Japanese people are incredibly well educated but there’s an amazing anomaly:
a lot of educated people commonly are unable to name the Prime Minister.
the reason is because in fact elections don’t matter much; the entity that really runs Japan is the permanent bureaucracy.
I noticed that America is becoming more and more like that, where elections are a type of Kabuki.
The other respect in which they’re becoming more alike is news media, where companies actually form a cartel in which they can decide what becomes news and when, and more importantly, what does not become news.
> The other respect in which they’re [US and japan] becoming more alike is news media, where companies actually form a cartel in which they can decide what becomes news and when, and more importantly, what does not become news. <
Yep, good observation there.