There is no freedom of press, expression, and ideology in China. You cannot criticize Chinese communist leaders on any street in China if you do not want to be brought to a court which often delivers a death sentence to an enemy of the Communist Party, since it is not a democracy.
There is not much meaning in freedom of press, expression, and ideology in India. You are yet to see an Abraham Lincoln in India, since its society, except large cities and modern industries, is based on strict class structure called caste, which makes its democracy almost meaningless (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste).
On the other hand, since the end of the Tokugawa samurai regime in 1868, Japan has been struggling in order to introduce and establish true democracy. Even in the Imperial regimes before WWII, Japan was advancing to equal and democratic society, though the progress was severely damaged in the deterioration of the world economy after the Great Depression which started in the U.S. in 1929 leading to the Japan-US War.
Before WWII, specifically, in 1925, the Empire of Japan introduced universal suffrage by adult males for its Lower House Election.
It was when China was in the massive civil war (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War) and India was a desperate colony of the U.K.
Japan has been a more organized country than the U.S., the U.K., and, for example, France as well as China and India in these 2000 years.
Everybody should talk about it.
(That is why it is no wonder that you encounter any non-nonsense Japanese in any field fatefully, which should be correctly grasped beyond a biased influence mostly generated in New York.)
"WHAT GIVES LIFE IS GOD'S SPIRIT; MAN'S POWER IS OF NO USE"