A Japanese 10-year-old has become the youngest person authorized to prepare “fugu” pufferfish — a delicacy that can kill if its poisonous parts are not properly removed.
Fifth grader Karin Tabira passed a test this summer that means she is now certified to slice and gut the fish for consumption.
She recently used her new skills to serve a platter of paper-thin slices of fugu sashimi to the governor of southern Kumamoto region where she lives.
I don’t doubt the ten year olds ability to prepare the fish, only the ability to understand the weight of her actions.
Catholic school uniform. Yes. She prepares and serves the fish while wearing one.
They’ve discovered that farmed puffers don’t have toxic organs. The poison comes from the food they naturally ingest, so farming them on a special diet makes them safe.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/new-improved-fugu-now-without-poison-81301903/
We put arbitrary age limitations on seemingly everything, from voting to watching a movie. When we have no age limits on something, stories always come up about a young kid who is capable and competent.
So why do we even have those age limits? We have adults of 30+ who are way more immature than some 12 year olds. Just seems like needless limitation on the rights of kids.
The real exception to this I suppose are things like age limits on joining the military or giving consent.
The reason is to protect the physically or mentally weak from the strong while also having rules that are easy to follow and to enforce, that don’t require psyche exams, which depend on the examiner.
Age might not be a good metric of evaluating maturity, but it is the best and most practically useful we have. (I use “maturity” here as having reached certain physically and mental level where they can operate, think and decide independent, and the risk of being manipulated is low.)
Because age is not a good metric, that means that we have false positives and false negatives on a maturity tests based on age, which we need to balance. And I would rather have more false negatives (wrongly ascertained immaturity) than false positives (wrongly ascertained maturity).
If someone comes up with a better and still practical maturity test, that would be interesting. “Solutions” like every citizen has to do a yearly physical and mental exam in order to keep their rights as an adult, seem much to harsh and easily manipulatable. Especially around blurry lines like disabilities.
Wherever certain thing needs a maturity test or not and where that should be, I cannot say. Just if the age limit is too high, then mental decline will raise the false positives, which would be bad as well.
I don’t think that is a fully-satisfying conclusion. If it held up to scrutiny, then we would also curtail the rights of the elderly in the same way, which in the overwhelming majority of cases we do not. We would do the same for people with relevant disabilities, which again in the majority of cases, we do not.
If someone proposed removing the right to vote from people with mental disabilities to “protect the mentally weak from the strong”, I’d like to think that we’d all see the problems with that. Why do we not feel the same way about the disenfranchisement of younger people?
Sure it isn’t a good system, but it is the one we have. And if you have concrete improvement ideas, it would be interesting to hear.
I mean, where ever we set the age limit for instance voting to 14, some 10 or 9 year old will feel disenfranchised. We could remove it completely and let toddlers vote. What would the consequences of that be? I have no idea!
Most adults are functionally retarded and can barely drive a car. These kids are the exception. Most humans are incredibly stupid.
I like how being able to drive a car has become the metric that decides if you are retarded or not. Like come on. Cars are killing the planet and even if they weren’t they are the most dangerous form of transport by far. Stop hyping cars.
Also you can have physical issues, coordination issues or attention issues that make driving difficult, but can still be more level headed than the average person.
“I was happy when the governor said ‘oishi’,”
It’s ‘oishii’, CBS. Just because English no longer cares about vowels doesn’t mean Japanese doesn’t. Oishi is proper name (big rock or little rock depending upon the kanji)
After how Japan mangles names and words into katakana I can’t get too worked up over languages without (formally transcibed) vowel length forget a macron or double letter in publications for non-speakers.
Besides, I don’t think the h thrown into Ohtani is gonna make Dodgers fans say his name any different than without it. It would be similar to trying to get a random Japanese person to use vowels outside the five sounds they have.
The h in after O in names was some choice to try to denote oo or ou in japanese (long vowel for those that don’t know) so at least that kinda makes sense (I’m not sure if any modern transcription system officially uses it).
Katakana is certainly limited, but they can’t just add new sounds to the language and such easily. Older speakers can’t even say ‘v’ as in violin in most cases. Younger generations generally can (but a DVD is still a dee bui Dee or even a day bui day in some speakers).
