Gov. Ishihara calls for more immigration. Not sure how to feel about that seeing as he’s made a fair share of xenophobic remarks in the past… Why the turn around? Is he actually a pretty decent politician after all?
No, I don’t think so.
Okay, I really talk way too much about that without really making much concrete rhetoric.
Anyway, that’s not why I wanted to talk about him. I’m more concerned about his stance on nuclear weapons. And I’m really more concerned with this bit of verbiage:
“If Japan had had nuclear (arms), there would not have been any (Chinese encroachment) on the Senkakus and North Korea would not have abducted our citizens.”
Okay Mr. Ishihara, perhaps you find me a crazy foreigner with no cultural taste (not safe for work) or bearings of Japanese people, but I find that as a fine formula for mutually assured destruction. What you don’t quite understand is that having a nuclear weapon more or less makes a tough situation into a Mexican-standoff. Seeing as Mr. Ishihara has probably not seen any recent movie or read a recently published work of fiction (as its all trash), I’ll excuse him from almost certainly not seeing “Inglourious Basterds.” But perhaps he should. The film includes a prime example of what Mexican-standoffs breed.
This call for foreign labor, however, may come from another source — the Japan Business Federation. In a statement they released late last month, they made it known that Japan’s future workforce woes may be solved through the immigration of foreign laborers. Sure, yeah, I believe that completely when domestic unemployment is an issue.
Either way, that is just dumb. Did this have anything to do with pop culture? Well, no. But I talked about Mexican-standoffs so I’m excused right?
Tomo Hirai is a Shin-Nisei Japanese American lesbian trans woman born in San Francisco and raised in Walnut Creek, Calif., where she continues to reside. She attended the San Francisco Japanese Hoshuko (supplementary school) through high school and graduated from the University of California, Davis with degrees in Communications and Japanese, along with a minor in writing. She serves as a diversity consultant for table top games and comic books in her spare time.
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