The Japanese Langauge

Today is the 20th anniversary of the crash of the JAL airplane that killed 520 passengers. Again, I wonder why Japanese commemoration of tragedies (e.g., the atomic bombing, etc.) sentimentalizes or aestheticizes human sufferings by isolating them from larger economic, social, and political contexts. For instance, a couple of my questions about the crash is, “Why was the rescue of survivors delayed? Why didn’t the US military and the Japan Self-Defense Forces help locate the crashed airplane? (There was no appropriate law to allow such an action?)” We shouldn’t dwell too much on intense emotions that tragedies provoke but try to redeem the lost lives by transforming culpable systems so as to prevent any more tragedies.

I think one of the reasons many Japanese lack critical/analytical reasoning is the way the Japanese language has been taught at school. During lessons of Japanese too much time is spent for reading and composing poems, tanka, and haiku, to use the language for aesthetic purposes. I don’t think they spend enough time developing skills to deploy Japanese to engage in critical/analytic discussion.