In winter, I'm a Buddhist,
And in summer, I'm a nudist.
- Joe Gould
"My Religion"
In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.
- Oscar Wilde, aware in 1889 that popular conceptions about the country and its people are mostly fiction.
Not even 10% of what Japanese people are thinking is communicated overseas.
- Watanabe Tsuneo of CSIS
All foreign correspondents, whenever they desert statistics for judgments of opinion...become models of self-deception. They may call themselves, with proper gravity, ‘reporters’. But...they are nothing but quack psychiatrists who do not even know that this is the field they practise.
- Alistair Cooke
Where all news comes at second-hand, where all the testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not the realities themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses.
- Walter Lippmann
We want...a revolution - a turning of the wheel, so that the state becomes once again the servant of the people, and not the other way around. We are the progressives now, comrades, (and) you the reactionaries.
- Daniel Hannan
If the textbook says, "It is well known that...", you can be sure that is a very good place to begin a research inquiry.
- Isaiah Bowman, geographer and former president of Johns Hopkins University
The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
- Cicero (55 BC)
We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press. It is not we who silence the press. It is the press that silences us. It is not a case of the Commonwealth settling how much the editors shall say; it is a case of the editors settling how much the Commonwealth shall know. If we attack the press, we shall be rebelling, not repressing.
- G.K. Chesterton
You can see a lot by looking.
- Yogi Berra
All text copyright 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 by William Sakovich
E-mail:
ampontan
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David said
Ampontan, whaddaya think of this? http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/08/expect-be-lied-japan/?pagination=false
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1. The word “horsesh*t” comes immediately to mind.
2. The first tip-off was that a book by McNeill was being reviewed. He’s made a career out of accentuating whatever shadows he can find and ignoring the sunlight. Typical of the FCCJ barstool crowd.
3. I have no patience for the artsy-fartsy, and it was a struggle getting past the first paragraph for that reason.
4. I stopped at this point:
That’s 100% proof horsesh*t about Occupy. There are compilations of even worse horror stories than that one. (NY sanitation workers, who do it for a living, said the garbage they picked up there smelled the worst of any than can remember.) The reviewer is living on an imaginary planet. And most Japanese put Oe in a category lower than that most Americans put Noam Chomsky in (among those who know or care who either person is).
Yoroshiku!
-A.
Andrew in Ezo said
David beat me to it. Buruma also delivered a whopper in an article about Takeshima/Senkaku:
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/east-asia-s-nationalist-fantasy-islands-by-ian-buruma
yankdownunder said
Buruma book review
The words “horsesh*t” artsy-fartsy are too kind for this scum bag.
“What put paid to any celebration of nuclear power in Japan, however, was the American H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll in 1954. By a slice of ghastly irony, the only victims of this explosion in the Pacific were Japanese fishermen, whose boat had strayed too close.”
strayed too close
the only victims
The Japanese fisherman were among 264 people accidentally exposed to radiation because the explosion and fall-out had been far greater than expected.
They did not stray and they were not the only victims.
The review is full of lies, misinformation and bias.
The title “Expect to Be Lied to in Japan” should be changed to
“Expect to Be Lied to by Buruma”.
James A said
Ian Buruma is still around? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. These old-school leftist academics whose brains have atrophied during tenure sometimes like to make a peep time and time again to show the regents that they aren’t totally comatose.