rlc27
Posts: 306
Joined: 7/21/2001 From: Connecticut, USA Status: offline
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General Richmond,
I'll disagree with you about Japan being homogeneous. There have for many, many years been large numbers of Chinese, Koreans, even Malaysians and Thai, not to mention the islands off the northern coast are inhabited by Russky fishermen, and then there's the native Ainu population to boot (but they no longer speak their own language.) That "homogeneity" is a myth propagated by the Japanese government. I think you're right in a way, though--the Japanese people tend to perceive of themselves as homogeneous--in a large part due to the government and media constantly reminding them how different they are from everyone else in the world, yet how they are still all spiritually Japanese. There's no real pressure in school to learn any second language other than English, even though you've got these large immigrant populations. At least, that's how my wife explains it.
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"They couldn't hit an elephant from this dist--" --John Sedgwick, failing to reduce suppression during the Battle of the Wilderness, U.S. Civil War.
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