"Rent" the movie!

Today, I would like to introduce you a movie called "Rent".

Some of you may have watched before, but anyway, the movie "Rent", was first a rock opera which was shown in Broadway, New York.

The story itself is mainly based on a opera "La boheme" by Giacomo Puccin, and different from the original opera version, location and a time setting were changed from Paris 1830 to New York 1989.

New version of the opera "La boheme", "Rent"(musical) was written by a composer Jonathan Larson.

In the story of "Rent", it shows how young people in New York in 1989 was living, with some problems such as HIV/AIDS, addiction to drugs, homosexuality and ethnic minority.

It is about 2 hours movie, and there are lots of things we could learn from this movie and sympathy with.

How Farhad Mahmud makes his arguement.

The letter titled "America, not Iran is the problem" was written by Fardad Mahmud on Nov. 13, 2007.

The letter is mainly about an assertion, made by the U.S., that Iran having and holding nuclear weapon.

This letter does not have any link on it, so it is not clear to which article Mahmud wrote.

As it can be expected by its title Mahmud talks about how conflicted the assertion is, saying Iran should revoke its nuclear weapons, contrasting the fact the assertion does not refer to the other nuclear owning countries such as Britain, and France, except for North Korea.

In the second paragraph, Mahmud talks about how the U.S. takes a role to protect other countries, and also caused the Taliban to be made.
However, because Mahmud does not show any information that support his statement, these statements seem too weak to have authority to pursuade people reading it.

In the last paragraph, he mentions about tendency of the U.S. policy being destructive.

Through out his writing, Mahmud seems to have strong opinion, however there is no enough information and authority to support them, so the writing does not seem to have so much power to convince readers.

Fingerprinting and photographing foreigners in Japan.

Today, I will write a response to the article "Not so welcome to Japan any longer" ,written by Kevin Rafferty.

The article is about the system starts from November 20th, fingerprinting and photographing all foreigners who enter, re-enter, and even people who have permanent spouse or working visa in Japan, and Rafferty says it is very discriminative.

There was a response (Fingerprint all Japanese visitors) which said that not only foreigners but also Japanese should be fingerprinted.

Idea of examining only foreigners, carefully seems to have bias that terrorists should be foreigners not Japanese.
Since there is a fixed image in Japanese peoples' mind toward some foreigners.
Also there was an insist that Japanese should also be fingerprinted and photographed.
This is good idea, but the system is not to discriminate against someone, or not done because others target you, but to prevent crime to happen as much as possible.

Today, I would like to respond the article "Which minority group face the worst discrimination in Japan?", and a response to the article above, "Ebb and flow of discrimination".

In the article "Which minority group face the worst discrimination in Japan?", six people from different countries (Australia, the U.S. and Japan) answered who he or she think is discriminated against the most.
There were Chinese, Korean, black people, and disabled people who were given as the answers, and one of the respondents, pointed out the absurdity of Japanese people who discriminate against Chinese, and Korean people that "However, they also say they love Chinese and Korean food."

There is the response written by Mike Dewood who lives in Nagasaki, Japan.
Dewood says that discrimination against American happens often in Nagasaki, expressing about his own experience discriminated against by Japanese.

In my opinion, things that were mentioned in these article and response were very true in Japan.
As it is said in the article, discrimination against people who were given as the answers often happens in Japan.
I suppose discrimination against foreigners deeply related to how the country Japan is located.
Surrounded by ocean, with very few contact with different nationality for long time, and war happened long ago made some Japanese unable to accept difference of people.
For disabled people, it is same.

People discriminate people because they cannot accept differences of others.
I can understand that people can not forget terrible war.
However, discrimination is sad thing to do.