not always serene hush
"Come, come, come out tonight...Sherry baby"(http://music.yahoo.com/Frankie-Valli/Sherry/lyrics/23292066)
Crisis of Decent Languages
(crise des langues décentes)
Last night, namely Sunday night, a Japan's cable TV channel delivered a 1995 movie "Tokiwa: The Manga Apartment."
The wooden humble apartment house existed in Toshima-ku, Tokyo from 1952 to 1982 (http://www.koredeiinoda.net/mukasi/tanjou05.html).
The movie was based on a fact that in the era Japan was yet to enter high-growth period after WWII poor youths dreaming of a success as a manga artist were living in a specific apartment house in a corner of Tokyo all together for convenience of communications and life. Most of them later made their dreams come true, forming the foundation of today's global success of Japan's manga culture.
Osamu Tezuka, the king of manga of Japan, was also one of tenants, though he was in a class by himself as he had already been famous when he had come to Tokyo from his home region, the Osaka area.
But, the true hero of Tokiwa Apartmenthouse was Hiro-o Terada. He created a story of boys who love baseball and respect traditional values. Terada did not adopt radical expressions including violence and immorality. He always depicted good mannered boys and girls who speak decent Japanese.
However, with development of economy and commercialism and invasion by American indecent materialism, other manga artists came to use radical expressions responding to request from publishers.
Hiro-o Terada felt isolated as if he had been left by the trend of the era. But, he continued his way of manga creation.
If you want to know how poor young people lived in 1950's and 1960's n Japan, the movie might give you a hint.
If you want to know what the fine customs of Japanese society were in 1950's and 1960's in Japan, you had better search and read works of Hiro-o Terada.
* * *
If you see a bad table manner of foreigners, you might really feel sick. American foods usually request no decent manners. Bad women who get used to, and come to love, violent treatment of violent men, not necessarily meaning strong or courageous men, do not respect decent manners of gentlemen. I do not want, say, Ms. Paris Hilton to become one of such women, since such violence-loving women sometimes end their lives as a victim of violence or an act of murder by a bad, violent, and mean man.
Indeed, bad money drives out good. Bad manga was once trying to drive out good manga. However, conscientious manga artists like Terada saved Japanese goodness in the manga industry, in my view, which has really contributed to global appreciation of quality of Japan's manga.
* * *
Manga is not a mainstream of culture. But, language is a key to prosperity of a nation. However, there are some people who are afraid that the Japanese language will be extinct in future.
A Japanese man living in France for 15 years has thought about world languages and the Japanese language, thus expressing his concern on a crisis on Japanese.
( http://blog.a19.jp/ijc/index.php?e=3)
He wrote that though there are 5,000 languages in the world today, 2,500 languages will be extinct in next 100 years, which may lead to a single value system in mankind. And the most dominant one may be English culture, since one of five people or 21% of the world population today speaks English as their official language or a mother tongue.
However, as is symbolized by the case of Ms. Paris Hilton, the modern English/American culture, represented by a New York-style of greed, is highly oriented to violence and immorality which might fatally contaminate the whole mankind.
As for rankings of users of a language as a mother tongue according to the above site:
1. Chinese...........1 billion people
2. English.........350 million people
3. Spanish.........250 million people
4. Hindi............200 million people
5. Arabic...........150 million people
6. Bengalee.........150 million people
7. Russian..........135 million people
8. Portuguese.......135 million people
9. Japanese.......120 million people
10. German.........100 million people
11. French............70 million people
* * *
If various tribes and nations do not try hard to protect and preserve their culture and language, American English will enjoy monopoly in future.
Then, even in Islamic countries, there would be no pious ladies, since they may start to speak every immoral thing sinfully, claiming that the language code has changed, like some indecent American ladies.
That is why you should not love New York. You have to protect your own value system and a language system the God gave to your ancestors.
The God has never changed the moral code and the language code. Their thought is very wrong as their sinful talk would rather increase abominable crimes on other pious ladies.
(There is a popular art called "raku-go" in Japan. It is a kind of comic story-telling. If you, a foreign Japanese learner, can enjoy classical "raku-go" in Japanese, your Japanese is excellent. Or, when Japanese lose interest in the rakugo spoken art, it may trigger a crisis of the Japanese language.
Anyway, without love to Japanese culture in mind, you cannot speak fine Japanese, as Jesus Christ suggested in terms of contents people talked about.)
"...Later on Jesus Christ was having a meal in Levi's house. A large number of tax collectors and other outcasts were following Jesus, and many of them joined Him and His disciples at the table..."