L. Ron Hubbard demonstrates a very serious bias against the Japanese people that is similar to the racist propaganda of World War II (a caricature with thick glasses and Oriental accent). Here in a lecture, he instructs his students in the finer points of the Japanese language, which he believes is responsible for the suicidal nature of the culture.

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There is no more madder nation than Japan. And you walk down the street in Japan and you say to some Japanese, "Blah-d-blah, blither-blither," something of the sort. And he says, "I withhold my foul breath from your face," and "Yes," and so on. And he goes on down the street. And you told him that you were on your way home and you wanted him to go on to the office. And he took it that you were on your way to the office and you wanted to go home.

It's supposed to be a terribly hard language. It's not a hard language. It's as simple as baby talk, really. It's an awfully easy language in terms of languages. Some of the Malay languages are a little bit rough.

But in katakana you have this great big character, which is a Chinese character, and then you have the little katakana stuff up at the corner of it (if I'm using the proper terms on this; it's been years since I ran into this stuff).

Anyway, they've got the character and then they say how it's pronounced in Japanese. But do you know that two Japanese can stand together and converse with each other for a little while andthen all of a sudden find out they're talking about two entirely different things, and with a great surprise find this out, and they promptly break out their pencils and pieces of paper, and they draw the Chinese character for the proper words they're using. "Oh. Oh, I understand; that's very good. Yeah, very good, yeah. I so solly. Yeah." Whee! That's a rough one.

They identify. And you will find that they're perfectly happy to do that. It makes bad communication. And they're perfectly happy to have bad communication. They don't want anything better than that. If you went in there and tried to straighten their language out and give them new words to support these, why, they'd be upset with you as all could be.

Now, you take katakana is, I think, if I remember rightly, some forty-seven characters — just sort of fishing this out of the hat. It's been ages since I ran into this. Anyway, some forty-seven characters, something like that. And when they write them all down they don't space anything — when they're just a stream of characters. There's no spaces that separate any of the words they represent. And boy, that sentence can read any way. It can read "The boy milked the cow" or it can read "Dogs are forbidden here" or it can read "The steamer will sail at nine." They don't care. Well, you just sort of infer from the surroundings what it's all about.

And that nation has the highest rate of suicide, has the highest rate of thick-lens glasses and did the most suicidal trick a few years ago. It's the doggonedest country.