Wonderful, Wonderful Japan
Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail:
People who scrawl on walls should be punished. Instead we indulge and flatter them, and so our streets are increasingly marred by this menacing, anarchic ugliness.
But Japan – one of the last truly independent, self-respecting nations on earth – takes a different view.
Several Japanese students who defaced Florence’s lovely cathedral have been traced after a long manhunt and – wonder of wonders – been suspended from their colleges and forced to return to Italy to clean up their mess.
It just shows what a serious country can do if it tries.
<– me
July 8th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
And be safe as houses walking around the streets late at night. Not a coincidence.
I imagine it was Mayor Giuliani who insisted that the graffiti be removed from a subway car before it was let back into service.
July 9th, 2008 at 5:31 am
Brett was it you who tells the story of the local Mobsters keeping an eye out for the tourists so they don’t get in trouble and give Japaneese crime a bad name?
July 9th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
No, but that sounds about right.