Amae desu!

(Artist’s impression of a Japanese feeling.)

Japanese emotions are to be taught in schools to make British teenagers less boring. The move comes in answer to parental complaints that their offspring are “just incredibly dull”, and is intended to expand the emotional palate of British youth.

Currently the main emotions which British teenagers have the capacity to experience are nostalgia, yearning, whimsy, embarrassment and “the grumps”. But the new proposals could see this tally nearly quintupled to a gamut of over twenty emotions. Unlike British feelings, many of the oriental additions are nonlinear and may be experienced in up to seven mental dimensions at once. They include amae (a sense of cosy dependency), shitashimi (a special kind of intimacy), aware (contemplation of universal transience) and bushido (an almost suicidal sense of duty).

“Japanese kids are some of the coolest on earth,” Prime Minister David Browneron told the House of Commons yesterday. “We should copy them. Also there is something about social inclusion, I think. And it will make knife-crime more classy.”

British emotions have traditionally been viewed as rather staid. But campaigners claim that they are just as valid as the exotic imports, and better suited to the drizzly climate. Others have warned of the risk that greater emotional literacy could encourage a black market in imported feelings, fears which were borne out this week by police raids that netted 256 hours of marah (a sullen brooding from Malaysia), from a house in Surrey, and a haul of berserksgangrrr (Norwegian fury) with a street value of ten terrible minutes and a lifetime of regret.

On the plus side, it is reported that a pilot scheme in Llandudno has already incentivised up to one teen to write a haiku about his favourite computer game, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter II:

“Smuts like black feathers
On southern wind at sunset:
Commie body parts.”