The subject is interesting, especially because I'm married to a Japanese - but man do I hate articles that go round and round like this one. Here, have a little bit of a sociological hypothesis - but let's not go too deep for your little brains shall we? Here, have a little bit of anecdotal evidence instead. Enough of that? Alright, let's start over again. [...] Oh I'm outa time, let's end the article now, kthxbye.
It's probably too much to ask - but I think there should be something in between a scientific journal and common journalism. In technology we have some pretty insightful articles coming up in blogs now and then, articles where sources are cited and you can go deeper on any subject if you like. Why can't traditional journalists not use the web the way it is meant to?
What do you mean using anecdotal evidence instead? The author cites data and surveys, which clearly show the problem.
"Japan already has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060."
"The number of single people has reached a record high. A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all."
"A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way."
"Official alarmism doesn't help. Fewer babies were born here in 2012 than any year on record. (This was also the year, as the number of elderly people shoots up, that adult incontinence pants outsold baby nappies in Japan for the first time.)"
That would be fine if the article was called "Japanese people don't start enough families" - however, this wouldn't be an interesting headline, since it's years old news and most informed people know this already[1]. But it isn't, is it? It's asking the question why. I can ask such questions as well, but if I'm going to write an article about it, I'd hope to come up with some analysis to try to answer it - and this is exactly where the journalist got lazy and just cobbled up whatever anecdotes he can attribute to actual Japanese people saying them, cause, you know, they must be at the source of this, right?
[1] Although I'm not yet sure whether more babies is actually what Japan needs right now - looking at their population density, going easy on the baby making might be ok for a while, if there is a plan in place on how to turn it around once the population has fallen to more sustainable levels (and also how to pay for everyone's pensions in the meantime).
I'm not sure about you, but the fact that 45% of Japanese women had "no interest or despised sex" was quite news to me, and is definitely worth reporting, and honestly not far from the thesis of the headline.
+1, especially on wishing there were more really good social sciences blogs out there covering issues like this.
One of the big problems of course is the fact that while outsiders can see dynamics of and sometimes critique cultures, such critiques are necessarily incomplete (well all critiques are necessarily incomplete but outsider ones are especially likely to be).
But on your final question, I think one of the big issues is that the corporate media insists on pushing everything into narratives the corporations can understand. For example, in the US I tend to associate with people from a wide variety of backgrounds politically (and talk politics, as taboo as that is) and one thing I have noticed is that while the media tends to see social conservatives as the "sex police" the social conservative movement is the largest movement in the US which questions the desirability of Capitalism on an economic level (and the critiques are really interesting), but that doesn't work for corporations, so....
So here you have a corporate media organization engaging in difficult cross-cultural criticism. While it is an interesting article, it says as much about Western corporations as it does about Japan.
1) I'm fine with incomplete arguments if there is at least some attempt at an analysis shown instead of just a meaningless collection of facts and anecdotes. In that case the engaged reader could benefit by gasp thinking about it for himself.
2) So the problem is that corporate media is politically streamlined? Yes, I absolutely think so. In Switzerland we have an interesting weekly magazine called 'Weltwoche', which allows rather extreme opinion pieces of all political sides to appear unedited. I enjoyed that a lot, until the selection of articles began to appear biased to the right. I think the idea is still great - give me unfiltered opinions and analysis, instead just filter by the 'intellectual depth' if you will. It'd be black coffee in magazine form.
> So the problem is that corporate media is politically streamlined? Yes, I absolutely think so.
Hilaire Belloc in 1918 wrote a wonderful critique of corporate newspapers where he pointed out that their real customers are advertisers, and that in many cases, the cross-ownership of media by other corporations, as well as cross-board memberships meant that the corporate press would necessarily adopt positions friendly to the largest corporations. His book "The Free Press" (although very right wing) is worth reading. It totally anticipates Chomsky's critiques as well.
> I enjoyed that a lot, until the selection of articles began to appear biased to the right. I think the idea is still great - give me unfiltered opinions and analysis, instead just filter by the 'intellectual depth' if you will. It'd be black coffee in magazine form.
It is a good reason to have a robust blogosphere and read blogs you might otherwise disagree with as well as those who you agree with.
> It is a good reason to have a robust blogosphere and read blogs you might otherwise disagree with as well as those who you agree with.
I agree - I haven't really found good resources on general topic blogs however. Collections such as TrueReddit or DepthHub often start out well, but as time goes on, quality goes down. It seems like there is some kind of sedimentation force going on when people can up-/downvote.
Maybe one should ask why narratives instead of detailed scientific analysis is voted up on hackernews? Do the "corporate media organizations" control hackernews now?
Or, you know, people prefer narratives, and there's nothing inherently bad to them, compared to "detailed scientific analysis" (of which, 90% is also shit anyways).
Irony in text is always risky... I thought it was obvious that my reference to "corporate media organizations" controlling everything was enough over the top to make the irony clear...
>the social conservative movement is the largest movement in the US which questions the desirability of Capitalism on an economic level (and the critiques are really interesting)
Huh. Reference? Perhaps it's because I just don't know enough conservative folks, but I've never heard of a mainstream socially conservative anti-capitalist dialogue.
If what you say is true, either I have a pretty huge hole in my political knowledge (that or we're just using 'socially conservative' or 'capitalist' to mean different things.) Especially if it's the former, I'd like to close that hole.
>the social conservative movement is the largest movement in the US which questions the desirability of Capitalism on an economic level (and the critiques are really interesting)
John Medaille has written extensively on the subject. His book "Towards a Truly Free Market" is worth reading.
A lot of it boils down to the critiques of market capitalism by Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Chesterton and how these have largely continued within the conservative Catholic movement, as well as parts of the Orthodox and conservative Protestant communities as well.
I am a Heathen and I worship Odin, Thorr, and Freyr. Chesterton can be a bit arrogant when it comes to religion sometimes, but the reasons for his arrogance are often interesting to ponder even when one does not share the same religion.
People who want to know a bit more about the particulars of this economic thought should check out Distributivism. While I don't know much about it, it seems like the idea of reconciling private property ownership with the spread of the means of production to all people goes well with open source / maker movement ideas.
"According to distributists, property ownership is a fundamental right and the means of production should be spread as widely as possible rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state socialism) or of accomplished individuals (laissez-faire capitalism). Distributism therefore advocates a society marked by widespread property ownership and, according to co-operative economist Race Mathews, maintains that such a system is key to bringing about a just social order.
Distributism has often been described in opposition to both socialism and capitalism, which distributists see as equally flawed and exploitative."
Also I wrote a blog piece(http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-distributist-view...) about Distributism and open source, which comes around to favoring BSD-style licenses on a work-ownership theory. The piece can be an introduction to Distributist theory for open source developers as well as an introduction to open source for Distributists.
Distributism is an interesting movement, but it's incredibly minor and is very Catholic. It's social conservative but very different from the mainstream social conservatism in the U.S.
Strangely I am a Neopagan and was introduced to it by a Russian Orthodox priest. It is moving outside the strict domains of Catholicism. Most of those on /r/distributism on Reddit are not Catholics either.
I agree, I've read too many articles like this one. It's picking up a topic, citing something here and there, some nice stories and persons (a dominatrix, that has to be interesting!), without any point or additional information. It's inflating once 3-paragraph article up to several pages out of nowhere. I like reading longer articles and books but I want a bit more than random chit-chat.
But hey, I now know that some Japanese dominatrix squeezed the testicles of an army general in North Korea. Hooray.
- In standard English, "Japanese", "Chinese", etc. are now used only as adjectives and not nouns (although the noun usage used to be acceptable). So you can't correctly say "a Japanese came in" any more than you can say "a Swedish came in." http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/29887-grammar...
- "The Japanese" remains valid as a way to refer to the people of that nation collectively.
- "-(i)an" endings are both nouns and adjectives, so Canadians, Germans, and Ankh-Morporkians are all fine.
- "-man/woman" endings are no longer applied except where they've become idiomatic, so we have Welshman and Frenchman, but not Chineseman or Japaneseman. ("Chinaman" is, of course, derogatory.)
- In more academic or historical writing, you might still find "-ese" in use as a noun ending, but it sounds faintly racist and outdated: "More than a hundred Chinese up to that date had been interrogated by police." http://books.google.com.sg/books?id=Yqemz6q_nQYC&lpg=PA74&ot... (The same might apply to "-ish" words, but I'm not certain.)
-
(To throw_away) Like you, I've done my fair share of correcting Chinese speakers about this usage, too. But I've seen regular use of "a Chinese" in various older English writing, so the usage is at least historically justified, and probably slipped into older instructional texts. It doesn't surprise me that some of the textbooks used in China may not have kept up with changes in usage over the last few decades - in the first place, English teaching there was almost zilch in the past and remains very spotty today.
The only people I've ever encountered using the "a (Japan|Chin)ese" construction were (Japan|Chin)ese people themselves. Which may have rubbed off on GGP from GGP's Asian spouse. I've wondered if there was some correlation in Asian languages, but the English translation of the Japanese version of that wiki page makes it seem as if the concept of demonym is foreign to Japanese readers: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&pr... (and there's no Chinese version, as far as I can tell).
I think it sounds weird to some people because they're used to "Japanese" being a adjective rather than a demonym. When used in an unexpected way, any word sounds weird.
I'm married to a Britisher (which is not used in Great Britan anyway) sounds similarly awkward. Married to an Englishman/Welshman/Irishman works, but is gender (and England/Wales/Ireland) specific.
I'm married to a Scott works though.
Not sure there is a general purpose word you can use to say "I'm married to someone from Britian".
What's amusing is that in Japan many Japanese are totally unaware of the political incorrectness of it. In Japan I sometimes hear people use 'Jap' as slang, in store or product names, or just in normal language by extension of how other countries are abbreviated in english. In a country that is mostly japanese, it just loses its racist power.
Credit for using "begging the question" properly, but let me clarify. Propaganda against the Germans was either aimed squarely at Hitler himself or at more abstract representations that didn't emphasize the frankly non-existent physical differences between Germans and Americans. Germans were portrayed with swastikas and Prussian helmets and jackboots; Japanese were portrayed with buck teeth, yellow skin, glasses and slanted eyes.
Does to me; I guess I think of it as either an adjective or referring to the language. While this usage is technically correct, I think I'd always say "Japanese person".
I don't really have a good explanation though of why it's different to "American" or "Canadian" in that regard. Maybe just it's less common for some reason.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the form "I'm married to a Japanese" (this usage comes up a lot for me, although I'm generally referring to Chinese rather than Japanese). But if I were to avoid it, I definitely wouldn't say "I'm married to a Japanese person". I'd say "My wife is Japanese".
I think the referring to "a Japanese" vs "a Japanese man/woman" sounds a little racist, it shouldn't, it makes syntactical sense, but I guess its the cultural influence on the language, I don't know why I brought it up, I was just really taken back when you said "I'm married to a Japanese"
It really does sound strange to me as well, almost derogatory in tone. It sounds so much better to my ear to say "i'm married to a Japanese person" or "... person from Japan". But I have no good reason as to why the same doesn't hold for Canadian/American.
Thanks, I think I'll have to keep that in mind when talking in English. The thing is, I thought about writing 'Japanese woman', but her gender seemed besides the point to me, so I didn't want to mention it. In my native tongue (German) there is no unisex term for nationalities, you're either a "Japanerin" (= Japanese woman) or a "Japaner" (= Japanese man). Because of that there might be less subtext when talking about nationalities, but I think this is all just due to the history of your cultural relations - for example in Switzerland there is some negative subtext to the word 'Yugoslave', because their immigrant group was rather unpopular at one point.
It's probably too much to ask - but I think there should be something in between a scientific journal and common journalism. In technology we have some pretty insightful articles coming up in blogs now and then, articles where sources are cited and you can go deeper on any subject if you like. Why can't traditional journalists not use the web the way it is meant to?