Japan (1)

I'm weeks if not months behind in this blog, but I'll try & catch up before the semester moves into overdrive.

I mainly went to Japan to catch up with one of my former students, Yosuke, with whom I have stayed in touch fairly assiduously in the five or so years since he was in Australia. Not that I haven't always been vaguely interested in Japan, but knowing someone personally was enough to tip the scales on going.

He asked me, what do you think about Japan? This is my attempt at the start of an answer.

IT's a very complex question, what do you think about something? Any answer says, for one thing, much more about the "you" than the "thing". But once aware of that, you should be very suspicious of what you see, because what you see might be yourself. But if you are too suspicious, you might not see anything at all.

Take, as an example, early European pictures of Australian Aborigines; they look much more "European" than "Australian". So an Anglo-Australian mode of seeing indigenous Australians now is different from 250-odd year old mode; note I'm not claiming either as more correct; differently mediated is as far as I can go.

Similarly, think of the double meaning of the question "What is it like?" On the one hand, that asks for the character, maybe even the essence - compromised word - of the thing. Simultaneously, it seeks comparison: well, it's like this, only different. But what you think about this paradigm is also coloured by self & experience, so each further comparison intensifies the picture of oneself and hides the landscape.

So be warned - this might not be about Japan at all. But I will do what I can.

It occurs to me to start with what I knew about Japan before I went; what have I heard/read, and what did I think about it? In the 50's in Australia the word Japan primarily evoked the war; before I was ten I had read four or five books on the lives of Australian soldiers in POW camps. This was a popular genre; not one which painted Japan in a very favourable light. In primary school I can remember a teacher disquisiting about "cheap Jap junk" (the triple alliteration is pleasing to the Anglo ear); from this I might infer that the early days of what later came to be known as the great Japanese manufacturing miracle were more focussed on price than quality - this is a pattern I have seen repeated with Korea & China. Whether the pattern is in the story, or the goods, I can't determine; probably a degree of both.

By the 1970's it was becoming clear to some that trade with Japan was going to be an essential component of Australia's economic future. That required a certain degree of "re-education" of the public view of Japan, which was largely still informed by post-war attitudes; the government sponsored messages to the effect that the war was a long time ago, it was an anomaly in Japanese history, it was time to forgive and forget. Schools were encouraged to set up Japanese language programs. Students were encouraged to learn Japanese, to facilitate trade. These messages were resisted by some conservative groups, such as the Returned Servicemen's League, but even conservatives like the smell of money and people were starting to notice that actually, Japanese products were frequently cheaper & better than local or European or American and over time the general post-war animus died down. It was a long time ago, and the rapid growth of the Australian population due to emigration and the post-war baby boom meant that the percentage of the population who felt personally involved in the war grew rapidly smaller.

Not that these debates meant a huge amount to me at the time. They were just there, in the background. They must have made some impact, because I still remember them, if dimly. They form part of what I know.

The most significant impact Japan made on me in the 70's was, I would say, Zen Buddhism.

I can't really reconstruct how this happened - was it by chance that my eye was caught browsing the Pelicans (a blue Penguin imprint, and I've always been a sucker for blocks of massed colour. I worked my way through Faulkner because the local library had all his works in one uniform set, and Dickens because the school library had his likewise. I'm grateful for the Faulkner, though.), or had I read about Buddhism in Kerouac first so that my eye was likely to be caught, or did my interest come from somewhere else? You could say that Zen was part of the hippie/beatnik zeitgeist, and that it was washing around Australia 10 or 15 years after it had washed though America, so I was naturally caught up in it. Anyway, for one reason or another, I read a few books about Zen and consequently about Japan. Also, courtesy of the same library that gave me Faulkner, I read Mishima's tetraology, "Sea of Fertility" - not that I remember much of it. The sex, mainly, that's what 13 year old boys remember about most literature.

Mind you, it's not just 13 year old boys & many people have drawn attention to Japanese sexual customs; particularly the mystery of the geisha, the relationship between the geisha & prostitution, hostessing, what exactly do all those "salarymen" (a peculiar term which for no good reason that I can see is applied only to men earning a salary in Japan, who, apparently, are somehow so different from the rest of the world's salary earners that they deserve their own unique epithet) do after work, the sexually-objectified adolescent girl, etc. etc. If you stop and think about this, it's a bit puzzling; why pick on Japan? No-one particularly thinks to describe America in terms of the world's biggest sex industry. You might say that national sexual stereotyping is a bit of an ongoing joke, and that's true to some extent, but it seems to me that it's only with Japan that the joke isn't a one-liner.

Anyway, I've drifted somewhat off the topic of Buddhism. For a variety of reasons my interest in Japanese Buddhism lead me back to China, rather than deeper into Japan. One of those reasons was the Tao Te Ching; but perhaps another was a story about Japan that was, I think, emerging already in the 70's, and to some extent dominated perceptions in the 80's and early 90's, and that was the story of the Japanese as perfecters of other people's beginnings. So, for example, the Chinese invented tea, the Japanese perfected the tea ceremony; the Chinese invented 禅 , which is zen in Japanese, and the Japanese perfected it; the Dutch invented video-recorders, the Japanese perfected them; The Americans invented cars, Toyota etc. You get the picture. It was a mantra of the corporate world in the 80's, TQM, incremental improvement, whatever name it went by. But part of the story was also that the Japanese don't invent, they only modify. I've always been interested in origins (before I developed more critical sophistication), so I went from "zen" to "chan" to "dao" and thereby China. Of course, Japanese wasn't on offer at my high school, where Chinese was. That may also have made a difference.

During the early seventies I was into games; chess, and Chinese chess & Japanese chess - of which I knew only the rules, having read one book about it and lacking opponents to play against. Shogi, to give it its indigenous name, is very interesting with a significant, and so far as I know unique, wrinkle in that a captured opponent's pieces become one's own, and can be redeployed at any time and place. There were other games, Go (Wei Qi in China) and Go-moku (Five in a row, if I have it right).

Go is another thing that fits the story of "invented elsewhere (China), perfected in Japan"; today the top players are still Japanese & Korean. On the other hand, the last time I looked, the Five-in-a-row world champion was Ukrainian. (You might say, if I were really "into origins", chess would've lead me to India. Maybe.)

Over the seventies, eighties & nineties I also broadened my reading of Japanese writing. Not hugely; Marukama (extensive), others whose names I can't remember; claustrophobic books set in overpowering cities with alienated narrators. This idea of the dystopian hype-city, exemplified by Tokyo, was another theme of the post-70's Western perception of Japan. The metropolis of Bladerunner is heavily dependent on Tokyo, although the de-humanised urban dystopia has Fritz Lang as a European progenitor - I presume amongst others; I would guess all cultures always have ambivalence towards urbanisation, but Japan/Tokyo took over, for at least a while, the predominant image of the unhuman city. The Japanese books I was reading reflected these Western concerns. At first one thinks, alienation is the common concern of all people, it's natural, but later I came to ask, why were these books, of all the books written in Japanese, translated and published in Australia/America? Was it because they best conformed to pre-existing images of Japan? Were they chosen to confirm, rather than reveal? My deepest intuition now is that they were.

I've also seen a few Japanese films (when I try to count them, it seems like an embarrassingly small number, maybe 20 or 30, surely no-one could call that significant & yet unconsciously, as one builds up a world-view, no-one thinks about statistical validity). "The Ring" is one scary film.

"Ran" is the best film adaptation of a Shakespearian play.The main impression that I take from those films, though, is a softening of the urban landscape, a sprawling, untidy suburbia which seems more intimate and community minded than the suburbias of my life. Images of Japanese suburbia seem friendly and alive, where Australian suburbs are cold and empty.

I've left out of all this the idea of "face" which pervades Western ideas about Asia, and which, in my opinion, is of absolutely no value whatsoever except as an excuse to stop thinking about the "other". "Face" is an excuse, by-and-large, to blame the other for failure to communicate. Not that there isn't face - just that every culture has it  & it is no more a useful marker of Asia than, say, black hair.