A Japanese sports commentator Mr. Seijun Ninomiya said last week as follows: "There are two types of stupid persons. One is those who can't do what is told to do and the other those who do only what is told to do." The referees and staff members of the Japan Sumo Association who told female nurses resuscitating a man who collapsed in a ring to leave the ring are the latter. They did so because the rule said so. I wrote about it in another post "A Demand to the Sumo Association." The association apologized saying that these remarks were not intended to discriminate women. But if this were true, the incident would not happened. Some say that they are not responsible, as barring women from sumo rings is a tradition. But if so, what is the tradition for? According to the Japanese Britannica dictionary, a tradition ("dento" in Japanese) means cultural forms or attitudes, such as ideas, art, social customs, technology, which are passed on or given to the next generations. So, the right question is whether or not the Sumo Association's attitude toward women be passed on to the next generations. The answer is no, because what should be passed on is not what was passed on, but what we think should give to our children and grandchildren. Recently, however, the meaning of "traditions" has changed to the repetition of what was done without thinking. This made me think that "inability to think," a phenomenon indicated by Hannah Arendt in “Eichmann in Jerusalem," is still rampant and shiver with the existence of evil anywhere.
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