Floods in Iran,Rougai in Japan

                                                      Iran

Llugwy in Flood, Benjamin Williams Leader (1831-1923)

Photo Credit:St John's College, University of Oxford
[CC BY-NC-ND]

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, has approved a request from President Rouhani to release about $2 billion in emergency funds to deal with the aftermath of flash floods that have killed at least 76, injured 1,000 and left two million people in need of aid. The Iranian Red Crescent said that it was the country’s worst disaster in 15 years. (AP)

(The Times, 16.4.2019)

Is the UK sending any aid to Iran? Doesn’t this country owe them over £400 million for a broken trade deal and isn't this part of the reason why Zaghari Ratcliffe is in prison there? 

                                                    


Japan

Fukurokuju 1, unknown artist
Photo Credit: Preston Park Museum & Grounds [CC BY-NC-ND]

…Rougai, in the various mouths of its users, can be the stubborn idiocy of a senior executive who cannot use a computer but decries younger staff as inferior to previous generations. It is shoplifting sprees by retirees. It is superannuated politicians. It is elderly women hectoring young mothers in the street with unsolicited child-rearing advice. It is a snaking queue of septuagenarians dithering over touchscreen ticket machines. It is 90-year olds causing pile-ups by driving their cars the wrong way up motorways.

When one major business magazine produced a top 10 list of rougai irritations in the workplace, it was topped by “the way old people always say they are right about everything.” Another defined it in terms of the competitive drag suffered by so many Japanese companies whose elderly leaders refuse to step aside. Rougai has become the go-to gripe when Japan’s old strike the young as infuriating, intractable and intolerable.

Generational friction is nothing new to humanity, nor special to Japan, but rougai seems to reflect a Japan-specific feeling that the young are being outnumbered by the old. Government figures, the latest slew of which were released this moth confirm that exasperation.

A fifth of the population is now aged over 70, a third is over 60 and the direction of travel cannot be offset. At the same time, most of the tensions created by rougai tend not to be socially explosive. Respect for the elderly, whether by instinct or habit, generally ensures that its many manifestations are suffered in silence, pity or with an awkward laugh.

(The Financial Times, 2019)

The old have always had a lot to answer for.