An assemblyman in Itabashi-ku, one of the 23 Special Wards in Tokyo, writes in his official blog that egoism fostered by the post-World War II education system is the root cause of this unscientific, rumor-based hysteria of the parents who want their children not to eat school lunch and instead want them to bring their own lunch boxes and water for fear of internal radiation exposure from contaminated food items used in school lunch.
45-year-old Assemblyman Yoshiyuki Motoyama‘s main message: “Those of us, who have been spared of the damage from the disaster, must share the pain of Tohoku people.”
There are several potential choices of special interests involved here, the nuclear industry, the education bureaucracy and associated businesses who profit from it, and the agricultural industry. Of course, this person could just be wielding power without thinking, a common ailment of politicians. Here’s a translation of his blog to understand the issue from his point of view.
On Sunday column in Sankei Shinbun, there was an article. About school lunch. School lunch started after the World War II…
Back then, there were children from poor families who couldn’t bring bento (lunch box), but…
School lunch started, and everyone get to eat together, and that built bonds and sense of solidarity, the article said.
That’s the educational meaning of school lunch, right there.
That is right now being shaken by a handful of egoists.
They mix the problem of radiation contamination after the nuclear accident…and demand that they be given the freedom to drop out of the school lunch system because there are problems with the radiation in food items. ([They want their children to] bring bento and water to schools.)
They fight the local government without any scientific proof.
Indeed, this is the epitome of baseless rumor.
For us, the citizens of this country who escaped the damage, it is important to share the pain of people in the Tohoku disaster areas.
Removing inconvenience around them, is that all they care about?
When did such egoism take root in the Japanese people?
I get it, it’s education!
Why, yes…yes, it’s the parents who are ruining Japan by demanding that they be allowed to protect their children using a very old axiom which dictates that one should err on the side of caution (something that the government has refused to do since the disaster). In fact, individuals are already sharing in the pain of Tohoku and Fukushima. While it is true that the government has had to borrow money for the reconstruction of the area, it ultimately comes from the pockets of individuals who just so happened to have misplaced their trust in the government regulators, TEPCO, and the nuclear industry who, as we have since discovered, had some very unusual and incestuous relationships.
It seems a bit of an overkill (no pun intended) to expect those same individuals to disregard their own self interest to protect their children so that the government does not lose face over the issue. It’s not like they are asking for their taxes back because they insist on spending even more money for lunches that they would rather their children eat.
It seems to us that the only egoist is the assemblyman who would scold his own constituents for being responsible parents. He forgets that in a democracy, the representatives of the people are elected as a voice for these concerned parents, not as their rulers. Only an egotist would reverse those roles.
Finally, this does not set a good example of the education system of which we are highly critical. From the original article.
Yes, clearly the post-war education system has been a big problem in Japan, as evidenced by this assemblyman.
It is obvious that for all of its failures in actually educating the public, the education system has succeeded in its primary goal of creating quite a few compliant drones from which to populate the political and bureaucratic class. He makes a better argument against the education system than we ever could.
