Liberal Japan

[Initially I stated I would revise this entry. I wanted to word myself more carefully and concisely. However, as this is a blog, I’m going to just leave this entry alone. As far as what Ibuki stated, I’ve more clearly presented his comments here.]

Bunmei Ibuki’s comments were *worse* than I realized. If this isn’t big news, in my opinion, it *should* be. If I have time I will blog on this tomorrow. I hope others do as well.

The Japan Times articles did *not* report on other comments that *did* get reported in the Japanese press. Searching around I did find that some of these comments got reported in at least one English newspaper, the Telegraph.

Ibuki makes comments that show on a fundamental basis he misunderstands constitutional government.

He seems to view rights as entitlements sort of handed out by the government. However, these rights can be overemphasized and to the detriment of the minzoku.

Minzoku translates as folk, but it’s code words for *race*, as in Yamato Minzoku.

Ibuki’s opinion is that rights should not be overemphasized at the expense of the minzoku. And he explicitly identifies the Yamato Minzoku.

This is the *same* minzoku that so many Japanese lost their lives over during WWII.

This is sort of like saying, yes, it’s nice to have rights, but don’t forget that the heart and soul of Japan is the Yamato minzoku, our homogenous race heritage.

This is really unbelievable and stunning. The fact that Abe does not see a problem with these comments is also political miscalculation he hopefully will suffer for.

Ibuki should resign and Abe should profusely apologize.

Because of the importance with which I see this issue, I’m posting the entire Telegraph article:

Minister’s human rights rant shocks Japan
By Colin Joyce in Tokyo
Last Updated: 6:39am GMT 27/02/2007
Japan’s education minister has stunned the country with a gaffe-strewn speech in which he claimed that too much emphasis has been put on human rights.

Bunmei Ibuki, 69, also said that Western-style individualism is damaging Japan, while he praised Japan’s racial homogeneity and appeared to denigrate minorities.

Japanese newspapers reported yesterday that Mr Ibuki, a veteran politician who worked at the Japanese embassy in London for four years in the 1960s, implied in his speech in Nagasaki that problems with Japan’s education policy stemmed from the fact that it was imposed by the US occupation authorities after the Second World War.

“Japan has stressed the individual point of view too much,” he said. He also argued that a society gorged on human rights was like a person with an obesity-related illness.

“If you eat butter everyday you get metabolic syndrome. Human rights are important but a society that over indulges in them will get ‘human rights metabolic syndrome’,” he said.

The speech raises questions about Tokyo’s commitment to concepts such as human rights and democracy, which Japanese commentators note were brought to Japan by defeat in the war rather than created independently by domestic reforms.

It is unclear whether Mr Ibuki’s choice of the word “butter” was intentional or unfortunate, but it echoes an old disparaging Japanese expression for Western ideas: “stinking of butter”.

The term came about because Westerners traditionally had a far higher dairy content in their diet than Japanese and hence were thought to smell of butter.
Link(cut and paste):
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/27/wjapan27.xml

Here is a link to his comments in Japanese:
http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20070226-00000022-mai-pol

Some of his comments:
1. 人権だけを食べ過ぎれば、日本社会は人権メタボリック症候群になる
jinken dake wo tabesugireba, nihonshakai wa ninken metaborikku shoukougun
“If we (eat) partake too much of human rights, our society will degrade as the human body does when it partakes of unhealthy food.”

2. 権利と自由だけを振り回している社会はいずれだめになる。これが今回の教育基本法改正の一番のポイント
kenri to jiyuu dake wo furimawashite iru shakai wa irzure dame ni naru. kore ga konnkai no kyouiku kihonn houkaisei no ichiban no pointo
“If we only brandish our desire for freedom and rights, then society becomes useless. That is the number one point of our educational reforms.”

The idea that there is some kind of trade off between rights and a “good” society is completely misconstrued. A good society is one where people have rights and those rights are protected, period.

If we allow that rights can be curbed at the needs of *society* we introduce a random variable that can be interpreted however one wants to interpret it. We *all* have different views on what a *good* society would be. This is why we have democracy.

Moreover, Ibuki doesn’t seem to grasp that freedom in a political sense *only* means freedom from (physical) coercion. The government cannot grant freedom in any other sense of the word. We accept that the government will have to use a limited amount of (physical) coercion to carry out its job, this is why we recognized the fundamental danger inherent in governmental power.

Shall we allow more government physical coercion in in order to support the Yamato minzoku. This is absurd. And its coming from the minister of education!

The primary function of government is not to create a utopian society, be it the Yamato minzoku, or some extreme form of Islam or Christianity. The *fundamental* function of government is to *protect* our rights. Through the exercise of those rights, we might be able to help society, physical coercion should not shape those decisions.

I’ll note that at least one politician has a nice come back to Ibuki. Kiyomi Tsujimoto stated:
「日本は人権意識が足りない国だと国際的に見られている。メタボリックどころか栄養不足だ」
nihon wa jinken ishiki ga tarinai kuni da to kokusaiteki ni mirarete iru. metaborikku dokoro ka eiyou busoku da.
“As from an international perspective Japan does not have enough of a human rights sense of consciousness, I’d say as far as human rights rather than having a human rights syndrome, we’re undernourished.”

http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20070227-00000046-mai-pol