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Shinzo Abe's Assassination

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81–90 of 211 posts

Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination

#81

Meta comment on cultural awareness: "Japan wants you to say its leader’s name correctly: Abe Shinzo [1]" Why authors are still messing this up almost 5 years later is bewildering [1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/21/asia/japan-name-abe-shinzo-in...

One of the most annoying things about speaking the dominant world language (obviously it is also great in many respects) is that there is some pressure to change your language rather than just adjusting the sounds and spelling to the pre-existing phonetics. Erdogan is pronounced closer to erdoyan and Türkiye insisting on the umlaut. Nguyen and Pho rather than wynn and pha. Gyro instead of hyro. Blonde vs blond (WHY w…

I mean part of it is we don't really have a central language authority so when immigrants try to transliterate a word from their language, they go with their best guess based on what letters they understand to be equivalent, and sometimes they get it a little wrong, but by the time anyone realizes a convention has been set and it's incredibly hard to shift conventions.

It also feels very silly to change the spelling of a word or name when two languages share an alphabet, even if it makes it a little less phonetic.

Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination

#82

It’s crazy how the assassination and the public acceptance of the assassin’s goals sound like something out of Persona 5.

Why is that so crazy? Happens all the time that people get assassinated and the public sides with the assassin. If the US was successful with any of their plots to assassinate Castro I'm sure the US public would mostly side with their government about it, as a relatively famous example. Another more contemporary example would be the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (prime minister of Israel) in 95, which had a lot of l…

There was not a lot of public support for the assassination of Rabin. That's a lie.

Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination

#83
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that so crazy? Happens all the time that people get assassinated and the public sides with the assassin. If the US was successful with any of their plots to assassinate Castro I'm sure the US public would mostly side with their government about it, as a relatively famous example. Another more contemporary example would be the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (prime minister of Israel) in 95, which had a lot of l…

> the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (prime minister of Israel) in 95, which had a lot of local public support. Kept the war going until the present day, too.

Bombing busses in cities by Hamas also helped....

Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination

#84
post #29

Meta comment on cultural awareness: "Japan wants you to say its leader’s name correctly: Abe Shinzo [1]" Why authors are still messing this up almost 5 years later is bewildering [1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/21/asia/japan-name-abe-shinzo-in...

Every Japanese and Korean person I work with presents their names with the family name last when operating in an English speaking context. Conversely, my (American) name is often written family name first (and in katakana) when I'm in Japan. Real cultural sensitivity is accepting the social conventions of the society you are operating in.

Eh.

I've never seen any articles referring "Jinping Xi", "Jong-Un Kim", "Jae-in Moon", "Zedong Mao", Yat-sen Sun".

Non-heads of state get similar treatment: Lee Sedol, Bong Joon-Ho, Yao Ming vs. Hayao Miyazaki, Akira Kurosawa.

This seems to have originated in the Meiji era (in the 19th century), when the Japanese assimilated many aspects of Western culture and traditions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_name#In_English_and_o...

Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination

#85

It’s crazy how the assassination and the public acceptance of the assassin’s goals sound like something out of Persona 5.

Correct, but causality is reversed.

When you are an artist in Japan, there are certain things you will pull a massive amount of criticism down upon yourself for directly critiquing or commenting on via your art. You can't make a video game about "Hey maybe it's weird and a little not okay that it's an open secret that formal power in Japan is very closely tied to the informal power structure of what is basically a specific religious cult." Making that game will pull all kinds of formal and informal pressure down on a person's head.

... But making a game where young people look at the existing power structure and band together to defeat it, fighting all the way up to divinity itself? Not only is there a reason Persona 5 is what it is, there's a reason we keep seeing that theme in JRPGs.

https://youtu.be/IEUqLL8J4gI?si=vzc7RK538-J28G-z

Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never played Persona 5, is that relevant to "public support of a assassination"? Otherwise I don't see how it's relevant.

One of the central themes of P5 is that “public support” tends to be based on spectacle and emotion rather than justice — kinda like the idea of news as entertainment rather than truth. The assassination of a foreign leader would be news, but it wouldn’t really be a spectacle in the same way as a local politician, and wouldn’t create the kind of emotional reaction within the public that the parent comment is referenc…

This is a very powerful notion in general. In an extremely real way, justice is just "codified vibes." The primary purpose of a functioning judicial system is really to allow the public to sleep soundly in their beds at night.

Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination

#88
post #36

I went to a conference in Nara last year and at one of the receptions I told a Japanese attendee that I was sorry to hear about the assassination. I joked that my name is pronounced Abe like Abe Lincoln, not like Shinzo Abe. He kind of shrugged and said it would be kind of like if it had happened to Trump in the US, in that there were a lot of of people that didn't like him. The article makes it seem like people disc…

Not getting into politics at all but I imagine it'd be utter chaos if anything similar were to happen to Trump, that's an interesting perspective to hear though.

If Trump died, and in the aftermath it was revealed he had ties to a Chinese cult, his only remaining supporters would probably be the cult-like reality deniers.

Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the central themes of P5 is that “public support” tends to be based on spectacle and emotion rather than justice — kinda like the idea of news as entertainment rather than truth. The assassination of a foreign leader would be news, but it wouldn’t really be a spectacle in the same way as a local politician, and wouldn’t create the kind of emotional reaction within the public that the parent comment is referenc…

This is a very powerful notion in general. In an extremely real way, justice is just "codified vibes." The primary purpose of a functioning judicial system is really to allow the public to sleep soundly in their beds at night.

> The primary purpose of a functioning judicial system is really to allow the public to sleep soundly in their beds at night

*In some countries.

In others, the primary purpose is rehabilitation so people can eventually re-join society as "better people".

Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination

#90

Meta comment on cultural awareness: "Japan wants you to say its leader’s name correctly: Abe Shinzo [1]" Why authors are still messing this up almost 5 years later is bewildering [1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/21/asia/japan-name-abe-shinzo-in...

i will be happy to accommodate this when speaking in japanese
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