Trade Is Mightier Than Safety, Then . . .
The US government has finally succeeded to make the Japanese government relax the regulation on beef testing (article is here). Even though US officials said that their inspection method had scientific basis (although seriously challenged by counter-arguments by other experts), the pressure to the Japanese government was clearly political, driven by lobbying of farmers and food businesses. They considered the issue was not on the bovine spongiform encephalopoathy (BSE), but on trade.
The Japanese government had been reluctant to relax the regulation because the Japanese people was highly sensitive to food safety. It was the Japanese people who demanded the government to conduct blanket testing of all slaughtered cattles. It was not an issue of science, by of preference. For many people, a very small probability seemed far riskier than zero probability. They were happy with the blanket testing, even it resulted in higher beef price.
But trade politics swept everything away. The people in the US should be aware that this kind of pressure causes serious antipathy among Japanese against the US government. The Japanese people thought that the issue was purely domestic, and should have not been "distorted" by trade consideration.
If their logic is valid, I can give them an argument in the opposite direction in a different field. FCC (Federal Communications Commission) locks out Japanese animated cartoons ("anime") from prime time TV slots because these animes go beyond the boundary on expressions of violence and sex. They argue that kids should be protected from the bad influence of those violent animes.
But from the viewpoint of Japanese anime industry, it is a serious trade barrier to the US television market. Japanese kids are viewing the same "off-the-boundary" animes but have lower rate of crimes relative to the case of US. Animes like "Case Closed" or "Inuyasha" are popular and perfectly acceptable for kids in Japan, and we see no bad effect on Japanese kids so far.
Thus the bad behavior among young Americans (if any) is not caused by animes but by other reasons. For us, the anime regulation, too, is an issue of trade, not of education. The Japanese government should start an negotiation with the US government to eliminate or relax this "unfair" trade barrier against Japanese animes.
Some people in the US would feel that my logic is money-driven and ill-hearted. But they should notice that this closely resembles to the way that Japanese people feel about the political pressure of the US government on the beef issue.
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