JT for ADD Sufferers

The Japan Times thinks its readers suffer from attention deficit disorder for this is the third time in a week or so that JT has run a story that insists there is no big deal to Ichiro's hitless streak in the pre-season.

Each story is longer than the previous one.

A good motto for the JT: More to say about nothing at all!

The Readers in Council section today is not nearly as bad as it generally is. Ko Unoki says, rightly, that the average Japanese "citizen is by and large....quite hospitable to immigrants as indicated by the increasing number of international marriages". I agree that the average Japanese person is very hospitable but unfortunately the country is run by below average Japanese.....and the argument about international marriages doesn't hold up. Some statistics about international marriages are in order.

Peter Stevenson blasts those who, like himself, write letters to The Japan Times. He's fed up with the anti-Japanese sentiments that have been expressed in the last several months over the fingerprinting and photographing of foreigners as they enter Japan through its airports. His argument is, "The US does it; why not Japan?" Well, yes! The Let's Be Lemmings argument. A good one, and incidentally one that Stevenson levels at those he is criticizing.

But I agree with Stevenson, basically. What I don't get is why foreigners are finger-printed and photographed every time they enter the country, even permanent residents.

Paul Cassity is upset at the creation of a special panel to investigate US military-linked crimes in Okinawa. He makes a good argument but JT should have edited his letter. His basic point of "why the US military-linked crimes and not crimes by Japanese, since they commit the vast majority of crimes in Okinawa and elsewhere in the country"?

Darryl McGarry's letter might have made more sense if JT had no edited out the meat of it. I can make neither hide nor hair of what McGarry's point might be.

Eric Luong blasts an earlier contribution to Readers in Council by the prolific Grant Piper. Piper make the bold statement that food is not important, and a week or so ago he made exactly the same statement about sports. Poor Piper. I wonder what peters him out if it's not food or sports.

But no section of Readers in Council can ever be consistently bad or good or anything else. The section wraps up with a contribution from Greg Garrison who apparently stays awake at night because women want to earn more relative to men. Garrison, no economist, argues that money that goes to pay women more is taken from men, who then earn less, who then can't support their families, which then forces women to work more to augment the family income, which leads to divorce and victimized children!

And Garrison has a thing about lemmings, too. His final paragraph begins, "As far as other countries are concerned, why follow them all off the cliff? Just take a look at family health in the United States. Is this what women want?"

Poor Greg. Still fretting over what women want. He should make like Mel Gibson and just go have a drink, but leave the ranting at the bar or in the car, Greg.

Or he could re-think his argument about health care by reading the news from the JT from the day before about the 24,089 cases of Japanese patients being turned away from hospitals more than three times before being hospitalized.