ARW 5/8 Response

ARW 5/8 Response

On 5/8, we had a ARW class on Bakayama for the first time. It is one of the interesting features of ICU!
We had group discussions on several topics that are closely related to the LLA lecture we had the day before: power of people and media's interaction. The first topic was the most interesting point; why Japanese people appear not to be as enthusiastic as people in other countries in terms of demonstrations. The first reason is excessively contradictory; citizens need to get a permission from the police to protest. For this restriction, most protests won't work. Well, they can even ignore that rule in the first place, but they can't. This is for another reason; Japanese are traditionally and culturally humbler than people from any other nationalities. When I used to go to an American school, people frequently asked me, "is it true that Japanese bow to each other before they start a conversation?" The answer is generally yes because we are taught to do so. We tend to believe that is the beauty of modesty; moreover, we also believe in the beauty of ambiguity. These two factors had actually made Japanese well-mannered from a hundreds of years ago, but at the same time, they made us weak, unenthusiastic, and fragile. As a result, Japanese became not be able to take an aggressive action so easily and not so many people join protests or demonstrations today.

I was also surprised that we are not allowed to make students union in our campus although we signed an oath that guarantees our freedom of speech. There are some parts in our educational system that is not "liberal." Topics we discussed in the later part of the class were much harder in my opinion. The first question was, "what kind of freedom of speech do we have here at ICU?" Well, students union is not an option, so the only things left are school newspaper or the use of Web 2.0, such as Youtube or Facebook. We also talked about NHK; we did not know much evidences to support that NHK is biased and censoring information as well. However, Takumi and I were arguing that it does not make sense how everyone who owns a television is obliged to pay fees to NHK because we can never choose not to receive a signal from NHK. Since Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister of Japan, is for the nuclear plants, NHK may censor any opinions that is against it. This "mass media and the society" is a big theme for ELA this term. I assume we will continue discussion on this theme in the class.