/jp/ - Otaku Culture

005

On the face of it, the Japanese are very like us. We are both island nations, about the same size, both mongrel populations with constitutional monarchies; it rains a lot, they drink tea, we drink tea. We’re both obscurely addicted to odd sports (cricket, sumo), both had empires, are bellicose, mistrustful of foreigners, and are passionate gardeners. Neither of us are particularly good-looking, we are both repressed, both suffer a class system, drive on the left, and only in Britain or Japan is having a stiff upper lip explicable as a compliment. 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 ten minutes in the land of the rising sun, you realised 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. It’s the little things, like the food. They make the most elegant, delicate food in the world and then make it in plastic for every restaurant window. Only a Japanese person could see a plate of propylene curry and say: “Yum, I’ll have that.” And the loos. Heated loo seats are slightly worrying the first time you encounter them, but after that they’re a comfy idea; and there are buttons for jets of variable power, warm water, one for back bottom, one for front, with pictures to tell you which is which and hot air to help you drip-dry. All of which is strangely addictive and makes you question your sexual orientation, or at least wish for diarrhoea.