"A wave of discontent among its younger workers is fueling a change in the nation's political landscape: communism is suddenly back in fashion."
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Funny you should Soc this Deas, I wrote about Osamu Tezuku, the creator of Astro...Cheers man....They had this stuf back in the UK years ago.... Fuggle's Ale I think it was called....LOL The "Story" section reads like a bunch of synopses I've read by...The story is almost always mentioned using its Japanese title, so it might be the...Actually, that's a really interesting discussion to be had. In FACT I reckon in...Does "Snow White" in Japanese have the same Disney movie conotation that...Ha ha - I just found this. Awesome. Selling snowmen to the Japanese. People buy...I'll try it if I can get my hands on it....Not quite as bad as Nakashima Mika's version (honestly what could be?), but...
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This is a very interesting article to read. I did a write up on this on mixi a few weeks ago. I agree in many ways with this article.
I am just a little surprised they are turning to the commies for answers. Although, with my experiences in the Tokyo punk scene many young Japanese say that Communism is `cool.`
Well, people always want Communism until they actually get it.
Communism without nationalism is weak. Japanese are too selfish and immature and ignorant to understand political models.
It's funny, I've probably seen this article pop up about half a dozen times on different social bookmarking sites, yet living in Tokyo I have yet to hear anything that would corroborate what it is trying to suggest.
Granted, I don't deeply follow political coverage here or go out of my way to talk politics with people, but I really think the author is grasping at straws here to draw a more alluring conclusion. Certainly 'Disalluisioned young Japanese workers turning en masse to communism' sounds a lot more interesting than another 'Figures show being a young temp worker in Japan sucks' article.
Look at her supporting 'evidence':
-'New recruits are signing up at the rate of 1,000 a month, swelling its ranks to more than 415,000.' Great, 415,000 members. How many members are in the LDP or DPJ? Without that info, the figure doesn't mean a whole lot. And what are the demographics for those 1,000 new members a month?
-'Earlier this month, crowds of up to 5,000 young Japanese workers marched through the streets of central Tokyo...' Did this really happen? I can't find a single reference to confirm the existence of this protest, even when searching in Japanese. The closest I could find was a 5000 person strong protest in July against Chinese human rights violations.
-'Nearly eight decades after it was written by Takiji Kobayashi, a communist who was tortured to death for his political beliefs aged 29, (kani kosen's) sales have leapt from a slow annual trickle of 5,000 to 507,000 so far this year'. An article by a Waseda Japanese Literature professor sums up the popularity of this book, and what that popularity represents in modern Japan, in this article (http://www.researchsea.com/html/article.php/aid/3512/cid/5). It's got less to do with readers behaving like that kid in high school who read Das Kapital and suddenly started going around telling everyone how corrupt capitalism is, and more with the fact that young temp-staff office workers with little job-security and no benefits can somehow relate to the slave-like working conditions of fishermen in the 1920s.
(And you have to imagine that those sales figures are padded heavily by the whole 'boom' phenomenon in Japan.)