The nail that sticks out will be hammered down

About a month has passed since I came back to Japan.

It has been peaceful and calm. I have been working part-time at "several" convenience stores around Tokyo about 4 days a week, plus attending some job seminars and experiencing some Syu-katsu (Japanese traditional job-hunting, where almost all the university students do job-hunting at the same time and it is sometimes described as job searching WAR...). It is for sure interesting.

Two days ago, Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama resigned after only 8 months of his position. Since then, news papers and TV news (particularly programs generally called "wide-show") repeatedly "complain" about the lack of practical strategy of Hatoyama, and even more, the lack of feature leader of Japan.

And it has been like this for over 4 years now already. No one prime minister has presided over his position more than 1 year since 2006. Even I find it weird and strange and even shameful, for sure people who have never been in Japan would wonder "WHY" Japanese prime minister changes so quickly in recent years.

I think that, it is not just because of the prime minister's ability and lack of political accomplishment that every prime minister has to resign his position within this ridiculously short time span.

It is because of the whole nation's political attitude, which is REALLY REALLY short-sighted and self-interested, or I could describe it as "SELFISH".

In my opinion, under the current situation of huge national debt and lack of social security in our country, if we want more secure social welfare service "each of us" has to ware some burden for "every one citizen", or others.

But once the politicians start talking about increasing tax of any sort, the mass media broadcasts the comments of general public as if they ALL OPPOSE to any kind of increase in individual expenditure. BUT, they want the child support money (I don't know how to call this in English but in Japanese 子供手当), which is that the national government pays 26,000 yen/month PER CHILD (for this year it is 13,000) to family who have more than one child under the age of 15.

Apparently it is partly economic stimulus plan and partly the strategy against the trend of aging population and declining birth rate of our country.

I find this policy very ambitious and brave. I mean, giving out 13,000 yen per child to every family in Japan cost approximately 200 billion yen to the government this year (2010). It is a lot of money and if one family had 4 children, next year they could receive 104,000 yen EVERY MONTH if this policy continues. On the other hand, family who already raised child and if the child was over 15 years old, the family will not receive any money.

So this policy does not benefit every one citizen of the nation, but it kind look like socialist regime (pardon my lack of political knowledge and please correct my mistake at any moment). And for sure those benefited families would ask for keeping the policy because they get the MONEY. But they vote for against increase in consumer tax. In my opinion, it is super short-sighted and selfish.

I think the mass media has huge responsibility for making the general public feel so hopeless in politics and protective, or could be called "hyper-individualistic". So far I have been in Japan for about a month now and already feel very strongly that people are very conservative in a little bit cheap way. They are not conservative in terms of globalization of the economy or outsourcing of our manufacturing industry. At least they don't really talk about it. Maybe they don't know about it? But they always talk about how much money they wish they had and they want to save more for UNCERTAIN FUTURE. It is not that they don't want to consume anything for environmental reasons (lol), it's just because they don't see much hope in the country's future and they don't talk about "how" they would act or CHANGE for it. All they do seem to be watch news papers and TV news and complain about what the mess media is complaining. In my opinion, each one of us (general public) is given very little information to judge politics if we just watch those major corporation supported mass media. They do not give the whole aspect of what is going on, so we need to find more information source "ourselves" these days. At least I have some those sources already, so I am not completely hopeless, fortunately or not lol

I am realizing the reality of the saying "出る杭は打たれる = The nail that sticks out will be hammered down." It may be because I grew up in Japan for 18 years and still I have the social norm and that's why I find it difficult to express my own "counter-mainstream" point of view. It is MUCH MUCH harder than when I am in Canada for sure. Open-debate seems often not welcomed in this society, and the older he/she gets, the more expectation or rigid opinion (often skewed by mass-media and advertisement) he/she will have.

But I never know, because I have only been in Tokyo so far and this is just the first month. I will have more opportunity to meet people and discuss for the next few months, so I am looking forward to that.

To conclude, what I really worry about my country is the people's super short-sided extremely individualistic political views, and the lack of open political debate could even worsen this trend. There is a big election coming up next month, so until then I need to learn more about politics in Japan and be able to discuss more core issues that we are facing now.