The fallout from the Japanese election continues, with many hours of TV coverage dedidated to discussing the various issues related to the change of ruling party. As always, I’m impressed with how open Japan’s media is about discussing topics in public forums, without a lot of emotional self-serving and posturing that can often be seen on American news. In one live news show I saw, Secretary General Katsuya Okada of the newly elected Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) was talking about his party’s stance on various issues with a panel of various experts. The interesting thing was, the topics they were going over were being pulled in live from emails and faxes that viewers were sending in live, not pre-scripted ahead of time as you’d expect. Thus many thoughtful questions were brought out into the open, like, if the DPJ is going to give extra financial support to families with children, what about married couples who are trying but are unable to get pregant? Or, what is the official policy on yutori kyoiku, the policy of “easy does it” education that’s being pushed by teachers’ unions yet which caused a sharp reduction in test scores by Japanese children compared to other Asian countries. Another show I like to watch is “If I Were Prime Minister…” in which the comedy team Bakusho Mondai have hard-hitting discussions with real politicians, talking about usually tabboo subjects like, should Japan arm itself with nuclear weapons in response to the threats from North Korea. In short, the level of professionalism and open political discussion I see on Japanese TV seems to be to be quite good, and it’d be nice for some of the ideas in use here to be imported back to America.

I have no ides what they mean by Ion! but this picture is cool, so I’m posting it.