The whole nation was rocked last week by the brutal murder of an elementary school student by her classmate. Having led her friend into an unused room, the young killer sat her victim down, slashed her throat, and then left her to bleed to death.
But as if this wasn’t bad enough, Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki has decided to inexplicably step into the fray after another cabinet minister, Kiichi Inoue, declared that the murder was indicative of how women had become more lively participants in Japanese society.
Obviously not content with the damage Inoue had already done, Tanigaki claimed that, “When I was young arson was a women’s crime. Men did it too, but it was pretty much a girly crime. Women would use paper cutters to slash throats, but that was overwhelmingly a crime committed by adult men.”
And when questioned about Inoue’s earlier comments, Tanigaki said, “It would have been unthinkable in the past for an elementary schoolgirl to have done something like this. Society, children, relations between the sexes all change. I don’t know whether it was all right to say something like ‘women have gotten stronger,’ but I guess he [Inoue] was trying to say something along the lines of how much society has changed.”
How such people manage to get through their day-to-day existence is something to wonder in itself, but how they manage to attain positions of real power is simply frightening.
Leave a Comment