This week, south Korea has elected a new president. I won’t pretend to know anything about korean politics and make some sort of comentary, because I really know nothing. One thing that I noticed, though, is that there is a huge thread in reddit about it. In that thread, a lot of (self identified) koreans piped up to comment with their experiences and opinions.

On the other hand, Japan has also chosen a new prime minister this week. The LDP was put back in power in the last elections, and they have chosen Shinzo Abe as their new prime minister. I won’t pretend to be an expert on Japanese politics (even if I know a bit more about it than I know about Korean politics), but I find it interesting that, compared with the Korean reaction above, I’ve heard so little about it from Japanese (be it on reddit, facebook, twitter, etc).

I’m not really surprised, it has been my impression for a long time that a lot of Japanese people are either apathetic towards politics, or simply not willing to engage with other on conversations about it. But it does saddens me a bit.

Or unrelated news, while looking for a link on Shinzo Abe to put on this blog post, I realized that google news no longer has an “International” setting – you must pick up an specific country when searching for news. If you choose Japan, this means all news will be in Japanese. If you choose anywhere else, you’ll see almost no news about Japanese politics :-(