The Fukushima I Nuke Plant accident may be changing the long tradition of vote buying in Japanese politics.
Yomiuri Shinbun (9/1/2011) reports that an assemblyman in Nara City in Nara Prefecture was privately asked by the assembly chairman in June to vote in a certain way in the upcoming election of the new assembly chairman. He refused. Then the chairman said to him, "What if I gave you rice for 5 years?" He declined, but recorded the conversation with his smart phone.
Well, rice was used as a medium of exchange in Japan until the Meiji Restoration knocked out the Tokugawa Shogun government. Rice may have become more valuable, particularly if it is radionuclide-free, than the fiat money they have in Japan. (Personally I think the assemblyman should have taken up the offer...)
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戦争の経済学
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ArmstrongEconomics.com, 2/9/2014より：
戦争の経済学
マーティン・アームストロング
多くの人々が同じ質問を発している－ なぜ今、戦争の話がでるのか？
答えはまったく簡単だ。何千年もの昔までさかのぼる包括的なデータベースを構築する利点の一つは、それを基にいくつもの調査研究を行...
10 years ago
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10 comments:
Tried bribing with lice?
The going rate for assemblymen is shamefully low.
A kilo of rice per day for 5 years is about 2000 kilos. The current price for really fancy (Niigata Koshi) rice is less than 500 Yen/kg, so the expected cost was well under 1 million Yen.
Can Japanese leaders be so inexpensively rented?
once people figure out half the rice crop is radioactive, the price for certified, inspected radiation free rice will go up by a factor of 10.
Someone in the opposing faction tried bribing with meat. Uncontaminated rice and meat must be priceless for many people...
Quite the opposite, I wouldn't (won't!) accept food from anyone these days, and certainly not rice. No way to know where it is sourced from unless you buy it yourself, and even then you don't know. (Has anyone else given up eating out entirely? Surely not just me.) I still buy onigiri at the convenience store, because they are still (presumably) using last year's crop, but I'm likely to give that up too as we get further into the fall.
I give you lice, why you not take?
It's unfortunate that some people have to resort to making stupid, childish, snarky jokes about Japanese people's pronunciation on an otherwise excellent blog.
@anon 10:40PM, don't worry, it's an age-old joke that many Japanese who are learning English know. Once is enough though, IMHO.
Rice is nice at any price if you're into vice. I wonder why it failed to entice why did the politician said no dice could it have been mice?
Was he asked thrice? He seems cold as ice.
"Can Japanese leaders be so inexpensively rented?"
netudiant, the real question is "Have they been bought so cheaply already?", and its variants.
Cushioned lifestyles of the Functionally Inept.
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