ELP journal

Today we watched a video on a misinterpretation that happens between political stances taken by politicians and what they actually do. The answer which was given by the speaker in the video was that politicians give very vague explanations about their policies so that their policies sound good and therefore they can get vote. Also, there was an interesting statistic which showed a relationship between a gov'ts spending on military expence and on education(was it?). Countries which spend larger amount of money on military spend less money on its educational programs and I was shocked to know that Japan usualy is at 3rd or 4th place for its military expence. I do not think the Japanese self-defence force as an military because it can not attack other countries in first place in other words, it cannot attack someone for its own benefit. However, it is true that Japan has the strongest military force in its region and it certainly does have certain impacts on other countries, like China and Korea. We also have couple of American military bases in our country and that also have considerable impacts and that I think is another reason why it is not right to say that Japan has a peace-loving country without any arm force. We are relying on the U.S., which probably has the most powerful military force in the world and, what else do we need ?
There has been certain amount of progress in abolishing nuclear weapon and I am grateful about it. However, I also think that we have to think about the weapons that we have today. Not as much as nuclear weapon, but other things such as missles and tanks are also very dangerous. There are also ongoing progress on these arms. I have been watching a NHK TV program series about American military force and its weapons. In the program it was said that now the U.S. military force uses less and less numbers of soldiers because they are replaced by machines. These machines are such as military planes and robots, that can be operated by computers and in consequence, no one has to get hurt.
It scares me when I hear about these things because I do not think that many Americans do not know that their country is developing such technology and actually using it to kill people in far away country. I have learned here in ICU that the media has the power to hide that it doesn't want people to know, and I think it is very frightening that people are voting politicians without knowing what thery are plannnig to do in the future...