Freed Japanese Hostages home from Iraq....and treated like shit when they get there.

Yeah, the article I read this morning about the comments made in Japan gave me a bit of culture shock. Comparing the treatment of these people to the 2 American girls who were held in Afgahnistan at the start of that war is a little weird- the girls were invited to the White House & I remember reading about them for weeks in the news. (random result from google: http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/people/shows/curry.mercer/profile.html)

Also, is it too off topic to mention this? "President Bush was "moved" by recently published photos of caskets containing U.S. military personnel slain in Iraq but stands by his policy barring their publication, a White House spokesman said Friday." (cnn.com) I don't know exactly why, that headline seriously pissed me off. He was "moved"? Did he fucking think about what was going to happen if he invaded?

I suppose they could be greeted in an American fashion and be elevated to the level of sainthood for being heroically kidnapped.

I'm not saying they should get fuckin' medals, but I don't think they deserve to be publicly shamed and demonized.

Gotta love american mass media.

It's hard for Americans to understand a thought like, 'What the hell were you thinking? Don't you know your place?' it's not the kind of thought we have very often.

The nytimes article on it (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/23/international/asia/23JAPA.html) went a lot into how they see it as a personal responsibility thing.

I'd disagree with saying that american's don't often think "what the hell were you thinking? Don't you know your place?" -I just don't think it's ever, in our country, applied to people voluteering in war zones who are kidnapped.

Fair enough.

In this case, Japanese troops are dispatched to a combat zone for the first time since WWII. The majority of Japanese a very ambivalent about the whole thing, and everybody just wants it to go well. These three people put that all in jeopardy. They created a major international incident because they weren't circumspect.

I think that's the thinking.

Go read the nytimes article- they note how pretty much the entire japanese media in iraq pulled out last week, so they have no first-hand coverage of their troops there.

I did read the article.

How does the media's withdrawal relate?

Your sentence " The majority of Japanese a very ambivalent about the whole thing, and everybody just wants it to go well." made me think about how the media pulled out, seemingly at the government's request. Despite the fact that the Pentagon muzzled the reporters in Iraq pretty well with the whole "embedded reporter" thing, it's very odd for us to think about reporters wholesale obeying govt. orders like that. To me it kind of spoke to the different attitudes between cultures about obeying govt. orders about dangerous places & such. American's celebrate the whole "Robert Pelton's World's Most Dangerous Places"/cowboy ideal, which is probably a very foreign concept in the Japanese culture.

Apologies if I'm rambling, just took more allergy medicine & my brain is probably under the influence of too many antihistamines to function. :-P

To be fair, the Australian who was briefly kidnapped along with them (? or some group) was also rebuked by our PM but that was more because she said she didnt agree with our govts policy on the war so they let her go. Not really the same thing though I guess, as our PM is a twit.