Priorities, Priorities...

Taro Aso, the W of Japan, is angry.Here's a good article from the Times, describing the tendency of crotchety older Japanese to blame all the country's problems on its straightlaced and well-behaved youth.  Although I generally don't think it's that simple. 

The writer, Leo Lewis, begins the article by describing a sign advising people not to litter, because littering is apparently immoral.  The sign is next to advertisements for a brothel, gambling facility, and a money laundering service.  The intended effect is to point out the hypocrisy of the Japanese: something as small as littering is immoral, and this needs to be taught to the youth of the nation via loud, in-your-face propaganda.  Meanwhile the big sins of prostitution, gambling, and money laundering through the yakuza are allowed to continue, because the older generation apparently likes those.

Well?  It looks like Lewis has succumbed to the paranoia a life in Japan tends to foster.  And even if his interpretation is fair, I kind of agree with the jijis and babas on this one, in keeping with my general theory on life that you should be able to do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt another person. Littering places the collective burden of cleanup on society.  Prostitution, on the other hand, is the exchange of a voluntary service for a voluntary fee, but only in countries where it's officially legal, or de facto legal as in Japan.  Prostitution in the U.S. and Britain is a totally different animal: dangerous precisely because it's illegal and unregulated.

Gambling should be legal everywhere anyways.  It already is via the internet, and blackjack is regularly played in bars across Japan.  The idea that people shouldn't be free to lose all their money suggests that other people are too stupid to control themselves, or that they don't deserve that right. 

Money laundering through the yakuza is probably the grayest item on Lewis's list, but only if you believe the government is the ultimate moral authority.  The yakuza is what controls, regulates, and keeps safe and profitable Japan's gambling and prostitution industries!  If there were no yakuza, gambling and prostitution would be really dangerous, and the real Japanese government could not pretend that those things were illegal in Japan in an effort to kiss the asses of western countries.  If the yakuza is not itself a regulatory force which competes with the Japanese government, is it not then a branch of the government?

I agree with Lewis that the older generation in Japan tends to have an entitlement complex and needs to shut up - and that AC shit is creepy. (Here's a public service announcement reminding mothers not to do stimulants.)  :)  Just the other day, I was riding the train, my cell phone went off because I forgot to put it on vibrate, and an old lady screamed at me to shut-up.  But old people in every country do stuff like that sometimes; far from suggesting a mass-conspiracy as Lewis does, I usually just chalk it up to hemorrhoids and mercury poisoning.