The Soul of Japan: By Roland Kelts

[NuBlackAnon !!z6ldXGL61Wm No.]

The Soul of Japan
By Roland Kelts

Japan has a curiously utopian image in the West right now. Everything from anime and manga to sushi and sudoku seems to emit the whiff of cool culture in the globalized 21st century. Even Japan's renowned bullet train is on the export docket: California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is said to be negotiating with Japan Rail to purchase Japanese high speed train intellectual property for an upcoming Los Angeles-Las Vegas line, and possibly extending it to San Francisco and other West Coast destinations in the coming years.

But inside the borders of this ancient archipelago, self-confidence is scant. While the aftershocks of a collapsing US economy causes tremors throughout the rest of the world, Japan is suffering a homegrown earthquake.

Unemployment stats have hit their highest points since World War II; the government is now subsidizing major corporations to beef up their staff rosters; immigrant workers are being laid off by the score; and the long-standing governing oligarchy, the so-called Liberal Democratic Party, is on its knees.

Hapless Japanese consumers have stopped spending any capital-political or fiscal. And why shouldn't they? Japan, designed since the end of World War II to be America's most passive and dependable Pacific ally, has finally hit paralysis.

"What most people don't recognize," wrote Masaru Tamamoto, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, this spring in the New York Times, "is that [Japan's] crisis is not political, but psychological"

[Anonymous ‮^_^ ‪‪‪‬ ‪‬ ‭‬ !Jones4ZrPA No.]

MacArthur unrelated?

[NuBlackAnon !!z6ldXGL61Wm No.]

>>2780231
None of this is news to many of Japan's artists, writers and leading progressive thinkers. The story of Japan since the US occupation in 1945 is one of forced docility and coercion amid bouts of humiliation. Japan's military government lost its biggest gamble (a war with the greatest mid-century Western power: America), and its legacy has been a perverted national identity -- one with international recognition and export dominance but little sense of agency or genuine independence.

"Japan is America's 51st state," a professor at Osaka University told me a few years ago. "There are 45,000 American troops here, and American fast food is everywhere. What could we do to stop it?"

Japan's writers and artists have done a lot to try to stop it - going so far as to take their own lives in protest. Author Yukio Mishima infamously disemboweled herself at the Tokyo headquarters of the Japan Self-Defense Forces 40 years ago in response to his nation's loss of self and soul in the aftermath of World War II.

The ambivalent Mishima, who apparently struggled to get his writing produced on Broadway (the icon of American entertainment values), seemingly foresaw the loss of Japan's soul long before Starbucks landed in every neighborhood in Tokyo.

[NuBlackAnon !!z6ldXGL61Wm No.]

>>2780240
also >Anonymous
>Have a tripcode

I'll get to the good stuff, just wait
But Kenzaburo Oe, Japan's last Nobel Prize-winning novelist, once critiqued Mishima's suicide as "proof of his perverted relationship with Japan," claiming his compatriot chose an archly traditional and sensational method of death precisely because he was conforming to Western stereotypes of Japan. According to Oe, MIshima's self destruction was less an outright protest than an example of his trying to live up to the image of Japan created by Europeans."

Oe himself has been battling the conservative, nationalistic political system he sees as the legacy of US-Japan relations since the end of the war. But even Oe is ambivalent. At an American literary conference in the 1990s, Oe admitted that books like Huckleberry Finn and volumes by Walt Whitman first inspired him to embark on his career as a writer. He reportedly bowed his head in apology immediately after making this confession.

"It was overwhelming," best-selling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami tells me when I ask him about the sudden influx of American pop culture in the middle of the 10th century. "It was everywhere. And we're not French, you know. We liked it."

But what does this mean for Japan today, when its own culture is penetrating Western minds and souls as its people at home suffer from a decades-old malaise?

[Anonymous No.]

>NuBlackAnon
HAHAHA, OH WOW.

[NuBlackAnon !!z6ldXGL61Wm No.]

>>2780245
"There's something unfair in Japanese society," says Japanese proto-punk author Ryu Murakami, easing onto a couch in his hotel room in Tokyo. "Maybe it's not with bad intentions, but the result is still a betrayal. The paradigm of Japanese society has changed since the era of rapid economic growth, but our society still provides the same kind of education and corporations are still managed by rules based on norms rooted in the paradigms of that time."

Murakami believes that Japan's sibling like relationship with the US may have been salutary during the nation's early growth years immediately following the war, when images of American wealth and stability served as a model for a people who had endured abject poverty and defeat. But the "mindless materialism" he saw overtaking his fellow nationals in the so-called bubble years of the 1980s, when the value of Japanese real estate and stocks blew a gasket, is revealing. The Japanese, he says, only perceived the superficial qualities of American life: the consumer goods, refrigerators, cars, microwaves, and designer clothing. They didn't understand the soul of America, or its essence. And they cast aside their own cultural core for a life guided by, and limited to, borrowed surfaces.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780245
>pointing out Jones' tripcode
Don't scream "Hi I'm new here" or anything.

Also nobody cares, we already know.

[Anonymous No.]

>[Japan's] crisis is not political, but psychological

The fact that for most of its post-1945 history Japan hasn't been a functional democracy hasn't really helped either.

But the point is somewhat accurate. The collapse of the bubble economy was the final end in Japan to the belief that'd sustained them since Meiji: that if everybody sacrificed, pulled together and worked their asses off, Japan could be the most powerful country in the world. Now that they don't have that, what have they got?

Not that Japan can't become a country of listless slobs like the US, but it'd be a shame.

[Anonymous No.]

holy shit i was just about to post this

also this is the greatest part

>"I don't see any adults here in Japan," he continued in the Atlantic interview. "The fact that you see salarymen reading manga and pornography on the train and being unafraid, unashamed or anything, is something you wouldn't have seen 30 years ago, with people who grew up under a different system of government. They would have been far to embarrassed to open a book of cartoons or dirty pictures on a train. But that's what we have now in Japan. We are a country of children."
>We are a country of children."

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780245
>also >Anonymous
>>Have a tripcode

Newfriends don't know about Jones-sama.

[NuBlackAnon !!z6ldXGL61Wm No.]

>>2780276
"Japan wasn't copying or borrowing from the States with any kind of profound awareness of what those things really were," he says. "Let's take the example of music. Some people who play jazz in Japan might think that all Americans play jazz. Those who play country music might think all Americans sing country songs."

He sighs in resignation. "You know, there are people who play Hawaiian music in Japan, and some of them actually believe that all Americans know how to hula dance."

Can 60 years of mistaken idolatry gut a country's sense of self? Murakami seems to think so.

"Japan copies American culture, but it's all myopic and superficial ... The US is very diverse, there are many races and religions, but Japan only takes what it wants to as a kind of fashion. And that's a problem."

Yet another Murakami, the conceptual artist Takashi, whose work now sells for millions at Sotheby's auctions, proposed a theory only a few years ago that he blithely labeled "Little Boy," a reference to the codenmae the US Air Force gave to its first ever atomic bomb, which it dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. According to Murakami, the trauma Japan suffered at the end of World War II (not only from defeat, but also from the unprecedented dropping of two atomic bombs, the decimation of its major cities through civilian-killing firebombs and the loss of its divine emperor, which, in Confucian terms, means the loss of the supreme patriarch, the family father) engendered a melange of grotesqueries in the nation's collective unconscious. Many of these demons could only find expression in the comparatively underground forms of Japanese comics (mange) and animation. Both mediums were cheap to produce, and were distrubuted outside the bounds of Japan's corporate-industrial complex.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780295
This is BS. Read Alan Booth's old travel writing on Japan from the early eighties and he talks about adults sitting around reading ero-manga in public.

[NuBlackAnon !!z6ldXGL61Wm No.]

>>2780295
God dammit you fucker stop beating me, seriously though I'm happy others are reading this, of all boards /jp/ should read this.
For Takashi Murakami, even the concept of kawaii, or the extreme cuteness in Japanese pop icons like Hello Kitty, Pikachu from Pokemon, and the Tamagotchi virtual electronic pets, emanates from the wounds of World War II and the American occupation. Evolution teaches us that cuteness is a symptom of dependence, urging adults to care for infants, puppies and kittens who are, after all, entirely helpless. A Japan shaped by its reliance upon big brother/big daddy America would naturally perfect this form of expression. Murakami's theory goes:

Be cute, and Daddy might be good to you, however much you hate it - and him.
>>2780292
I come here for VN knowledge, not for board culture, but unlike that horrid /a/ tripfag Lanced Jack or whatever I try to post on topic images and content!

[Anonymous of Colombia !pkzejWGkfw No.]

>>2780303
Just say cargo cult already and get it over with.

[NuBlackAnon !!z6ldXGL61Wm No.]

>>2780326

"Japan lost the war to the Americans," Hideaki Anno, creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion, Japan's version of Star Wars - a film seen and beloved by an entire generation now in their 30's and 40's, who are still paying to see its ongoing remakes - told Atlantic Monthly two years ago. "Since that time, the education we received is not one that created adults. Even for us, people in their 40s, and for the generation older than me in their 50s and 60s, there's no reasonable model of what an adult should be like."

Anno is notoriously cynical, prone to debilitating bouts of depression and antagonism. Yet his insights are shared by Japanese artists and thinkers several years older and younger. Japan, goes the argument, became America's little brother after the war, and it retains the childlike aspects of that role even today.

Jesus Christ its like I'm really reading Helical Axis Powers!

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780295
>unafraid, unashamed
>"I don't see any adults here in Japan,"

Maybe they're not afraid because they are grown men with jobs and can damn well do as they please with their hard-earned money as long as it respects the rights of others?

[Anonymous No.]

>Neon Genesis Evangelion, Japan's version of Star Wars

Haha, sure is believable shit here. Goddamnit I hate it when normalfags think they know shit about Japan. Fuck, we sure don't know a whole lot about it, but these people are just as retarded and superficial as that Japanese asshole says Japanese are.

[NuBlackAnon !!z6ldXGL61Wm No.]

>>2780346
Sup Colombia, you don't post on /a/ anymore, you were a cool cat, but cargo cults... are another bag of worms

A country of children. Perhaps there is no better description of the safe, uber-polite, superficial land in which I live today, as a half-Japanese American. Everything works. But something is wrong.

Yet however painful, Japan's current psychological crisis may be groundbreaking. A new generation of Japanese has taken a second look at the American mid-century "big daddy" model and found it sorely wanting. Coupled with America's belligerent unilateralism after 9/11, US domestic fiascoes (the failed rescue operations during and after Hurricane Katrina, collapsing bridges and other infrastructural disasters and frequent shooting and crime sprees) are now transmitted instantly, in gory detail, on the Internet and satellite TV. American brand names like Coca-Cola and Levi's have lost sex appeal and market share in Japan. Even Hollywood, whose blockbuster storylines seem a bit dated and redundant next to the wild rides found in anime and manga, slipped of fits box office perch in Japan in 2006, when domestically produced films muscled their way past the 50% cut of the local market.

[Anonymous No.]

Oh is this the article where Anno complains about his fellow country men of being children when he has been a childish prick in the past? Good times. Reported.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780239
>Author Yukio Mishima infamously disemboweled herself at the Tokyo headquarters of the Japan Self-Defense Forces
>herself

You might want to fix that before submitting it for a grade.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780371

u mad?

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780368
>American brand names like Coca-Cola and Levi's have lost sex appeal and market share in Japan. Even Hollywood, whose blockbuster storylines seem a bit dated and redundant next to the wild rides found in anime and manga, slipped of fits box office perch in Japan in 2006, when domestically produced films muscled their way past the 50% cut of the local market.

But are instead making incredible headways into modern China, a nation far more relevant in this modern age than Japan.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780368
Japan has been the lickspittle of the dominant regional power for a thousand years, barring brief periods of aberration that coincided with a weak Chinese government. If Japan falls out of the American orbit, it will only fall back into China's.

>>2780371
Why report on-topic posts? To annoy the janitors?

[Anonymous No.]

For some reason, news outlets love to write about how backwards and fucked up Japan is, despite it being quite the opposite. Regardless, people eat that shit up and the writers know it.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780368
Maybe this crisis will be good for Japan. Maybe they will grow a pair and tell the US to take a flying fuck and do something for themselves for once, like a sovereign nation should. I for one, think that rebuilding a proper military might do wonders for the country.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780245
>"It was everywhere. And we're not French, you know. We liked it."

That's a great line.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780395
When a country's current policies will lead to it being extinguished via depopulation in a century, it's probably kinda fucked up.

[NuBlackAnon !!z6ldXGL61Wm No.]

>>2780407
>>2780400
I am happy that this article is promoting discussion on this board, my goal is done, but let's finish now.

Younger Japanese are setting the trends that young Americans and other Westerners now follow - via the Web, the media, and the incessant chatter of social networking sites (sns) like MySpace, Facebook, and Mixi, the Japanese-language SNS -- and a growing number of them know it. "I was speaking to high school students in Tottori," says Motoyuki Shibata, Japan's leading translator of contemporary American fiction. "They are sort of postmodernist without knowing it. They know there can be no absolute clear-cut answer to any important problem, and they can live with that knowledge.

More importantly, he continues, "they don't like America. I asked them why, and they said it's because America imposes beliefs on others and believes their own answer to be absolute. They want to impose it on other countries. I talked with them more, and I realized 9/11 happened when they were six or seven years old, the only America they know first hand is Bush's America. America to them means the Bush Administraiton."

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780400
Yeah, I'm sure having to foot their own defense bill will do wonders for the Japanese economy.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780326
But you did not post an image from a VN, Touhou or whatever. How is that on-topic?

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780409
Japan isn't special. Any country would experience that if not for immigration.

[NuBlackAnon !!z6ldXGL61Wm No.]

>>2780413

In other words: Big Daddy became Papa Bush and, for even the most docile Japanese, that new boss was worse than the old one.

"I asked them whether they thought things would change with Obama," adds Shibata. "And they said they hope so. They really do."

The ruling Liberal Democratic Party, called Jiminto and created in part by US President Harry Truman, Commanding General Douglas McArthur and Japan's zaibatsu (ruling class) elites some 60 years ago to ensure a cooperative, coercive relationship, may finally be giving way to a more organic, fully-realized Japan. As I write, young people are gathering on Tokyo's streets in protest and chanting outside parliament i the pouring rain. And that decades-old governing party - always a puppet of US leadership - is facing stiff opposition. Some claim it will break into fragments. Others believe either the opposition party, Minshuto, or the Democratic Party, which has a more socialist bent, need to be given a chance.

"More young Japanese people are interested in environmental issues," says Ryu Murakami. "I know a group who formed an NGO to work against sexual slavery and child prostitution in Cambodia. There are certainly more young Japanese people than ever who are interested in environmental issues or world poverty problems instead of money, traveling abroad, or sports cars. So the lack of the old-school materialistic ambitions is, yes, a problem in some ways. But there are good sides to it as well."

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780413
Wait, so George Bush Jr. saved Japan by being an international swinging dick and making the US look bad?

[Anonymous of Colombia !pkzejWGkfw No.]

>>2780368
/a/ can burn for all I care.

It fits if it's used as the idiom, not the actual religious practice. A cargo cult is the shallow repetition and imitation of utterly foreign behaviors trying to achieve the same observed results, while missing the real core of what makes it work. It fits the description of what he's trying to say better than a whole paragraph of "boy, surely nobody superficially copies other people's cultures, we must describe it from the ground up".

Oh well, that burned some time. Article is flawed and needs further research, but it ought to be enough to give the common public a sense of satisfaction.

[NuBlackAnon !!z6ldXGL61Wm No.]

>>2780419
/jp/
"All things Japanese welcome here"

I also posted Armored Saber from the visual novel, "Fate Stay Night", so eh, pretty sure articles on Japanese culture are on topic!

Even organizations resembling labor collectives have recently blossomed in Japan. So-called "freeters," a compound loanword from the English "free" and the German "arbeiter," or laborer, now gather under the banner of the Freeter's Union (http://www.freeter-union.org). And the BBC reported in May that Japan's Communist party has swelled to more than 400,000 members, with 1,000 new people signing on every month.

As Haruki Murakami said to me a few months ago in Tokyo: "When I was in America in the early 1990's, Japan was rich and everyone in the US talked about it. But we didn't have a cultural face. It didn't feel real. And I thought: Somebody should do something I have to do something for Japanese culture. It's my duty. I've been getting more popular in Europe and America, so I am in a position to be able to talk to people directly, exchange opinions and tell the truth. That's a great opportunity. Only a few people can do it. And I'm one of them."

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780416
You realize that Japan could easily afford and create a modern military with proper combat capabilities? If anything it would IMPROVE their economy by creating industry and jobs and tax revenue on them in order to build and maintain a military.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780449
>"All things Japanese welcome here"

lurk more

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780449
>"All things Japanese welcome here"

Even the made-up rules are more accurate than that.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780424
Nothing this person is saying wasn't said 25 years ago. And the idea that Japanese youth today are somehow more politically active than they were in the past is a joke. Standing out in the rain? Compare that to students getting killed a generation ago in the years-long Narita protests, or a generation before that in Tokyo's '68. Hell, that was when Japan actually had viable leftist parties, too.

[Anonymous No.]

Fascinating.

[NuBlackAnon !!z6ldXGL61Wm No.]

>>2780450
Hell, the JDSF NOW is one of the best military factions in the world, they are building a carrier (lol helicopters), its just fear of China and its short ranged nuclear missiles and the USA keeping Japan de militarized.

>>2780463
>>2780468
I will not be intimated by sagebomers threats. Sure you can have your touhou and a waifu thread, but have something new!

>>2780472
JCP oddly enough is stronger now than it has been for a while, but either way, LDP is going to suffer in the next elections!

The next part is... a bit AMERIKA FUCK YEAH, so be warned former /n/ users and NIHON IS SUPREMACISTS

Murakami's opportunity is Japan's ... and ours. Let's grab it. This dramatic shift in Haruki Murakami's identity and sense of himself -- from a largely reclusive Japanese writer living in voluntary exile in Europe and the US to something of a cultural ambassador, proudly representing his native land -

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780512
>but have something new!

It's this kind of tolerance that leads to idol threads and Japanese bird cooking spaghetti.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780512
>Implying that this is new.
Oh wow.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780512
>sagebombers
You're out of your element. Better head back to /a/ kid

[NuBlackAnon !!z6ldXGL61Wm No.]

>>2780537
The editor added new content, and I thought Idol threads (which make me feel like shiro) were on topic, with your rule being so vague. Isn't the bird bannable under no image macro global rule though?

may reflect a realignment of priorities in the broader Japanese population. The nation's "soft power" appeal overseas is now being acknowledged by domestic, state and industry leaders, who are finally putting money where their mouths are. This fall they are launching the tentatively named Contents Overseas Development Fund, which will finance Japan's pop culture industry with the aim of rivalling, and eventually surpassing, America's global media presence. Even tourism to Japan, which long occupied a lowly spot on the list of Japan's priorities, received a jolt of funding and attention in recent years. And the effort to revel Japan's treasures to the rest of the world is literally paying off: according to the Japan National Tourist ORganization, the number of foreign visitors to Japan spiked by three million from 2003 to 2007, with a total of more than eight million trekking to the archipelago in 2007 and a projected ten million by next year.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780512
What, a lot of Japanese equipment is derived solely from American and European research. Tactics too.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780512
The JCP has lost two-thirds of its representation in the past twenty years. And of course the JSP has pretty much ceased to exist. The less said about the DPJ the better.

Not that it matters, since aside from 1945-7, Japan has always been a bureaucratic state with a democratic facade to please overseas opinion. What politicians do simply doesn't matter. The only postwar politician who had an inkling of power was Tanaka, and he was nothing more than a kleptocrat.

[NuBlackAnon !!z6ldXGL61Wm No.]

>>2780578
well yeah, the F-2 is a Japanese built F-16, it goes on


Nearly two decades ago, controversial Tokyo governor and former novelist Shinto Ishihara penned a book-length diatribe called The Japan That Can Say No, decrying American dominance, arrogance, and racisms and arguing that it was really Japan, not the US, that held the reins of power in the bilateral relationship. But a more accurate tack (and title) for today's Japan might be The Japan That Can Say Yes: say yes to its rising sense of self-confidence, pride and national maturity; and to playing a more decissively independent role on the global stage -- where Japan's stronger presence and unique voice are likely to be welcomed, and may well be necessary.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780407

What exactly is this saying?

[Stoned Anonymous !XUUanJpkos No.]

Japan is in the middle of their Enlightenment, which is probably why the West has such a deep interest in them. In the middle of their entire culture searching for a stable identity, their clinging to the past has allowed for the fight for modernization to clash and battle traditional values. It is in this battle that the new Japanese are being born. Unfortunately, much of it is still the old-Japan, except in American clothing.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780637
The french attempt to keep their culture pure by minimizing external influence. They even go so far as to sometimes restrict what people can name their children, so as to keep them "French".

[Anonymous No.]

>>2780594
Oh yeah.

[Anonymous No.]

Fuck yeah, Europeans and Americans. We fuck up everything we touch and mutate it into a perverted mix of cultures.

[Anonymous No.]

In a war, one side wins and the other loses, that is all to that.

If Japan haven't been soundly beaten and then reduced to a mere vassal state of the USA, it would have been the other way around. Imagine USA being possibly split into various confederacies and even being pressurized to conform to Japanese culture.

[Anonymous No.]

Stinkin' Japs complaning why they had to suffer after they LOST the war.