"Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone. For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, but has trouble enough of its own."

So wrote American Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) in an oft-quoted poem titled "The Way of the World."

If Wilcox had seen Ryutaro Nonomura, a 47-year-old member of the Hyogo Prefectural Assembly, in his incoherent crying jag on YouTube, she might have revised her verse to, "Weep and the world laughs at you."