Bonus French fun fact!

Just like in Japan, there's nothing wrong with installing a urinal by a window on the ground floor of a building in France.

And on a lighter note:

The accepted context for imported ideas and characters isn't even considered before use in Japan; exhibit 77d.

In Japan, the dark lord of the Sith digs jail-bait.
Totally.

Too many ideas, not enough understanding

You know, after re-reading that last bit, something just occurred to me. I can recall the first time I realized that someone like Batman would, by necessity, have to be a criminal. Generally, you can't just beat up other people no matter how much you think they deserve it, without being labeled a vigilante, a hooligan, or a criminal. Excepting, of course, those seemingly apocryphal stories about Judo stars beating up muggers. But by and large, we're not supposed to do anything besides calling the authorities. Which is logical, I guess, if you don't live in the Montana territory in the 1880s.

But for some reason I keep seeing stories about people resorting to extraordinary measures to protect what they think is just. C'mon, Knight Rider, The A-Team, Spenser for Hire, Mannix (no, "Mannix" is not a breakfast cereal...) and on and on and on. Why do we keep asking for someone to break the rules to make things better?

Initially, I was trying to be sarcastic. Just talking about a trend in fiction, y'know. But then it hit me: there are quite a few people who believe that justice is something worth struggling for. But they tend to be described as "radicals," "extremists" and "terrorists." Why else would someone strap a bomb to themselves and walk into a crowd? Why else would you fly your plane into an aircraft carrier? You don't do it for fun, and you probably don't honestly do it for the chicks. If you didn't actually believe that you were acting in the name of justice, that you were serving a higher cause, why else would you do it?

I am certainly oversimplifying an awful lot of things. First off, I don't really know anything about suicide bomber training, kamikaze pilots, CIA sleeper agents or army guys who throw themselves on grenades to save their buddies. Secondly, I don't claim to be able to define "justice" well enough to withstand any sort of honest philosophical inquiry. And I don't mean to imply that wearing spandex while beating up purse-snatchers and machine-gunning a bus load of civilians are even on the same continuum of valid moral choices. But if you use small, unambiguous terms, you can easily describe both motivations with the same sentences.

"Acting outside the law to meet one's idea of justice."

And that is where I start feeling more uneasy. You can usually spot a hypocritical act by the depth of the bullshit it's wrapped in. Anytime what sounds like a good idea comes with a lot of extra syllables, someone is being lined up to for an ass-fucking. Do you really think that

"...The President's goal to help unleash the productive potential of individuals in all nations..."
-2004 Republican Part Platform Statement

has anything do with actually helping individuals attain self-sufficiency in terms of food or health-care? Or is it just another effort to exploit a potential source of profit like oil, timber ormigrant labor?

My point is that you can usually understand an essentially moral idea because it can be explained simply. "Don't hit weaker people." "Be kind to people in trouble." "No raping." So why can such seemingly incompatible ideas be explained with the same simple words? Why can someone say "the rules are so wrong, the way society has treated those dear to me is so wrong, that I have to go outside what is accepted and fight for something better" and wind up killing so many people?

And what's wrong with my head that allows Batman and Spider-Man to wind up classified with the same essential reasons for action as a suicide bomber or an IRA assassin?

The thought which might worry me more is the prospect that there something about the "spread of democracy," as it's been practiced in the last 100 years, that winds up becoming a force that people feel a need to fight against? If the problem is in my head, that's just me. But if there's something essentially wrong with the way democratic ideology is practiced, that does and will affect a lot more people.

Approved by the Comic Dork Authority

I'm sorry if this is something I've said before, but I think it bears repeating. You really shouldn't let your kids spend too much time reading comics. Especially not books by Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, Kurt Busiek or Frank Miller. Leaving aside the issues of violence, sex, language or questionable taste, letting your kids spend any amount of time reading these books is likely to warp their priorities. In general, these writers' books tend to follow one rather disturbing theme: that in a troubled world, people, struggling very hard to do the right thing, may suffer setbacks and losses, but in the end do manage to act on behalf of what they consider just.

Think about that for a moment. Do you really want your children to grow up with expectations influenced by ideas like that? Do you want to raise kids with the notion that justice is something worth struggling for, worth sacrificing for?
Really, save them and the rest of us a lot of trouble, disappointment and disillusionment by keeping them off of the hero-books. Give them an XBox 360 or something so they can play Tony Hawk 5 or Madden 2008 or whatever else has been carefully co-branded and synthesized for easy, dilemma-free consumption.

I also sort of miss public radio...

In my former, non-Japan existance, I used to really like This American Life. And not just because host Ira Glass is willing to devote whole hour-long shows to easy ideas like pets, but the less easy ones like fiascos, superpowers or what makes a Canadian Canadian.

Each week on TAL, as they refer to it on their own web page, they tackle a different topic in (usually) three acts. And sooner or later, it seems, they hit something that I can relate to, think about or laugh my ass off at.

What did they say "idle hands" were?

One of the things I most enjoyed about living in Santa Monica was occasionally running into unexpected art. And I don't mean stuff from the kind of people who make easy, boring crap that you could just as easily buy at the state fair. I'm talking about stuff from groups like The Billboard Liberation Front or the California Department of Corrections, or running into something from the Cacophony Society or seeing the Santa Rampage.

I seem to recall that there was something invigorating about seeing normal routines disintegrate for a while. Like meeting, in front of the Blue Man Group, a bunch of orange-suited boozers with trading cards of themselves. There was a sense that life still had surprises in store.

But life in Tokyo does not seem to hold any surprises in its immediate future.

We'll have to see what can be done about that.