Pico Iyer On The Contradiction Of Japan's Contradictions

[Mulboyne]

[Adhesive]

One of the more astute essays I've read on Japanese society. Thanks.

[Kuang_Grade]

http://mediasearch.wnyc.org/m/21813375/high-finance-old-japan-studio-360.htm

This is a podcast from earlier in the year (I had thought about posting previously but this thread reminded me to do so) where Pico Iyer talks chats with the host....It starts the after the 13 minute mark (there is a interesting piece about a suicide forest as well at the 37 minute mark). He talks about how he met his wife and how despite all the time he's spent in Japan, he's never developed more than an elementary level of language skill in general and with his wife in specific...likewise, his wife's English is very elementary as well...He says this actually works well because their respective vocabularies are so limited, they communicate very well because the both of them have to speak in extremely basic terms as well as not being able to have verbal spats because they lack the tools to fight.

[Coligny]

If the test of a first-rate mind, as Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, is the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time,

This assume they are holding ideas...

I don't really know how to express in proper english what I mean without looking like my usual bottom of the swamp dweller troll. But I'm pretty sure that bosozoku, black van crowd, yamamba and a lot of other new-japan castes might have read somewhere some reason said by some people why they might be doing said stuff. But in fine, they do it, ...just to do something... , and started without any kind of reason. Like kids collecting stamps.

In japan a bosozoku with nazy apparels... might not even be aware of German engagement in WWII. That means he don't understand the ideological extreme of the ideology displayed, therefore it can't be deduced what he thinks based on what political signs he's displaying. So he's not holding any idea... This for sure is quite japanese... in a pathetic way...

(have to read more on that guy, maybe i'll understand better why the washing machine understand better my frustration than me wife seems to be)