Remember back in the days when the conventional wisdom held that the Japanese were going to overtake us and everyone else?
Sean Kinsell has a great discussion of why Japan is slipping behind China and South Korea. He begins with a mysterious title I can’t quite fathom:
????
That might mean Happy New Year. How that’s going to render here, I don’t know; last night I tried to say “Merry Christmas” with Cyrillic characters but utterly failed. It came out looking like this:
? ??????? ?????????!
Ж Ð Ñ-здвом ХриÑтовим!
(The first line is the actual Cyrillic, while the second is copied from the way it appears.)
The gobbledygook is probably about as sensible as the bureaucratic edicts from Kasumigaseki (a subway station name I remember from past travels) which have hamstrung Japan vis-a-vis their more productive neighbors. Here’s Sean:
…Japanese youth don’t see a good chance of bettering their circumstances through hard work. Japan is publishing fewer academic articles on physics and chemistry than the PRC, and the literacy rate of its fifteen-year-olds is lagging behind that of Shanghai, Korea, or Hong Kong. But there’s nothing new about the ideas, except the comprehensiveness and relentless directness with which the Nikkei has expressed them. The system by which elected officials, unelected federal functionaries, and leaders of key industries simultaneously work with one another to their mutual enrichment and push against each other to keep reforms from happening was identified decades ago. It’s all very well to tell the government that it will play a key role in helping the Japanese economy adapt to external reality; it’s another thing entirely to convince those who actually populate key ministries in Kasumigaseki that their endless “administrative guidance” is choking economic development at the root and that they need to lay off the control-freak-ism. And for the love of Pete, if someone finds a politically viable way to deep-six the current farm-subsidy system, please tell us in America about it. We’re all ears.
Also note that many of the elements of the Japanese government and corporate systems that the poor Nikkei is pleading to have changed are the very things that used to be held up as the reasons Japan was going to overtake the West–and, indeed, the very things that were seen as the key to the success of Korea and the other Tiger Economies as they “followed Japan’s example.” Now they’re moving away from that example, and in the process they’re leaving Japan behind.
Yet another piece of evidence that the more government runs an economy, the more the economy is run into the ground.
You’d think we could learn from the failures of others.
Instead, we insist on repeating them.
Why must we?
The problem with that damn “we” word is that it isn’t being done by the we as in “we the people”; it’s being done by them — the people in the government and their elite minions — imposing their will on us. Unfortunately, “we” inevitably becomes we the country, and because of the usual conflationary rhetorical processes, “we” become the government. And much as I dislike being conflated with meddlesome government bureaucrats, the “we” error makes me one.
(Not a wee error, and I wish I could avoid it.)
Comments
7 responses to “Lessons from Japan “we” fail to learn”
The Cyrillic and the Japanese look OK on this page:
http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2011/01/lessons_from_ja.html#comments
Incredibly weird. I am not seeing the Japanese characters in either place, although the Cyrillic looks OK here.
However, the Japanese looks different here than on the front page; here I see vertical boxes containing number sets, while on the front page I see gobbledygook.
I saw it correctly in both places.
In your first post you said, This (Ecpotha or something) is supposed to look like this (Ecpotha or something) and they both looked the same.
The reason it looks different for everybody is because the Content-Type field in the HTTP response header doesn’t specify a character set. Your web server returns “Content-Type: text/html”. It needs to return “Content-Type: text/html; charset=xxx”, where xxx is the character set of the page.
If you fail to indicate a character set the browser will display the page using its default character set. This will vary depending on the locale of the person and/or the browser settings.
If you want a consistent looking page specify “Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8” (Unicode) or “Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ (ASCII+Latin1).
If you can’t change the Content-Type in the HTTP header (for example because you are using a service provider) you can instead embed the the Content-Type field in a [META] tag in the [HEAD] block: [META HTTP-EQUIV=”Content-Type” Content=”text-html; charset=iso-8859-1″ ]. (Change the square brackets to angle brackets.)
Most browsers will interpret META HTTP-EQUIV as if it was inside the HTTP header.
Make sure that the text in your web page conforms to the declared character set.
Yeah – listen to Gideon7 – I’m seeing the Japanese characters both places (and the Russian). I left a post similar to the above on the original Merry Christmas post. Use UTF-8 – that’s got the most character sets.
Reason I’m seeing them correctly is that my browser defaults to UTF-8 if no set is declared.
Oh – and that Japanese translates – according to online translators as “I cut a rudder” or “The rudder is cut” – which doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Thanks for the link, Eric! Much obliged.
Kathy, the sentence does, indeed, mean “[rudder] [direct-object marker] [cut]” when you look up the words individually, so your online translator is right about that. 🙂 But the idiom means “steer in a different direction.”