Rocking in Hakata

I just finished reading a really interesting 3-part survey over at What Japan Thinks. If you’re interested, or if you want to know what I’m talking about, I encourage you to go take a look: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. While Ken Y-N seems to think that a few folks will jump on it because it’s wide open for foreigner discrimination based criticism, I’m going to briefly talk about what I found interesting.

I guess you could say that Japan is headed slowly in the direction of modern Western liberalism. I’m not a big fan of the American variety, and by extent, I’m not a huge cheerleader for the entirety of Western liberalism. Looking at the multiple answers used in this survey, I feel like Ken Y-N hit it on the head when he wrote, “The key question is, of course, what do Japanese consider human rights?” Sure, they have defined them in the Constitution, but the survey to me had a distinctly different flavor.

The responses that surprised me (taken from multiple questions, in no particular order) were as follows:

- People staring, running away

- Opposition from others regarding marriage

- Problems being financially independent

- Rumors, others speaking ill of me

These things are not what I consider human rights. In fact, I get pretty annoyed when someone starts bandying about trying to enforce public behaviors that fix the so-called problem. This is an issue for me when dealing with Western liberalism: people are unbelievably hypersensitive! Now, don’t get me wrong. That doesn’t mean that I think people staring at you or running away from you, opposing you regarding marriage, or speaking ill of you are good things - or even socially acceptable. I simply feel that they fall outside of the realm of human rights. It aggravates me that in my country people cannot put up Nativity Scenes during Christmas anymore because they’re considered eyesores to people of differing religious beliefs, in the same way that hearing “Merry Christmas” is a startling affront. Nobody has the right to not be offended. That’s just silly. Similarly, I don’t feel like any laws or government intervention is called for in the case of people staring / running away, opposing marriage, or rumor mongering. People’s behavior is ultimately their responsibility.

I also don’t think that being financially independent is a human right. I think it’s a goal, not a condition to be taken for granted. And I don’t feel like its the government’s role to “help” in that case either. Surely society should step in and help our floundering individuals. But the individuals who are currently floundering would be mistaken to charge everyone else with breaking their inviolate human rights if they did not help out. In short, I draw the line between social ills and legally protected human rights. Anyway, it was an interesting survey. I just hope that Japan doesn’t encourage the same mentality of victimhood that is so pervasively nurtured in America and other Western countries. It seems to run hand in hand with this kind of thinking. And hey, once you have victims, you have court cases and an increasingly litigious culture. Please, Japan, think that over. I’d rather see you fix the actual problems, and not fight the windmills. (And this is coming from a fellow who gets stared at, run away from, and incorporated into rumors every day I live here.)