I’m not just comfortable discussing political issues with friends, I want to talk about them with people close to me. However, it’s been harder for me to find people in Tokyo who feel as strongly about discussing things like police brutality, unhoused people, and genocide. Part of that might be that these problems aren’t happening locally. Another part may be that these topics are much more difficult to discuss in a second language. But one important part might be what is or isn’t communicated through the news in a specific language.

My therapist introduced a thought into my brain about how language plays a role in what information one can access. I never thought about it before, but that’s because I speak English. And due to imperialism from England and the US being a global power, English is a common first language in several large, populous countries, and a relatively common second language in many other countries. This has resulted in a really high volume of information being accessible in English.

For example, the English Wikipedia has 7 million articles. For comparison, French Wikipedia has less than 3 million articles, and Japanese Wikipedia has less than 1.5 million articles.

Just for a moment, think about how you search for things on the Internet. You search in your language, right? You’re not really getting results for the same topic presented in other languages. For people where English is their second language, they might also or instead search in English, because that broadens the possibility of finding what they’re looking for.

Because English dominates international journalism.

So what about the news in Japan? What about what’s on TV, printed in papers, and posted on social media? In Japan, it’s all in Japanese. And—it should go without saying—Japan is the only country in the world that speaks Japanese natively. And though everyone in the country learns a little English when they grow up, not many are proficient.

All news organizations make editorial decisions. Americans know how different the results of those editorial decisions can be between different news organizations. However, this presents an unfortunate situation in countries that speak a language virtually no one else does outside that country. All information regarding anything happening in the world is first filtered through language.

That means that in Japan, everything people hear about and read about comes from one of very few news sources in Japan. Those news organizations have extraordinary power in shaping not just public opinion, but what people are even aware of. This is not to say that Japanese people don’t know Israel is committing genocide. But it is to say that what people know is limited to the language that information is presented in.

Of course, local issues often come first, but even those can be presented in a specific way with almost no alternative perspective. For example, people I know and meet seem to talk about things like rice shortages and what might be the cause of something like that (supposedly foreign tourists). It’s not something that gets much international attention because, well, gestures wildly. Even if math doesn’t really check out that the shortage of rice has anything to do with tourism, the few news outlets that exist can report that and everyone might more easily accept it as truth.

I’m not saying every channel is Fox News. But imagine for a moment if they were. Imagine any country’s population being only able to comprehend global news in a non-global language. Many people who read this post may be in such a country.

But that’s not all.

At the end of WWII, it was Americans who wrote the new Japanese constitution. And in it, Japan was prohibited from going to war again. Japan is only allowed to defend itself. I never really thought about how that might contribute to something like this, but consider: even if Japan as a country would ever stand against genocide happening in another part of the world, they could never go to war for it. They can’t defend anyone else, even if they wanted to.

From that perspective, why even bother getting angry?

I don’t think everyone around me is necessarily apolitical, unopinionated, apathetic, or just disinterested in discussing political issues, but I’ve come to understand at least a few reasons why it could feel that way to me. It’s just that my personal morality is shaped by discussions about this stuff. But now I’m living in a culture where engaging with these kinds of political topics is not really seen as appropriate.

I’m still working on how to address my need to talk about these issues with people around me. For now, I’m kinda just talking to folks back home when I feel the need to talk.