I've done a tremendous amount of non-fiction reading on a wide variety of subjects the past year+, and it's unfortunate that I've been too busy (with that reading, and other related things) to blog about it much. Lots of interesting new info and ideas though, and since I was just writing one to a friend in email, I figured it would make a decent blog post.
The most recent book is
Japan: A Reinterpretation, by Patrick Smith. I haven't read a lot of books on Japan, so I can't say how good or bad this one is. It was recommended by a professor of Asian Studies, and it's got pretty good
reviews on Amazon, and it's won some literary prizes, so that's something. I'll quote from the official Amazon blurb, since I'm too lazy to summarize the book myself.
For years westerners have viewed Japan as a nation of democratic, hard-working, unabashedly pro-Western people, a viewpoint promulgated mainly by a group of postwar scholars known as the Chrysanthemum Club. Journalist Patrick Smith takes a hard, fresh look at Japan and its relations with the West--particularly the United States--in Japan: A Reinterpretation. Smith asserts that the economic miracle we in the West have long admired was achieved at the expense of true political reform, creating a corporation instead of a democracy. Now that the miracle has collapsed, the Japanese are in a state of cultural, political, and social malaise.
A lot of the reviewers on Amazon accuse the book of racism, or at least being insulting towards the Japanese, and I didn't find that at all accurate. He describes the culture and country quite precisely. I don't know if he's entirely correct, and there are obviously a lot of generalizations that must be made to sum up 1600 years of history on a nation of 125m people in a 300 page book. But his conclusions all seem to be well-founded and researched and argued, and if some of them are somewhat negative, that's not racism. That's objective sociology.
It's not racist to describe a culture as it is, warts and all. Racism comes from the subjective opinion drawn from the description of a culture. If you love Anime and think Japan is the coolest place ever, then you might find Smith's book racist, since he doesn't describe the country you've idealized. That's your problem, though, and in fact you're the racist, since you're assigning traits and behaviors to an entire race of people based on very limited knowledge. Smith never says every single Japanese person is this way, or that way, and he never says they're bad for being how he says they are. Conclusions of that nature are up to the reader. Or the Amazon.com reviewer, in several cases.
What I emailed my friend about was the mention of anime, since the friend had just sent me
a link to this, which is NSFW and seems to be some sort of body pillow, with a hot, topless anime chick on it, and real, protruding boobs. It's even got detachable panties, though I don't see the point in those, since the pillow/anatomy beneath is not visible, and not anatomically-correct in any event. Not that I really see the point in the rest of it, for that matter.
Anyway, it's one of those weird Japanese anime things that most of us Westerners see and wonder, "WTF? Why does everything Japanese = weird/perverted?"
I have an answer for that, but it'll come after I quote the only brief bit from Smith's book that mentions anime, in the form of the manga comic book:
To take a small example, let us consider a manga called The Silent Service that was published not long after the Gulf War. Manga, the ubiquitous comic books the Japanese lose themselves in, are full of violence, sex, and derring-do of all varieties. They are a prevalent addiction because they are an outlet for people whose social codes are rigid and confining. This makes them a kind of inverse image of the Japanese; a way to gather and explore the collective wishful thinking.
So manga are escapism, and they're so bizarre and weird since so many Japanese feel tremendous cultural/societal pressure to conform and be cogs in the wheel, which makes their need for bizarre escapism that much stronger. Most of Smith's book is about that issue, but it's about why it's true and how it came about historically, rather than exploring any particular cultural expressions of the overall cultural condition.
Thanks to this book and some other reading, I know a great deal about historical Japan, and how the nation and culture got to where they are today. I do not in any way "understand" the Japanese people though, nor do I have any more insight into their culture than what I expressed a paragraph or two ago. I don't think Smith would claim to either, especially not today. His book was published in 1997, and maybe this is just an example of my own cultural/temporal relativism, but I think contemporary (youth) Japanese culture has undergone a huge transformation since 1997, largely thanks to the Internet age causing such a global mutation and combination of cultures.
I do have some insight into why we see so much bizarre Japanese culture online, though. It's pretty simple; that's what makes headlines. Bloggers and news sites aren't going to post news about regular people doing regular things. What they (we) post about is the bizarre stuff, and then readers who know nothing about Japan (this list included me until about a month ago) draw sweeping generalizations about the entire culture based on its most outlying weirdness. It's as if other countries judged the US only by Paris Hilton, Fear Factor, Jerry Falwell, and The Bang Bus.
Come to think of it, that's pretty much what happens. Ouch. However, you can apply that mis-knowledge to your situation. If you're an American and you want to judge how accurate a view of Japan you get from what you see about the country/culture, when what you're seeing are body pillows with tits, oddly-pixeled tentacle porn, and game shows featuring strangers screaming at each other on subways, consider how accurate an appraisal of life in America you'd get from only seeing brief news items about the weirdest stuff we turn out?
Labels: japan, society
