Hello from Japan

stalk momus. hah especially since he's in the states now.

i went to canada -------it was north

Was it grim up there, Mike?

cor i thought it was only us crazy Brits (well southerly-based brits to be precise i suppose) that made "it's grim up north" jokes! mmm tokyo, Fritz let us know of all of your adventures!

Hello Fritz! Have a good time, I can't think of some witty joke cos I've never been to Japan but DON'T EAT ANY DOGS AHAHAHAHA! That might do! I hope the weather is good also.

Tokyo seems to be based on the presumtion that people won't behave like assholes given a chance, an idea that never really occured to me before.

That's very well put, I like that. I was just trying to explain today to a Japanese person why many US toilets have a beam-flush system. It's because the default position for human behaviour here is 'bad'. So you engineer or institutionalize the morality or responsibility they should have internalised (ie flushing).

Actually we'd just been talking to an irresponsible guy who confessed he'd made a woman pregnant by inseminating her when stoned. My Japanese friend said he had 'killed a baby' by forcing the women to have an abortion. I explained that in the west a woman is supposed to have the right to choose whether to give birth or abort, and the state / employers / charities etc are supposed to step in if the man abrogates his responsibilities. So here again we engineer or institutionalize things that in Japan would be internalized as part of personal / social morality. That's good, in that it makes women think of themselves as agents. It's bad too, though, because it gives men an excuse to be assholes. In the end, in the west, we're actually socialised into bad behaviour, like being out of our head on drugs at crucial moments, because such selfishness is not at odds with consumerism, the only moral imperative left. Being 'bad' is our way of being good. Hence, perhaps, the amount of boasting you have to put up with about how much people drank last night.

I'm back home now, still too jetlagged to think straight enough to write anything about Japan yet, suffice it to say that I'm enrolling in Japanese language courses asap. I want to live there. anyway thought I'd stop by to say hello again. Just had a birthday (33! yikes!) too... hope you're all well.

and Momus... I saw lots of people getting really really drunk in tokyo and behaving badly, and abortion is really common because the pill was illegal until just a few years ago (legislated morality?) so I don't know if your examples stand up all that well, though I do agree with your basic premise.

ahhhh, scratch that... I'm way too tired to make sense of anything right now. momus, if you read this, please expand cause i didn't really get your point on first drowsy reading.

fritz- nice to know you had a good time in Japan. welcome back!