chubu comments

Message to my grandchildren: Yes, it's terrible what happens when people have guns like in America. A good thing you don't go to school in a country like that, isn't it? A good thing you have parents who wouldn't let you live in a country like that. You are safe where you live, but still remember to look both ways when you cross the street.

Isolated people + lack of social responsibility + easily access to guns = American madness.

Yes, there are crazy people everywhere. But in Japan a crazy person gets a knife and stabs a couple people (with luck not fatally) before being overpowered. In the US a crazy person gets an assault rifle and this is the result. That nutcase may have pulled the trigger, but the blame is with the entire society, especially a Congress that thinks more about the NRA than about its country's children.

What would Kissinger know about human rights that he could be on such a jury?!

Why now? No good reason for the timing , except Maria's about preventing local nutters doing something shameful in China or Korea.

This man--and not the political leaders of China, Taiwan, and Japan--represents the hope for the future of East Asia. Nation-states are a failed idea from 19th century Europe. And as Shoghi Effendi Rabbani, another Asian, said some 80 years ago, the roots of conflict in the modern world stem from nationalism, racism, and communism. This conflict has elements of all three.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

I was at the school in question two years ago checking on a student teacher there. It was a zoo. Wild kids, clueless staff, a recipe waiting to happen.And it obviously did.

Germany has successfully closed down its reactors and is now a world leader in solar energy. Japan is starting its reactors up again and is a world leader in.......?

I agree about the despicable record. I was just in tiny Launceston, Tasmania, Australia, population maybe 70,000. In the past year, they have accepted and resettled about 200 ethnic Nepalese refugees from Bhutan (with more family members coming). What could be a more different culture and setting? Yet no one makes a fuss over it, this in a country with its own problems of unemployment. This is more refugees than entire Japan accepts in a decade. And Japan sits and frets about its ageing shrinking population base

Re Pukey2's question about what happens with abusive J fathers and Nj mothers: I do know of a case near me where a very physically abusive Japanese father was given a Japanese court order not to have any contact with his American ex-wife or child. And it upheld this even after the father made several court appeals. I'm sure it helped that the mother was fluent in Japanese and could navigate the Japanese social services and legal systems.

Let's see if I got this right: this guy doesn't make an English menu because it would make the atmosphere "too Western". And he's selling hamburgers?!?! Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, is he?

Quite part from the Marine's widow, what about his parents? To lose a 22-year-old son must be terrible. The one solace they had was their new grandson--an American citizen-- and now the government he was fighting for won't allow them to stay. I hope this young boy grows up in Japan and never thinks about living under a government that would send him off to die in a war for oil and then treat his family like this.

Does anyone know how much (or how little) France has been doing to help in the disaster? Much of Haiti's current economic woes are due to the drain its former colonising "motherland" had on it. When Haitian slaves had the audacity to fight for their freedom in the early 1800s (the second American nation to become independent), an important part of the peace treaty was the requirement for Haiti to pay huge reparations to France for property (land. slaves, and deserting soldiers) France lost. With huge annual interest rates on unpaid reparations, Haiti wasn't able to finish paying until the 1940s! No other American nation had to pay its ex-colonial master for its freedom. This was the basis for continual poverty in Haiti throughout its post-independence history.

France, maybe time to pay back that money now?

The movie is an obvious (too obvious?) metaphor on European colonialism of the Americas and much of the rest of the world. Part of that history included a minority of Whites who took issue with people being colonialised, assimilated into them, and tried to stop them being enslaved or having their land taken from them. Movies like this celebrate those heroes either directly or indirectly, and they remind us that not all Europeans were evil colonisers.

When we see a movie like "Avatar" or "Dances with Wolves", we White people like to identify with that hero, just as we like to read "Anne Frank" and think that we, too, would have hidden a little Jewish girl if we had lived in Nazi-occupied Europe. Maybe we wouldn't really have been so heroic, but the first step to having the courage to conquer the racism inside us is thinking about how we would do (or would have done) things differently.

Is it a movie about racism? Sure. Is it a movie about examining the racism in our society and saying "no"? Sure. Is the movie especially effective because the man turning his back on European-style racism is White? Of course.

For someone with certain eye disorders like me, e-books are a godsend. I need very high contrast to read and without e-books, I would have to sit with a bright light and magnifying glass. This half-blind bookaholic has no nostalgia for hard-to-read and heavy-to-carry paper books.