大臣泣く Minister cried!

I did not know this until today, but Mr Kaieda, the Minister of economy, trade and industry in Japan cried in the parliament last month. The above YouTube clip shows how the incident happened on the 29th of July 2011.

I have read quite a few articles and books on cross-cultural studies before saying that Japanese people tend not to show their emotion in public. I believed that was indeed Japanese people’s cultural tendency. So what is going on in Japan now!?

As you can imagine, all sorts of people made a comment on this incident. For example, Prof Uchida made a comment on in his blog (written in Japanese). It is very interesting; so if you understand Japanese, please read it. Prof Uchida wrote that probably this incident reflected the current trends, which are 1. people cannot control emotion and 2. people do not think they have to control (or to hide) their emotion. 

What do you think?

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