{"id":22,"date":"2004-04-28T18:46:57","date_gmt":"2004-04-28T23:46:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/server97.snhdns.com\/~ravik\/wp\/?p=22"},"modified":"2004-04-28T18:46:57","modified_gmt":"2004-04-28T23:46:57","slug":"wow-what-a-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200404\/wow-what-a-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Wow what a country!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Japanese hostages returning from Iraq were <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/04\/22\/international\/asia\/22CND-JAPAN.html\">humiliated<\/a>(NY Times free registration required. Link will be inaccessible after a month)<\/i>  by their countrymen on their return for causing trouble to their government.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;You got what you deserve!&#8221; one Japanese held up a hand-written sign at the airport where they landed. &#8220;You are Japan&#8217;s shame,&#8221; another wrote on the Web site of one of the hostages. They had &#8220;caused trouble&#8221; for everybody. The government, not to be outdone, announced it would bill them $6,000 for airfare.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know what to think of this. On the one hand I sympathise with the sentiment that if you disregard your government&#8217;s advice and go to a dangerous place, then you shouldn&#8217;t expect the government to bail you out. On the other hand, I dislike the spirit of conformism that expects an entire country to do just what the government says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Japanese hostages returning from Iraq were humiliated(NY Times free registration required. Link will be inaccessible after a month) by their countrymen on their return for causing trouble to their government. &#8220;You got what you deserve!&#8221; one Japanese held up a hand-written sign at the airport where they landed. &#8220;You are Japan&#8217;s shame,&#8221; another wrote on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}