🚀 go-pugleaf

> > bart@alice.UucP (Bart N. Locanthi):
> 
> >>...the Japanese are wonderful for
> >>romanticizing suicide like we Americans do violence
> >>(and also because of their willingness to slice up their friends)...
> >
> >a second for a japanese [understands and]
> >agrees that there is only one way out.
> 
> In the US you would never hear a story about two young lovers
> who realized they had achieved the heights of human bliss; so
> as a consequence, they walked arm-in-arm up a volcano and
> jumped in. This kind of bilge is a part of Japanese culture,
> and sometimes they act on it. Was there "only one way out" for Yukio
> Mishima? Is not the suicide of Mishima the product of this Japanese
> societal sickness, just as all the murders in the US are a product of
> our different sort of warpage? I say yes, and I think a lot of you
> turkeys sound like ghouls and sickos.
> 
> Gene Ward Smith/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720

I have tried (really hard!) to stay out of this debate on
Japanese/Moslem attitudes toward suicide, but Mr. Smiths commeent
perpetrates some nasty stereotypes which I feel I must, as a
person of Japanese descent, oppose.  Mishima, who incidentally
gets a lot more press in the US than he ever did in Japan, was
a right-wing fanatic and taken just about as seriously as, say,
Jerry Falwell here; that is to say, some idolized him, some
considered him dangerous, and some (my mother among them)
thought he was laughable, a raving lunatic not worth worry.

If Mr. Smith is referring to the story "Patriotism," or any other in
which Mishima extols the virtues of seppuku, he should know that
most Japanese are not extremist enough to regard this as other
than a right-wing's rhetoric.  I strongly object to Mr. Smith's
blaming Mishima's suicide on any "societal sickness" of the
Japanese people.   After all, the English literature has "Romeo
and Juliet," among others.  I resent my culture's beliefs on
suicide being summed up pithily as "bilge,"  and I
suggest to Mr. Smith that his information has
been -- limited at best.

Gently, politely and restrainedly,

Ellen Eades
-- 
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	"Who's been repeating all that hard stuff to you?"
	"I read it in a book," said Alice.
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