Blogging About Japan Analysed

[Mulboyne]

New Japan blog The Westerner's Fear of the Neonsign has a cautionary tale on the dangers of running a Japan related blog. He also seeks to classify the motives which drive people to run blogs

There are ten statements below. If you have ever written about Japan, identify the statements that could possibly describe the rationale behind your words:

1. Japan is unintentionally hilarious - in particular, misuse of English - or Engrish - is so funny that I devote considerable time to documenting and disseminating it. To avoid a similar fate, I will not be blogging in Japanese.
   
2. Japan is barbaric - it fails to treat sacred Western food with due decorum (bread in a can) and celebrates Christian festivals all wrong (Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas Eve). Check my blog for further examples.
   
3. Japan is sexually deviant - society operates in the tacit knowledge that Japanese men are paedophiles by default. Look at all the photographic evidence I have amassed to prove it. They just don’t know how to treat a woman properly. That I do is the underlying message I want you to receive from my blog.
   
4. Japan is a visual paradise (1) - all Japanese have a heightened visual sensibility; they spend their coffee breaks contemplating tiny design modifications to plastic cups and bathe in the juice of fonts come evening. Not actually living in Japan, I can safely say that they never drive ugly white minivans or fill their tatami rooms with tat.
   
5. Japan is a visual paradise (2) - the thing I love about Japan is how it allows me to me indulge in the objectification of women without guilt or reproach. The pornography here is just fantastic. Oh, of course, this will be known as The Great Unmentioned in my blog.
   
6. Japan is spineless and work-addicted - people will do any job rather than lose esteem by not working. Look at this old man waving past cars with a pair of red wands - you wouldn’t catch me stooping to do such a demeaning and unnecessary job. Oh, excuse me, I’m late for my English conversation school class.
   
7. Japan is childish - public announcements are only heeded when they are delivered by curtseying cartoon characters. To prove it, I will photograph them all. Even though the large incidence of such messages is obvious, I will continue to treat each one as a fantastic novelty.
   
8. I am childish - only in Japan can I indulge my secret love of toys and games while presenting it as sociological research. I never miss an opportunity to make the sweeping observation that Japan is populated by inadequate geeks. I visit Akihabara every weekend in search of corroborating evidence, but it’s purely research you understand.
   
9. Japan loves me - it’s always saying how tall I am, how handsome I am, how intelligent I am (admit it, I am pretty hot at producing those L/R sounds), how good I am at sports, how amazing it is that I am a man and yet I cook for myself. Nobody said anything in my home country except: “So, are you finally going to get laid in Japan?” Deeper awareness of Japanese social etiquette would have saved me the trouble of believing any of this.
   
10. Japan is mine - I am the Alpha Gaijin. If Japan can be said to exist at all, it is only because I have brought it to life with my intellectual efforts. Other foreigners intruding on my turf better be able to withstand the fire of my comments. Japan will thank me for everything I have accomplished once it knows who I am. Until then, I have an immersion experience more impressive than yours to attend to.

I think the virtually all of the contributions on these forums tick one or more of those boxes. Which, of course, puts the "F" into FG.

[hundefar]

Hmmm, what about the blogs that focus on Japanese politics, history and other "serious" issues? Or is this just for the popculture etc. blogs?

[Charles]

If Japan can be said to exist at all, it is only because I have brought it to life with my intellectual efforts.

heh.. I read a book by a French Postmodernist, can't recall his name at the moment, who traveled to Japan and wrote of his experiences. He insisted that Japan was a mental construct that you had to build as you encountered it.

[hundefar]

heh.. I read a book by a French Postmodernist, can't recall his name at the moment, who traveled to Japan and wrote of his experiences. He insisted that Japan was a mental construct that you had to build as you encountered it.

Wasn't Oscar Wilde the first to say something along those lines when he wrote "In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people"

[Charles]

Wasn't Oscar Wilde the first to say something along those lines when he wrote "In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people"

There's a long tradition of Europeans going to Japan and completely failing to find what they were looking for.

I had to look up the book, it's "Empire of Signs" by Roland Barthes. If you want a real snooze, look up his wikipedia entry, it has some drivel about how he traveled to Japan in the 1960s and developed post-structuralist theory.

[hundefar]

There's a long tradition of Europeans going to Japan and completely failing to find what they were looking for.

Let me recommend "The Great Wave" by Christopher Benfrey.

The quests for spiritual fulfillment of the figures profiled here unfold in extraordinary ways. Disaffected by the mercenary state of American culture in the Gilded Age following the Civil War, many of New England's intellectual elite sought a new social order from the largely unfamiliar Japan, a nation whose own intellectuals were in turn looking to shake off years of isolation and forge a new identity as part the international community. Cultural historian Benfey, a professor of English at Mount Holyoke (Degas in New Orleans), seamlessly braids the far-flung adventures of cultural importers/exporters from both countries and offers an enjoyable collection of eclectic and surprising historical narratives about such figures as Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Adams. Benfey traces the importation of Japanese culture to the U.S. back to intrepid pilgrims like Herman Melville, who wrote of exploring Asia's "impenetrable Japans." This curiosity boomed in the cultural confusion after the Civil War, when many Americans felt that European philosophy could advance no further except through mysticism, which the exotic Japan was thought to offer. Benfey relates the lives of several Japanese eccentrics who likewise believed that a foreign culture might provide useful tools for a country similarly in the midst of dramatic change. The cultural exchanges that Benfey describes, at times comic, are tantalizing examples of how nations develop and in what ways they are able to learn from each other. Though Benfey sometimes meanders and indulges in digressions into the decadent lives of 19th-century Boston Brahmins, his account is consistently enjoyable and always informative.

It's a brilliant book. I'll go and have a nap while reading Wikipedia now.

[Charles]

Let me recommend "The Great Wave" by Christopher Benfrey.

It's a brilliant book. I'll go and have a nap while reading Wikipedia now.

Ha.. sounds interesting. That is a particularly interesting historical period, the waves went back and forth. I remember my art school had a Monbusho-sponsored art researcher who came over and lectured on the history of early Meiji Japanese artists who studied French art and traveled to Paris to study firsthand. Many of their works were exhibited in Europe alongside the famous artists of the era, but of course only a few reached an international standard. And a few of them got to France and discovered they really didn't like modern French art, so they went back to Japan.

[Mulboyne]

This is from Oscar Wilde:

I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence ? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate selfconscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. One of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans. He was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his delightful exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell's Gallery showed only too well. He did not know that the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home, and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.

[sublight]

1,2,5,7 and 8 describe my Flickr photo collection pretty well.

Granted, 2 and 3 are things that I love about this place, and 8 is something I embrace whole-heartedly.

[GomiGirl]

Most of the blogs I read are not commentary type ones about stuff, more about a journal about what the bloggers themselves do in their daily lives and they just happen to live in Japan. More of a way to reduce RSI from typing emails back to family and friends.

I have never tried to analyse my own blog. I usually just forget to blog and it is just what takes me at the time. But then I have maybe about 3 people who read it and the majority of those are my family.

[Mulboyne]

[kusai Jijii]

Put me down for a 5.
Oh while you are at it, put Greji down for a 5 too (with extra goat).

[Taro Toporific]

1. Japan is unintentionally hilarious

[Greji]

[quote="kusai Jijii"]Put me down for a 5.
Oh while you are at it, put Greji down for a 5 too (with extra goat).]

Ahh, could you make that two goats to go, please....

[kusai Jijii]

Ahh, could you make that two goats to go, please....

Thanks G-man. Didn't know it was your treat.

[nottu]

[Charles]

[quote="nottu"]..You know finally after you go through the whole Japan thing and you finally lift that veneer off you get to see behind it –]

That reminds me of a famous old quote from LA, "they say Hollywood is an illusion, nothing but a veneer of glitter and cheap tinsel. But if you scratch beneath the surface, you'll find more glitter and cheap tinsel."