Japanese TV Reports About the BBC’s A-Bomb Humor

That’s good. Japanese media should cover this topic more so that the Japanese can realize the world is full of animosity and hatred. The Japanese are too ignorant. They somehow mistakenly believe that those famous foreign media, such as BBC, CNN and NYT, are fair and justice, even though most of them have never watched or read them.

The Japanese mistakenly believe that the BBC is “the guardian of the justice”. That’s why the Japanese overreacted this issue. In fact, no one can deny that Western media is full of hatred and animosity toward non-White, non-Christian countries. The Japanese should accept this simple fact and stop holding high expectations for Western media. Then there will be no conflict.

The guy survived two atomic bombs and lived into his nineties? Doesn’t sound at all unlucky to me. Quite the opposite.

As a lot of people who have actually watched the clip and fully understand it, NONE of the humour is derived from the experiences of Mr. Yamaguchi himself. All the jokes are about British transport (and rightly so, the trains are a catastrophe).

However, images of people laughing and making jokes with mushroom cloud pictures behind them is obviously going to cause alarm. It was an insensitive and silly choice by the program-makers, especially as “I.Q.” is not a normally controversial show at all.

However, to deny Mr. Yamaguchi as being “unlucky” is ridiculous; I personally know a Japanese person whose grandparent also suffered at both Atomic Bombs and she used that same description!

Irreverence and breaking taboos is at the heart of good comedy. I’m not going to Japan-bash here but most local comedians tend to be successful in the mainstream media if all they do is just shout and hurt each other. Needless to say this breeds a culture that might have trouble comprehending other forms of humour (let alone also understand the English being said, which does not appear to be the situation here either).

The ironies of Japan’s “anger” here when it is a country that hardly discusses the war and also features plenty of stupid, inane (and, yes, racist) TV programs have been noted, but of course are not wholly the issue for this case. (Sigh) Unfortunately.

Another reason for “Axis of Evil” countries to have some nuclear weapons out of the genuine self-defence motivation. Otherwise, you would get nuked and, top of that, get mocked about that by Westerners, their very aggressor.

It’s just a cultural thing. When I spoke to my Japanese wife I was shocked to learn she took the Japanese media point of view on this but she wouldn’t have said anything if I hadn’t asked her opinion.
She asked me if a program like QI (which is comedy of the more gentler sort comparatively speaking) would have said similar things about a 7/7 survivor who might have managed to walk away from a tube train bomb and had then taken the bus which later got blown up. The thing about our humour is that the survivor would have been the first one to make jokes about being lucky or unlucky.
When I asked her if the Japanese media outrage over this gave us in the UK licence to complain about cultural slights on Japanese TV she said we were free to complain as much as we liked. That’s the point really. We have to accept that some Japanese people will be upset by our humour even if we didn’t intend to offend. Those same Japanese people will have to accept that they will get offended by stuff they don’t understand. We can choose to do the same in reverse and then everyone gets upset.
Or we can relax, educate and learn.