Japan never fails. Monkey disaster again. Oh, and it gets worse. This was the big news this week, prompting Ed's wife to state, "Japan is a peaceful place." Indeed. My favorite quote was the old lady on the news saying, "Then there was a monkey in my house and I thought 'Why is there a monkey in my house?' And then it bit my leg, so I hit it in the head, but it kept biting me." Quality.
In other Japan news, This shit about pissed me off. I won't go on about it for too long, but with all the bullshit that foreigners ge there about their manners and lack of them and their general barbarianatude, some conduct that would never be acceptable in civilized countries is completely okay here. Number one on my list, being a drunk guy in public making a big nuisance of yourself and having nobody say anything about it. It doesn't always result in needless death, but it could. Sometimes America being violent and having dangerous consequences seems like a good thing to me. Oh, I'm going to go hang around downtown shit faced and sleep wherever I fall down and stumble around the train station and see how that works out. At best, it works out in having no wallet anymore. And it fucking well should.
1 comment:
It is pure monkey terror that keeps me from going to Japan.
As for the other story, I give a not-very-heartfelt counter argument, which is to say that if it is the norm in japan for pedestrians to occasionally wander around drunk, and one happened to jostle into people who josteld into an old guy standing on the edge of a subway platform, perhaps that is the price of a certain sort of liberty. Now, i know that when we put an esteemed scholars life in the balance against the right to be an asshole, it looks cold and even dumb to say such a thing, but the risk free society is pretty much liberty free too. We can draw a lot of lessons from that story, and one is that people shouldn't be allowed to be drunk in public. Another might be that frail people should stay back from the edge of subway platforms. Another is that people shouldn't crowd forward on subway platforms. If we are being critical of Japan, maybe we can criticize their sense of personal space that allows such a horrible thing to happen. Maybe Japan needs a Mothers Against Drunk Walking chapter, or a temperance league.
On selective enforcement against foreigners, you ahve my agreement. On no one having too much to drink then taking public transportation home, not so much.
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