Re: [tlug] (OT) The enigma of Japan (was: UNIX jobs on TLUG)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

Doug McLean writes:

 > I bet in some book store in Asia there's a "Dogs and Demons"
 > equivalent bemoaning the broken system in the US or Europe.  :)

Quite possibly.  However, the Japanese I know who have lived in the
U.S. and comment on it mostly point to the obvious cases where the
results are horrible, but the political system arguably reflects
plurality opinion at least: medical care (and in general the welfare
system) that depends on being well employed, high levels of economic
mobility coupled with lack of job security and high income inequality,
and so on.  The state of the "safety net" in the U.S. is certainly
deplorable, but guess what?  You can find equal number of voters to
deplore it for being too generous, as those who deplore it for being
too stingy.  A very large fraction (I won't say majority, but you can
surely count it in tenths of the electorate) agrees with the general
policies that lead to these results.  IOW, in the U.S. the system is
gridlocked because the voters as a group are pulling in different
directions.

The Japanese I know in the U.S. mostly acknowledge that; they don't
really think the system is broken from the point of view of serving
the American people, although they find the outcome pretty distasteful
as Japanese.

And then there's the Asahi Shinbun.  cf.

http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/Blog/Japan/SenseMaybeButSenseOfShameNo