We have "universal health insurance" on the NHS.
This kind of violent British ethnocentrism & snobbery, when they've never known other cultures well, is an excruciating pain for people. Once this is known, there'll only be one actor left to sell English snob books.
People tend to think that the secret of longevity lies in the general Japanese diet, which is nutritionally balanced, but there's a side-effect of too much salt in foods such as miso.
The negative side of our increasingly westernised diet, where people eat more meat than fish, is a cause for concern.
And these points also cannot explain why Okinawa and other prefectures have particularly long life expectancies!
It's certain Japanese people generally don't believe having a "ikigai" will make you live longer, and this is merely Ken Mogi's personal philosophy or belief. We generally consider such delusions to be spiritualism, and scientifically they're on the level of commercial self-help book.
I have a lot of respect for Bloomberg. I really follow the news from his company every day. I trust them to be the best business media in the world.
So I feel pain very strongly culture friction about this Mogi's sometypes of lie. But maybe the reason is a long story... I may have to tell you that, but if you don't want to read it, please shatdown before you read the next texts.
At first I, or we Japanese general readers of the books, think Mogi-san is a kind of "self-help book author". In fact, his book is quite popular among the relatively less educated. But that also means Mogi-san is not a highly cultured, intellectual author that we haven't seen.
I'm a watcher of his information, almost all of it, mainly on the web, I've got some of his books. Not only that, but I've read as many of his papers as I could, and his personal open diary, 'the quoria journal'. I know who he is and how unique.
So I feel bad about this video.
In a word, he seems to be an 'itai-ojisan (painful uncle)'.
In Kansai dialect slang, 'itai (ouch)' - probably from the archaic 'katawara-itashi (side pain)' - means 'painful' or 'looks pathetic because it doesn't fit the context'. Especially in the company of Kansai comedians.
He uses two contexts at once, one is the domestic. The other is the English sphere.
But his attitude is like the slang 'dewanokami' (pun on the imitator of the honorary European). In fact, he went to Cambridge and got a PhD, so maybe it's not just more or less an imitation.
I once advised Mogi-san about his unpopular comedy - why don't they remake it like traditional "rakugo"? (as in funny comparative cultural essence)
Because Mogi-san's style is just 'English-dewanokami'.
He had directly imported the sarcastic, ironic and offensive laughter like standap or roast types of the Anglo-American world, which is unfamiliar in Japan. But of course we're not at all happy to see public slapping at the Oscars.
The next thing I said was, 'Why don't you imitate An-pan?'
Because it was simpler and more familiar to Japanese everyday life, and he said he loved this bread with 'anko'.
So he wrote "The Way of Nagomi", perhaps appropriating my idea? Of course, I don't know his own circumstances very well.
I once taught him this. The original texts of the Chinese philosophical books "Book of Rites" and "Analects" say in Chinese that 'the essence of courtesy is to behave in a harmonious (nagomi) manner'.
He also seems to have taken this interpretation directly and written the book and taught it to the English-speaking world.
But we don't say 'nagomi' like that in everyday life. Examples of its use are given below.
Suppose you go to a chic cafe or a relaxed buckwheat noodle shop or an izakaya (English pub)-like place, and there's a sunken kotatsu or a place to sit - you sit there and say a few words.
And so on. This kind of language is used in everyday life, but not in the sense that Mogi-san describes. It's also different from the original Chinese meaning of "the essence of politeness or courtesy".
In any case, it's as if he's deceiving English or overseas people who are more or less unfamiliar with the Japanese way of life. So I feel pain and sympathy for the overseas people, including the inevitable misunderstanding.
It's like you noticed that Japanese people thought Sir Jimmy Savile was the best British gentleman? It's not an exact analogy, but I think the "pain" is very similar.
Perhaps Mogi-san's dewanokami-pretending attitude, or dogmatic ideology of some kind of effort to find universality in the unified mono-cultural world of English, comes from his personal complex, about his experiences as a teenager. He describes it in some speech or v-log.
He went to Hawaii. And in a hotel corridor he passed a group of American girls. He moved in a strange way and walked past them, but then he turned around and the girls said, "What's that?"
It was a very hurtful incident for him, a teenager from the countryside in Kasukabe City, Saitama Pref. according to his YouTube.
He may have felt he was unattractive in urban or international terms, and in that respect he could be hurt at any time in the world of sensitivity.
When a producer of a comedy that mocked the Holocaust came under international fire during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, Mogi-san went to great lengths to defend the comedian he knew by storming the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's account.
Of course, he also tried to force it on a paying audience, while questioning the obligation to wear a mask that clearly had medical benefits, despite international calls for it to be postponed or cancelled.
In case you were wondering, the death toll in Japan reached its maximum in January this year (2023), and he was then, and still is, known as the archetypal 'overseas Dewanokami' no-mask agitator.
"The Internet right is annoying," he said angrily about the public condemnation when he was investigated by the National Tax Agency for tax evasion.
He was an art juror, and a child was burned to death in an artwork he passed at Tokyo Design Week - maybe he wasn't looking directly at the artwork, I couldn't check enough. But he wrote an apologetic memorial on his blog.
Although I think all these things do more than a little to make him seem like some kind of psychopath. I've tried to be quite inquisitive - like looking at the bottom of a dark well of humanity with a pretty strong conviction he's living with that kind of sociopathic personality.
My hope is two things.
1. That people overseas don't take Mogi-san's opportunistic and highly convenient (but often self-centred and annoying) discourse for granted. - In fact, he's a regular self-sacrificing fodder (self-proclaimed Cambridge-style comedian) in Tokyo's yellow journalism for his constant, unresolvable, off-the-mark controversies as a flame-baiter. My girlfriend nicknames him "old man" and "pakuri-mogi" (thief Mogi).
2. His personality is not only dangerous, but highly contaminated with severe psychopathy - for example, he says Hiroyuki is "most wise" (which means "foxy" making money in a bad way, but Mogi-san can't differentiate moral concept enough). So be very careful with his movements.
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His worst theory is the "denial of history". This comes from the diversion of his neuroscience into historical revisionism. Of course, the English sphere is more secure in its interpretation of the Holocaust, but the Japanese sphere cannot be secure in the face of his theory. There is an extremely vulnerable side...
Because the Japanese right generally wants to deny the bad side of World War II of the Japanese Imperial Army, especially the Western Japanese Army of the Meiji era, including the people of Mogi's hometown of Saga, who created the Japanese Empire after the anti-government terrorism at the end of the Edo period. Not only in the imperial family, who believe themselves to be children of the goddess Amaterasu.
To be continued... (back to the life of Mogi)
