In a dualism born of the self-promoting insistence of locales -- that here, I, and this must persist because I'm attached to it -- the badness of the one implies the righteousness of the other, necessarily, as the localist, a pragmatic box-preserver, first closes the circle -- certainly in theory, to some extent in practice -- then harps incessantly about the evil of the circle's only other member (who is outside the small circle, inside the big circle). Your Democrats and Republicans fit the bill, to be sure, but the term foreigner will be applied everywhere to indicate those who are not us -- to the person indoctrinated on the archipelago called Japan, the American and the Iraqi (gaikokujin, foreigner) are more similar to each other (on this logic, the same, to be precise) than they are to the Japanese (nihonjin) -- so even the multi-party system is essentially dualistic.
So when I hear complaints about the (real, I think) pollution from China (called "PM," I assume for "particulate matter," pronounced "pee-emmu"), apart from the fact that the complainers wear Chinese-manufactured clothing and are themselves implicated, it's clearly driven by own-back-patting pro-Japanism, as opposed to a concern about human well-being. Because if it were the latter, the first response would be "what can we do to address this problem?" and the answer would involve consuming less, among possibly other things. Instead, the thinking jumps to China equals bad and the worse China is, the better Japan is, and the more the Chinese threat needs to be dealt with. The Japanese nationalist, who is pretty much everyone in Japan, opposes evils like Chinese pollution the way Republicans and Democrats oppose spying and torturing when the other is doing it.
For the localist, everything must be sacrificed to save the box. It's the only thing we've got.
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