.
To learn something about how dyslexia may be perceived in Japan, it would
be useful first to Brush up Your Japanese and make web searches in that
language. For some curious reason, possibly linked with being stuck on a
set of islands some way off the coast of China, the Japanese have their
own "language", and most of what they read and write is in that language!
(Why don't they all just speak and read English?! I've no idea -- but I
agree, it's very strange!) Further, their language has an entirely
different shape and form of writing from the roman script with which
another population group stuck on set of islands - but this lot are parked
off the west coast of Europe -- is most familiar.
So the problem, as properly restated in Disability-Studies-Speak [i.e.
that "Dyslexia" is not a deficit in the child, but the product of set of
Child-Abusive Tendencies in Society that force young citizens to spend many
formative years of their lives in the unpaid labour of intensive and
unnatural scrutiny of small marks in ink or electronic symbols, in which
they must try to discern and reproduce specific patterns while hunched over
page or screen to the detriment of their eyesight, backbone, mental
faculties, and spirit (if any remains), and is imbricated with the pursuit
of Capitalism and other nasty whatevers and etceteras] may turn out to
look, smell, sound, and generate 'attitudes' a bit different among the
Japanese.
Wrenching dangerously away from what may be considered decent conduct on
this list, it's interesting [but readers may here be warned that something
Medical is about to rear its ugly head...] to google NLM Gateway, pop
Japan dyslexia into the search box, and check out the 39 publications that
come up, many with free abstracts, and the majority being in English, as a
kindly concession to Anglo monolingualism. "alexia" is one of the words
that figures -- maybe this has a scientific meaning, or perhaps it's a bold
attempt to dispense with the deficitiveness of words beginning dis-, dys-.
On hasty return from the National Library of Medicine catalog search, you
may wish to erase your electronic track. (At any rate, don't tell anyone
where you've been).
A further search, among 900 listed items mainly in English, in a partly
annotated bibliog on disability and deafness in East Asia (China, Japan,
Korea), history, social responses, etc at
http://independentliving.org/docs7/miles200708.html
would find little or nothing about dyslexia -- but would show up a certain
amount of records and writing that indicate the progress, regress or
circularity of social responses toward people with impairments and
disabilities in those countries, during the past 3000 years. As indicated
in the introduction, a considerable amount of caution is advisable in
trying to understand - at several leaps of period, history, concept,
culture and translation - anything that is being said about the "attitudes"
of that quarter of the world's population through much of historical time.
Similar bibliogs listing, with some annotation, a few thousand articles on
social, medical, educational and historical responses to impairments and
disabilities in a further quarter of the world's population scattered
across South and South West Asia, the Middle East and Africa, appear at
CIRRIE, go to: 'additional resources', 'bibliographies'. (But a further
caution - after 30 years in the disability game, and compiling these
bibliogs over the past 15 years, I couldn't tell you what is my
own "attitude toward" any of these conditions, or the people having them,
or the societies or medical condition generating them. Probably I have some
attitudes; but if so, they vary with dozens of contextual factors that seem
to defy description or measurement, and would very likely be described
differently by any ten disabled people on the receiving end of those same
attitudes during the course of ten minutes or ten weeks -- so it's not at
all clear to me how useful it might be to decide, on the basis of 15
minutes' search or 15 years' search, what is the attitude of the Japanese
to anything.
(But I'm told they're fond of eating fish, which may also appear
as "ghoti", a shaw help in the Literacy Hour. I hope this may be useful...)
miles
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