“What you people are saying is right, but it is too difficult to get across to ordinary people.”
Lately, I have been asked to speak here and there about e-government, national IDs, and related matters. @shingoym, who regularly listens to such discussions, said this to me.
Once he said it, I realized he was right. Things that have become almost self-evident to people who follow this field barely spread at all beyond the community of experts. Professor Horibe and his group’s proposal for a “privacy commissioner system,” discussed last Saturday, is another such example. An astonishing 30 years have passed since Professor Horibe first raised the issue, yet it has not been realized, nor has there been any groundswell of public demand for it. It has already become “normal” in Europe and the United States, but in Japan that normality does not materialize. The nature of national policymaking has much to do with this (for example, bureaucrats rotate every 2 years, preventing institutional memory from developing, while in Europe and the United States officials with 10 years of experience are commonplace). But we experts probably bear some responsibility as well.
After all, explaining something “obvious” in a way that is “easy to understand but inaccurate” is difficult and uninteresting, and the pangs of conscience are intolerable for an expert.
When we try to speak accurately, the explanation naturally becomes difficult and hard to understand.
Looking back, the leaders of the Meiji Restoration were admirable in this respect.
Their slogan was “Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians.”
What they actually wanted to do was tear down the feudal system that had persisted since the Middle Ages; it had nothing to do with revering the emperor and expelling foreigners.
The very people spreading the slogan were importing weapons from abroad, and they must have known perfectly well that the country would be ruined if it truly tried to expel foreigners.
But even if they had proclaimed, “Abolish the feudal system and modernize the institutions of the state!” there was no way that obscure lower-ranking samurai, townspeople, or farmers could have understood it. Indeed, perhaps only a few dozen people in all of Japan understood it at the time.
In that respect, “Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians” was easy to understand.
It must have pained them to deceive their comrades and the public, but the slogan matched the sentiments of people whose country had been closed for 300 years.
After all, it called for reversing the shogunate’s recent opening of the country and returning to the previous state, with the sole proviso that the shogunate be abolished and the traditional sovereign govern instead. Unless one was a retainer of the shogunate, there was little psychological resistance to it.
Using that slogan, they overthrew the shogunate, the source of feudalism.
Once it had been overthrown, they abruptly changed the slogan to “Civilization and Enlightenment.”
It was the complete opposite of expelling foreigners, but the people were once again readily taken in by an easy-to-understand phrase.
This time, however, it was in a good direction.
If one truly intends to make things happen, this sort of Machiavellianism is probably necessary.
Politicians and the media are presumably the ones who should ordinarily do this. But even before that, to help the media and others understand, we experts too will probably have to offer explanations that deliberately sacrifice some accuracy in favor of clarity.
Related posts
Media Interviews Really Are Difficult
The other day, while talking with Professor Suzuki of Niigata University, we agreed that media interviews really are difficult. This was our reaction after seeing an…
How Corrupt Japanese TV News Is
An Asahi Newstar program in which experts discuss how corrupt the Japanese mass media are. I already thought they were corrupt, but much of the discussion…
The Merciless Society and the Numbering System: The Dangers of Record Linkage in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables
Humans are creatures that forget. Forgetting leads to forgiveness, and people act on that premise. But the Internet does not forget. A person who never forgets,…