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Turning Japanese | page 1, 2
For maybe the first or second time in my life, I was stunned into speechlessness. They took advantage of that moment of silence to ask a couple of questions: Would MTV be available in the rooms and was there a shopping mall nearby? And the scales were lifted from my eyes. I suddenly understood this whole archipelago. I had a downright Joycean epiphany, and grasped an essential fact about the land of Pokémon and karaoke. All at once I knew the answer to the question that plagues every foreigner who comes here. How does Japan turn its people into, well, into Japanese? How do you drain a whole people of psychic vigor? How do you render them incurious and intellectually languid, with only nervous energy and shallow greed to fill the mental vacuum? I already knew why this was done. Everybody knows why. Such people are easy to govern. They're made-to-order dupes for contemptuous plutocracies, such as the one that runs this country so badly. The answer to the question of how this is done lies in the secondary schools. The educational system is deliberately and cynically designed to serve this end. Starting in junior high, through sadistic amounts of homework and relentless cramming of the short-term memory with arbitrary data, young souls are reamed out like melon pulp, and young minds are robbed of curiosity, which we Homo sapiens are supposed to share with the higher, and even mid-level mammals. Once you've killed curiosity, you've killed the cat, to turn the proverb upside-down. By the time the poor saps get to college, they are ineducable. Their professors couldn't have an easier job. It's like being the night-shift nurse on a narcoleptic ward. The very term "Japanese university" is an oxymoron, in the sense that, properly speaking, universities exist to stimulate independent thought and lifelong curiosity -- the very qualities that, if unloosed on Japan, would cause this whole edifice to crumble. Scrutiny is one thing Asian oligarchies have never been able to stand. An ignorant and incurious populace is a basic requirement for Japanese society, and the educational system couldn't be better designed to serve such ends. Needless to say, that study-abroad program at the University of Utah flopped as badly as cold fusion, right there on the same campus. But nobody cared or even noticed. It was just another somnambulistic gesture, a riddle with no answer signifying the regulation Zen emptiness. The puerility and sloth of the students, the pure nothingness of the curriculum: It's all sham and mummery, gutless as a haiku poem. But I had plenty of time to write this article. I've found a niche in these languid institutions that the natives call, with hardly a smirk, "daigaku," which means "big schools." "Parasite" is such an unpleasant term. I prefer "opportunistic organism." Where dead things exist, there will be happy worms.
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