STEADY, AIM, FIRE!
Mad in Japan (Author: AA Gill)
On the face of it, the Japanese are very like us...But that's just on the face of it. Underneath, we're chalk and tofu...You don't have to go to Japan to have an inkling that the Japanese are not as the rest of us are. In fact, they're decidedly weird. If you take the conventional gamut of human possibility as running, say, from Canadians to Brazilians, after 10 minutes in the land of the rising sun, you realise the Japs are off the map, out of the game, on another planet. It's not that they're aliens, but they are the people that aliens might be if they'd learnt Human by correspondence course and wanted to slip in unnoticed.
...Religion is one of the reasons Japan is so socially crippled. In the beginning they had Shinto. Now, if religions were cars, Shinto would be a wheelbarrow.
...Oh, but then, silly me, of course I don't understand. I'm constantly being patronised for my coarse sensibilities and told that naturally I couldn't comprehend the subtlety, the aesthetic bat-squeak of Japanese culture. No country hides itself behind the paper screen of cultural elitism like Japan, which, considering they've bought their entire civilisation from other people's hand-me-downs, is a bit of a liberty. When it comes to Japanese civilisation, it's mostly eyewash. Kabuki theatre is only just preferable to amateur root-canal work. The three-stringed guitar is a sad waste of cat. Japanese flower-arranging is just arranging flowers. Their architecture is Chinese, as are their clothes, chopsticks, writing, etc. The samurai were thugs in frocks with stupid haircuts, and haiku poems are limericks that don't make you laugh. Indeed, they are so aesthetically difficult, one haiku master managed to compose only 23,000 in 24 hours, including gems like: 'The ancient pond, A frog leaps, The sound of the water.' Marvellous
...If Freud had lived in Tokyo, we'd never have got analysis. He wouldn't have known where to start...It's the absence of the western idea of love - of brotherly, charitable love or sensual love, that finally explains Japan's appalling, lunatic cruelty.
