When that student nearly got ran over by that tank in Tiananmen Square a few years back, it didn't faze me. Not that it wasn't tragic because it was. And no, I do not have anything against Asians (my best friend is an Asian) just kidding. No, what I attributed it to is the fact that I had watched too many damn Kung Fu theater episodes when I was growing up. So from their super exaggerated big eyed Anime, to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon nonchalantly leaping over trees, to Madam Butterfly, I learned that when they see a theme they like they stick to it. Godzilla has been fucking up Tokyo for 40 years. Same plot, with make shift cities made out of Hot Wheels City Center Play sets, the monsters that crawl out of the kiddie pools to stomp on the Hot Wheels cars are still wearing the same Johnny Sokko foam costumes from 1967. If it ain't broke, why fix it right?

I concluded real early that Asians are just too damn dramatic. In Tiananmen Square I expected someone to do some shit like get run over by a tank.
When you stab a man in the stomach with a sword, he isn't supposed to walk 25 miles through the jungle with a blade sticking out of his back, only to die on the front porch of his master’s dojo. All that does is get people unnecessarily riled up and typically swearing bloody revenge.

And although they all swear to their uncles that they will not fight anymore, it is unpreventable that someone from the West will rip that locket off their necks, thus releasing them from the promise that they made not to fight anymore and they immediately commence to over acting and beat everyone's ass…twice.

I guess a big knock against the West is that we are just too damn apathetic, but it seems that in the East they are just too fucking serious. Hell, I can't stand Dubya's social policies but I'll be damned if you see me tossing myself off an overpass because he won't sign the patients’ bill of rights into legislation.

In China, fourteen imprisoned followers of the banned Falun Gong sect committed suicide in Heilongjiang's Wanjia labor camp by making ropes from sheets and hanging themselves from bunk beds. Another 11 followers, who also took part in the mass suicide, were rescued by labor camp guards.

The suicide was the most deadly involving Falun Gong practitioners to be officially confirmed by the government since it banned the spiritual movement in July 1999. Since 1999 tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have been detained, and many of them have been beaten, forced from their jobs, homes, schools, and sent to labor camps without trial in China. And why? Why can't they do their slow motion Kung Fu exercises in the fucking basement? Worship your shit in the closet, at night, in the privacy of your own home? Sure it is a bit inconvenient but shit at least you live.

Then in Japan, not two days later and no, I don't think they are all the same. I do recognize that I was talking about the Chinese and now I am talking about the Japanese. But no, I don't think that this was just a coincidence, in Japan a man who appeared to be in his 50's performed hara-kiri on himself with a sword next to a platform where Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was giving a speech. The man was well within the prime minister's view, but police rushed to the scene and the speech went on without disruption.
``He was screaming something about Koizumi before I noticed that he had stabbed himself with a sword,'' said one witness.
In Japan, plunging yourself out of a 25 story balcony window because your Tomagotchi died because you forgot to water it was so common for a while there in Japan it turned into to a cliché.
From the land where people drink their own piss and pull 747's with their dicks, I have come to expect nothing less than all the drama I can handle.