Japan Bans Use of Web Sites in Elections

couch_warrior writes with a BBC article about Japan's choice to restrain political speech in the 21st century. The nation of Japan bans the use of internet sites to solicit voters in its upper house elections. Based on election laws drawn up in the 50s, candidates are restricted in the ways they can reach their constituents. Candidates are even restrained from distributing leaflets that will reach more than 3% of the voters. What's more, people who are trying to change the laws are failing. Despite heavy internet usage and a strong installed base of high-speed connectivity, young people just don't feel involved in politics. "In Japan, 95% of people in their 20s surf the web, but only a third of them bother to vote. Some, though, do not seem keen on politicians using the web to try to win their support. 'I believe that internet resources are not very official,' says Kentaro Shimano, a student at Temple University in Tokyo. 'YouTube is more casual; you watch music videos or funny videos on it, but if the government or any politicians are on the web it doesn't feel right.' Haruka Konishi agrees. 'Japanese politics is something really serious,' she says. 'Young people shouldn't be involved, I guess because they're not serious enough or they don't have the education.' There cannot be many places in the world where students feel their views should not count. Perhaps it is really a reflection of the reality — that they do not."

Comments

I'm too stupid to be posting a comment.

[Lordpidey]

Hey, I just realized, I'm too stupid and uneducated as a person to post comments, please take this away from me.

That's the difference!

[jforest1]

...between Japanese and American students. American students think they know everything and people care what they have to say. Japanese students know everything--including that nobody cares.

--josh

Re:That's the difference!

[kklein]

Um, I teach university here in Japan. I've also taught university in the states. So believe me when I say:

These kids are dumb as rocks. Really, really dumb.

The argument for these people being smart and this education system being good is predicated on test scores. As an educator and an assessor, I can't tell you how dumb that is. Basically (and I speak from experience in the K-12 education system here) no one does any learning in school until a few weeks before a big test, and then everyone crams FOR THE TEST. They don't actually learn anything; they just learn how to take the test. The most immediate place you can see this is by trying to talk to any Japanese college graduate in English. These people have all had about 10 years of English. They should be able to carry on a basic conversation, right? But you'll find that they can only spit out a few words, horribly mispronounced, and usually lacking any kind of syntactic structure. Why? Because they've never been expected to DO anything based on what they studied; they were only asked to pass tests. And they do. But they have zero real-world language--or any other kind of--proficiency, unless they've become involved in something in their careers.

Companies here fill the role we in the Western world give to schools. Now, I have many CS friend who bemoan the fact that they didn't really learn how to program well until they hit the corporate world, but that's not even what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is that some of my English major students walk out of here into programming jobs--with no prior experience or education or even an interest in programming. Why? Because when they interviewed for the company (and you interview for COMPANIES here--not jobs--the company then will decide if they want you and where you should go and what you should do), they looked like the kind of person who'd make a good programmer.

So if that's the case, what is the impetus to learn anything in school? If it has no bearing on your employability, save the name of the school, why bother actually learning about politics, history, language, ANYTHING? Answer: none. There is no reason whatsoever to learn anything, unless you just happen to be interested. So my boys are interested in drinking and getting laid (nothing wrong with either, mind you), and my girls are interested in Prada and Louis Vuitton (and I have no problem with brand goods, either--although I'm a Gaultier man myself). Very few, however, are interested in anything we'd call "important."

Of COURSE there are exceptions. Of course. But the sick and sad thing that I see over and over is that the exceptions--the people who really did learn things and really are aware of their surroundings--do not fare any better than their benighted colleagues. They don't get better jobs. I'm sure that wherever they end up working, they do a better job, but they still get the same kind of generic jobs with the HORRIFYING starting salaries as the idiots around them.

Japan is not a meritocracy, and it shows. They have done very well for themselves by refusing to compete domestically and by keeping foreign entities on a short leash in Japan. But the lack of sound Japanese leadership has had a lot of repercussions that it seems most people don't realize. Look into who runs Nissan. Who has controlling stakes in Mazda. Mitsubishi. Who runs Sony. Etc. These "Japanese" companies--the companies we point to to say "Japan is amazing"--haven't been run by Japanese people for a long time. The exceptions, of course, are Toyota and Honda, and they're big ones. But still.

PLEASE stop buying the Japan hype, people. If you came over here and lived for a few months, you'd be just like every other gaijin, saying "I always thought Japan was X, but it's actually Y!" It is nothing like what you imagine. It is a silly place.

Those damn vans.

[Takichi]

The article talks a little about the loud speaker vans candidates usually use to get their message out. I hate them! The volume they blast their cookie cutter pleads for endorsement are as deafening as they are annoying. My house is a little ways from the road that they drive by, and it sounds like they're right outside my window. If you're unlucky enough to be on the side of the road when they pass, you need to cover your ears to prevent damage to your hearing, all while they're smiling and waving in white gloves. The worst is when election day is coming, so you have three or four vans all trying to out do each other.

Sorry, that was a bit of a rant. But it gives you an idea about what those damned trucks are like. After reading this article, it looks like things won't get any better for a while.

Breaking the apathy

[alvinrod]

'Young people shouldn't be involved, I guess because they're not serious enough or they don't have the education.'

I'm not up to date on the civics education in Japan, but I feel that in America it's sorely lacking and really explains why we have such poor turnouts for our elections. I didn't have Civics (American Government, or whatever you may have had instead) until Senior year in high school, and by then it was obvious that most of the students in my class didn't care. It seemed as though most were content to sleep or slack off during the class or agonize the teacher with idiotic questions or annoying answers.

I think if we would have had the class at a much younger age and a teacher who promoted the importance of voting and participating in government, more students would have been interested in their government and the political process, perhaps to the point that they would research candidates on their own and make informed political decisions or have intelligent political discussion beyond "Bush is a Nazi!"

Looking back on my education as a child, I really wished that there would have been more classes like this at a younger age or just more schooling in general. I look at the other countries where children receive more schooling than here in America and wonder why this isn't something that we as a country aren't attempting to emulate.