Friday, November 09, 2007

Fresh from the department of tasteless metaphors

"the government recognized suicide as a death of a person... who is at the end of their rope"
The govt has released a white paper on the suicide issue (Japan is 9th in the world). With a characteristic lack of attention to punctuation and clarity, Japantoday reported that the government "stressed the need to tackle the issue of suicide by society as a whole".

In unrelated news, an international survey of gender inequality by the World Economic Forum placed Japan an embarrassing 91st out of 128 countries - just below Zimbabwe, Malawi and Nicaragua (well, I think they should be embarrassed, in my culturally-imperialistic way, but I see no signs of them actually being embarrassed).

Hmm, maybe there's something in that "suicide by society as a whole" thing after all.

1 comment:

EliRabett said...

A Chinese friend once told me the story of a really good English speaking person in China who sought his fortune by going to store owners and offering his services to correct the English on their signs (At least in the 90s it was tres chic). He starved.

My favorite was a store that sold running water supplies (toilets)