French Riots, poor Japan... who knew?

Please read all of this post before drawing any conclusions.

A few weeks ago there were major riots all over France. It seems an underclass of angry young immigrants and 2nd even 3rd generations of immigrants were fed up with something and set about torching cars, schools and the occaisional disabled bus rider.

Sociologists and historians can debate the causes. I mention it for a different reason.

About a week into the riots, I was in a class and we had run out of things to talk about. But someone had mentioned something about France. So I said "That reminds me, how about those riots? Wow!"

So here's a short take of what happened that day in in the following weeks as they rioting progressed.

After a week of rioting, a lot of my students didn't know. (Everybody had known about Katrina the next day.) Ok, fair enough, not everyone is a news junkie. But, what interested me, and this is why I'm posting this, **is people's explanations for not knowing.** Many of the people who hadn't heard said basically "We are a poor island nation that is cut off from the world... how can we know? We only know about America." Ok, so you weren't there, I was. The tone was that of "Oh that poor man -- he lived in a landlocked arid country, of course he couldn't swim when the ship went down."

There's a lot of ignorant people in America, I agree. But my point here is not that a lot of japanese hadn't heard of the riots, but that as soon as they were acquainted with this information immediately went into "We are a poor helpless society, and the rest of the world is against us, and we are helpless to resist American influence." Were the Japanese always like this? I don't think in the Meji (1870's---)and Taisho eras (about 1920's,) both "modern" periods, people said these things. What has changed?

In the weeks that followed, more and more people talked about the riots. What I gathered from these discussions was:

1. a lot of japanese were shocked, shocked! that there might be any sort of problems related to minorities in France/ Europe.

2. They were shocked that there were slums in Europe. Europeans are cool, fashionable, cultured, egalitarian and rich.

3. The reasons there were problems with katrina in the US is because the US is bigoted and New Orleans was a sinister black city. Blacks were angry in America because of this.We talked about this before. Minorities in France, however, were merely expressing themselves in the time-honored french tradition of rioting and arson, and the month-long mayhem in France was actually an expression of French liberty and independence.

Okay, I fell into sarcasm when writing this, but really, this is the gist of what I got from hours of conversation with dozens of Japanese of various ages and incomes.