Green IslandFear in Japan
September 3rd 2010 07:34
In the Michael Moore movie Bowling Columbine the director interviews the singer Marilyn Manson. In many ways the interview is the defining point of the movie. The singer who is often reviled in the mainstream press commented that the mass media in America have made a successful connection between fear and consumerism. The more news stories, press releases and ad campaigns can strike fear into the heart of the populace the more money big business can make. For every fear there is a corollary product. Fear of burglary boosts the sale of security systems. Fear of spots boosts sales of acne cream. Fear of Islam boosts the defence budget. Fear and money. You scare the people into departing with their hard earned dollars.
Behind this powerful nexus is the assumption of what is normal – a world without acne, a world without crime, a world without terrorists, a world without obesity, heart disease, tooth decay, hair loss, aging, bank runs, robbery, illegal immigration. And so the list goes on. The media is completely complicit in this scheme to brainwash the populace. They report about killer bees, random stabbings, rare diseases, epidemics, unusual misfortune and a host of other improbables to convince people that a fate cruel and unusual is just around the corner for those not prepared to pay for protection.
This psychology is frighteningly omnipresent in Japan. The Japanese who live in Japan (there are many who live abroad and shudder at the mere thought of returning back to Japan to live) are almost always of the opinion that all foreign countries are dangerous. They want to visit Hawaii, Rome, Paris, Vancouver and Seattle but they prefer to go with a Japanese tour group to steer them through the minefields of poverty, crime, drug use and sodomy that awaits them in foreign climes. To further minimize the risks of foreign holidays they confine their tours to but a few whirl wind days which always end at a hotel which is reassuringly bland and international. The lack of personality a hotel projects is a reassuring reminder of the home country.
The cause of the problem is this stupid list that UNESCO has made up. The World Heritage Site is pure gold for Japanese. And the greatest insult they have suffered since Emperor Hirohito was made to visit General MacArthur to offer Japan’s unconditional surrender is that their beloved Mount Fuji was denied a spot on the star studded list. It is the list to end all lists. For the Japanese who are raised with a high level of literacy, subservience and ignorance of all things historical the UNESCO World Heritage list is the only way of accessing the value of a foreign place. If the United Nations scrapped the list then only Japanese managers, engineers and students would need to risk the war zone that non-Japanese countries represent. Countries without a traffic light every 50 meters, without a wide variety of bland foods, without 3 cars per household, without the mind numbingly respectable broadcasting of NHK, without the reassuringly staid values of the middle class and the aged class are to be feared and mistrusted.
Like all myths of national identity, it is a lie, an ideal never to be reached. The land of ‘wa’ can never have enough ‘wa’, can never be safe enough. One of my students today made the astonishing claim that a taxi driver in Japan was more at risk in his or her professional life than a fire fighter. She was a smart enough and old enough woman to know better. And her English was good enough to understand my point that fire fighters had to enter burning buildings in the course of their job to rescue people and pets. I emphatically made the point that firefighters risked death by poisonous gases and by collapsing structures. I also made the point that out of the tens of thousands of safe and uneventful taxi rides that occur every day it is only the one journey where a customer attacks the driver that the media chooses to report about. Nothing could sway the woman in her opinion that being a taxi driver in Japan was akin to a tour of duty in Baghdad for an American soldier.
That is the power of the media creating fear. Fear is largely irrational and so reason cannot dispel fear. The only thing the media-fed morons gain comfort in is the thought of a criminal being locked up or better still executed. Phew, that’s one less danger on the streets.
Perhaps if the media talked about the number of people killed every year by non-drink drivers, or the amount of damage done by pollution, or the amount of people who feel compelled to kill themselves we might get a more fruitful public response. If the government told the people how much land they waste on land fill sites for all the consumer crap they throw away perhaps this fear of impending doom could be channeled into more constructive and more forward thinking policies.
Let’s bring some facts into the frame. Here are the figures per 100,000 for intentional homicides for 2010:
El Salvador – 71
Jamaica – 58
Venezuela – 49
South Africa – 47
Colombia - 35
Russia – 14.9
Papua New Guinea – 9.06
Kenya - 5.72
the USA – 5.4
India – 2.82
China 2.36
New Zealand – 2
Canada – 1.83
Chile – 1.6
the UK – 1.49
Tunisia – 1.22
Spain – 1.2
Denmark – 1.01
Saudi Arabia – 0.92
Japan – 0.44
Singapore – 0.38
Iceland – 0.31
Liechtenstein – 0
What does this tell us? Well the first thing all Japanese taxi drivers should note is that Liechtenstein is the only safe place for them to pursue their chosen profession of over-charging and driving irritatingly slowly. These figures also point out that in fact Japan is not the safest country to live in. You are more likely to encounter a nutter with a weapon in Japan than you are in Singapore. Who would believe that Saudi Arabia is a better place to raise a kid than Denmark? Or that Tunisia is safer than Canada?
Just one glimpse at the list makes you realize that it is all bullshit. Most people whose lives are cut short are not the victims of violent crime but the victims of malnutrition, preventable disease, car accidents, a bad diet, HIV and contaminated water. People die from inequality between the rich and the poor, from lack of education, from poor resources, from market forces. A few perhaps succumb to falling coconuts, snake bites, terrorism and homicidal taxi drivers but they represent a near negligible number compared to those who perish at the hands of global financial inequality. A child dies every 5 seconds somewhere in the world from a hunger-related disease. Compare this to the fact that (shock and horror) 2,929 people have been killed by terrorist attack around the world since 9/11. In just one day 17,280 children die from hunger. What should America be declaring war on?
Well by my reckoning it should be Liechtenstein. Zero murders is terrible publicity for the economy. How the fuck are the American elite meant to keep a sense of fear instilled in its population if countries like Liechtenstein set such dangerous precedents? And how do the Japanese feel now that they are empirically imperiled and shamed by the more upstanding citizens of Singapore, Iceland and Liechtenstein?
Clearly America and Japan should round up the elite of their taxi drivers; those who have survived the most attacks from disgruntled passengers; those who have braved the front lines of customer service for many years. The true hardened vets and give them all a bleached bone from an African baby (surely no shortage of these) and send them over to Liechtenstein to start clubbing the shit out of the locals. This will have several beneficial consequences: the terrorism figures will improve, Japan will only have Iceland and Singapore to deal with, and sure enough nobody but Bono will be interested in feeding Africa; the world’s eyes will be glued to the spectacle of bone wielding homicidal (and possibly Islamist) taxi drivers on the loose in Liechtenstein. In terms of telly and fear there really is no contest.
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