Class - 5/31/2010

Uh oh, I realized that I have three blog posts I have to write(;-;)

In Monday's class, we worked mainly on politics and nationality.
Rab talked about election. The reality of types of people who vote, percentage, and how candidates get voted or not in the U.S.
In the election of 2008, it is true that Obama won the election for getting the most votes compared to other candidates. The number of the people who had rights to vote but did not vote to any of them, however, was more than the number of people who voted for Obama! This was surprising for me to know that the result might have appeared differently depending on those voters, and that the fact that there were so many people who were unsatisfied with all the candidates.

Then we moved on to the topic of elections in Japan.
My group's discussion ended up in these result for the reasons of people who do not vote:
1.There are no attractive, reliable, and suitable person to be elected.
2.The Japanese government is not trustworthy. People can not believe its plans such as manifestos because the image of them often failing to achieve the plans is strong.
3.People, we thought especially young people, are not interested in politics because they haven't felt that government's action directly changed their life. It can be also said that the government is too far from the citizens. I think that the fact that it is difficult to recognize the importance of one vote might be also the cause. Therefore, they don't get the meaning of voting, which leads to low voting rates.
There were other small reasons brought up,but they all related to indifference towards the government, it being undependable, and lack of person who fit to be elected.

After that was about nationality.
I think nationality should be proved abd admitted by people by an official paper instead of how people look. The case in Onsen and driving Rab mentioned was unbelievably rude, but somewhat understandable to hear as a case in Japan. I personally think Japanese people have a special view of seeing foreigners, especially for the people who do not look like Asians. When Japanese spot someone whose appearance differs from most of the Japanese, they would definitely say "Hey, there's 'Gaijin' !" Japanese seem to recognize foreigners as 'outside people' and feel as if they are not same 'people' , as it is so literally. If people are judged which nationality you probably belong to by how they look, what happens then in America, or other countries??There were suggestions in our discussion that it's because Japan had a 'sakoku' period and that the country itself is an island.
In spite of these or any of the reasons, Japanese should be more generous to foreigners, respect them, and judge by how they look because there are a lot of non-Japanese who love Japan, maybe more than a Japanese does!
What I wanted to say was that people should not judge by how one looks and nationality is something

Now I'm not sure about what I wrote, it might be unconnected to each other, but I have to go to bed now...zzZZ