Minister's human rights rant shocks Japan

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Minister's human rights rant shocks Japan

Japan's education minister has stunned the country with a gaffe-strewn speech in which he claimed that too much emphasis has been put on human rights.
Bunmei Ibuki, 69, also said that Western-style individualism is damaging Japan, while he praised Japan's racial homogeneity and appeared to denigrate minorities.
Japanese newspapers reported yesterday that Mr Ibuki, a veteran politician who worked at the Japanese embassy in London for four years in the 1960s, implied in his speech in Nagasaki that problems with Japan's education policy stemmed from the fact that it was imposed by the US occupation authorities after the Second World War.
"Japan has stressed the individual point of view too much," he said. He also argued that a society gorged on human rights was like a person with an obesity-related illness.
"If you eat butter everyday you get metabolic syndrome. Human rights are important but a society that over indulges in them will get 'human rights metabolic syndrome'," he said.
The speech raises questions about Tokyo's commitment to concepts such as human rights and democracy, which Japanese commentators note were brought to Japan by defeat in the war rather than created independently by domestic reforms.
It is unclear whether Mr Ibuki's choice of the word "butter" was intentional or unfortunate, but it echoes an old disparaging Japanese expression for Western ideas: "stinking of butter".
The term came about because Westerners traditionally had a far higher dairy content in their diet than Japanese and hence were thought to smell of butter.

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