ELA 5/8

Yesterday, we had our first ELA class on the Bakayama, and it was so nice outside that I’d love to do it again! The first topic that came up was whether demos in Japan are possible or not. First of all, I did not even know that demos take place in Japan since it is rarely on the news. The most recent (and perhaps the only one) I heard was the demo on the Fukushima nuclear plantation that Shiho mentioned in her blog. It is no surprise that demos are seldom reported on the news when you hear about the restrictions set up by the police in having demos, as Rab said. The government is obviously unenthusiastic towards demos, and many information on the various broadcasting stations are presumably censored by the government. Personally, I think the reason why demos don’t take place in Japan as much as the U.S. or Europe is because Japanese people are afraid of the consequences of it. This is pure assumption, but I am guessing that if one takes place in a demo, one has risks such as injury (like the Battle for Seattle), and to losing one’s job since employees who rebel against the authority are a danger to the company. I know of a demo that happened in Tokyo University called the “Tokyo University Yasuda Hall Incident” in 1968, and I researched a little about it. In the video I checked out, this demo looked more colossal and devastating than the Battle for Seattle; it looked more like a war. For initiating such a significant demo, I am quite sure that students were expelled, and many privileges were taken away from them, although I could not find any information on it. As a result, the next generation of students may have been less motivated about starting a demo. I think most Japanese people have complaints about the current social system but do not have the intention of taking action because they feel obligated to bear with it.

When Rab told us about the Japanese fishermen and the Green Peace, it reminded me of a news about two years ago that told about Green Peace members protesting on the shores of the Japanese sea. They captured a scene where one Green Peace member obstinately sits on the shore and starts wailing when the Japanese police try to move him. I am sure there were other members who weren’t acting like a lunatic, but the Japanese media probably chose the wailing guy because they wanted to send out an image to the viewers that the Green Peace were ridiculous and disrupting, and the police have better things to do than talk to these people. Now that I think about this news, I’m sure there was more to it than that. The whale hunting in Japan has been condemned by other countries for years. Personally, I don’t see the necessity of whale hunting since as Rab said, it seems unnecessary to kill whales for “experiments”. Obviously, they kill whales because the fishing market desires them, and it is unjust for the Japanese government to be controlling the media so that fishermen smuggling the whale meat can remain concealed. However, I thought that in a way, documentaries that cover whale hunting in Japan must biased as well. I believe they only film the nasty parts of it, such as the killing scene and ignore everything else such as our culture. They capture this topic from only one particular angle, and in a way, this seems similar to how the Japanese government censors the information about whale hunting.