In his Dec. 30 letter, “Conceptions of rape, sexism differ,” James Hicks chides me for making a statistical comparison of Japan and the United States in my Dec. 26 letter (“Statistically Japan does value life“) “as though their history, culture and tendency toward liberalism were irrelevant.” Mine was a short letter in which I was just saying that we Americans aren’t in a position to lecture Japan on their culture. I don’t think this makes me one of the “reflexive defenders of Japan.”
I’m an American who has lived in Japan even longer than Hicks, and I wish some of my countrymen wouldn’t be so quick to set themselves above the “culture” of this country. Maybe the key to Hicks’ letter comes at the beginning of his longest paragraph: “Rape in Japan should not be compared to rape in other more progressive countries without addressing the level of sexism and conceptions of rape in each country.”
Why do we have to assume that “other countries” are “more progressive”? This is too broad. Surely Japan is more progressive than the U.S. when it comes to, say, the teaching of evolution. I deliberately stuck to a comparison of murders because it is so hard to find accurate statistics on rape.
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