You know, things loose their novelty because people get used. And its kinda difficult if you don’t know the language. Does that makes sense?

It’s virtually a term of endearment as far as I’m concerned.

If I was to criticise Japan’s culture, I’d say that perhaps there’s still a great deal of conformity under the surface… the various genres of whatever tend to be relatively pure, from what I’ve seen.

Keep stirring that melting pot : )

I’m glad you are able to share your experience with a wider audience.

You could have reflected a bit more on your own role, though. As you say, you did build a career on what to some extent is catering to these reflexes.

What has bothered me so much about most of the endless Japanophelia is the unrelenting positivity of it. Yes, there’s cool weird stuff going on in Japan, but it’s also a real place with real problems. I don’t see a lot of coverage of how the strict gender roles really damage people, or the suicide rates due to stress and work culture. I don’t want to be a downer, but the overly thrilled voices of most authors of such coverage seem to portray Japan as some sort of magical fairyland of weird culture and intensely interesting goings-on where nothing bad ever happens. And, well, no.

Similarly, a lot of the pro-Japan writings tend to really otherize and stereotype the Japanese. They’re not people, they’re Mysterious Orientals. One of the things that’s nice about your writing is that you don’t do that.

Anyways, I appreciate your more balanced perspective here.

~td99

“frankly, having lived in the SF Bay Area, Los Angeles and Austin, TX, this just doesn’t seem that odd to us”

It’s okay, Europe also has its good measure of wonky, misunderstood, wonderful weirdness!

I have lived in Japan for 10 years. I’ve lived all over the country, including rural areas. My wife is Japanese. I speak and read Japanese.

In the time that I have been reading your posts and articles, I’ve been unsure as to what I really thought of them. On the one hand, you say “roll with it,” but on the other, you’re just contributing to the silly fetishization of your home country. And you know you’re doing it. That’s what sells, though, so it’s hard to fault you for that.

However, as others have pointed out, these “weird” things you write about are weird over here too. As the ALT in this discussion pointed out, if you bring up any of the “common knowledge” Japanese subcultures to most Japanese people, they have no idea what you’re talking about. If you are pressed to prove it and produce something like japscat porn, they are horrified. “These people aren’t Japanese!” is a common reaction (not that these people are foreign, but that they don’t represent Japanese people). Guys with dolls can be seen on the rare occasion on the subway, but no one will sit anywhere near them because those guys are crazy.

And this is where I feel I need to ask you to stop rolling with it. It is not racist to ask, in all seriousness, if a guy who married a DS character is mentally ill. It’s a valid question. It struck me as a great big nerd joke, but yes, if he was serious, I’d have to say he’s a nut.

As someone who straddles the literal and figurative ocean between two cultures, you know very well the power you have to control the image of the other that your audience develops, but it seems to me that, while you’re certainly better than most, you still come down on the “isn’t Japan crazy” side of Japan reporting, and I think that’s a shame. This post, while good in spirit, in letter, seems to reinforce the idea of weird Japan, by claiming that what you report on is not weird and that we should just roll with it like people do in Japan, where they most certainly do not.

This is an issue I face almost every day at work (I am, やっぱり, an English professor). There are many English teachers here who play the gaijin clown, acting silly and showing off weird/funny aspects of their home countries’ cultures. They are immensely popular with students. However, I absolutely refuse to pander to the students like that, not because it’s not fun (because it is), but because I believe it is doing them a disservice. If they end up studying or working in the US, I don’t want them to go through the utter shock I did when I came to Japan and found it to be technologically backward (you read that right) and almost universally mundane. I was horribly disappointed, having grown up on US Japan coverage, but ultimately discovered better and more rewarding things I had never heard of in the US, but which were commonplace here (example: karaoke is enjoyed in small, private rooms with close friends, and is therefore relaxing and fun). When I represent the US to Japanese people, I try to focus on these everyday experiences, rather than the statistical outliers. The experiences are not only more useful and more educational, but, I think, are also more fun or interesting.

Finally, so as not to sound too scoldy, I do want to commend you on your “taste test” articles, because you typically focus on everyday Japanese food that US Americans just usually don’t know anything about. The food over here is hearty, varied, and delicious, but most of the dishes that people really eat at home everyday are unknown in the US and that is a crying shame. Shichimi should be in every American’s spice cabinet, and raw eggs and natto deserve a larger audience (especially when mixed together).

I really encourage you to seek out more stories like that. Report on things people do every day. Write about Kano Eiko’s hilarious, hubristic turns on London Hearts. Write about Yukio Hatoyama’s policies and not his batshit-insane wife (Last week, I got a lot of response papers about Miyuki Hatoyama–for some reason a lot of them chose to read about her last week. Student opinions tended to be along the lines of “I hope people don’t think she’s normal.”). You can’t highlight tiny subcultures of your home country and then ask people to roll with it. You can roll with it because you understand the broader context. Most of your readership can’t because they don’t.

I hope you read this. I really enjoy your writing, but I do wish you’d ponder this a bit.

The obsession with cuteness, the infantilized sexual culture (I don’t even mean manga; even the kind of porn that Westerners can relate to generally feature women gasping in extremely high-pitched voiced, like they just finished sucking down a balloon-full of helium), all of it seems to be a self-conscious response to far too many years of not having ANY fun, of being too grown up.

It’s the same way that American macho-ism (“I like my trucks BIG and my beers the same; and my steak, I like to kill it with my own HANDS”) is very much a response to what Americans saw as the sissification of their country due to the loss of the Vietnam war and the peace-n-love movements. I find it equally bizarre and equally false.

The pop-culture of Japan is INCREDIBLY stagnant.

How long have busty violent sailor-girls been parading around mangas?

How many animes/mangas about giant fighting robots or collection adventures?

I quit watching/reading anime when I realized how repetative it was. Yes, theres good stuff out there, but its the TINIEST fraction of whats produced.

Look at Japanese pop-culture today, and look at it 5 years ago, how different is it? Now do it with America.

I got particularly sick of asking to write about weird Japan around the same time Western fanboys were working themselves into a lather about crappy J phones they knew little about.

More here: http://post.ly/FE17

No doubt I do the same thing about contemporary Japanese culture; I watch a lot of Anime, yes, but I also try to understand and respect more traditional Japanese culture.
I only know a few words of Japanese, and I definitely cannot read it.

I’ve gotten better at being able to pick up on the specifically Japanese cultural elements of some Anime, which sometimes adds to the humor and awkwardness.

It’s interesting to see how the Japanese view European culture and its legends and myths through some of its Anime that uses European settings/stories.

As an American, I have mixed feelings about the culture of pacifism the American occupation strongly enforced and reinforced in post-war Japan; Sometimes I think it’s one of the worst things we did to Japan after the war. It’s interesting to see idealistic, pacifist Anime characters bump up against the hard realities of war and injustice, and realize that doctrinaire pacifism may not be tenable.

On a lighter note, I still profusely enjoy watching romantic comedy style Anime set in Japanese High Schools…so much of that teen coming-of-age angst is universal, hence the appeal beyond Japan’s borders.

I remember reading about physicist Richard Feynman finally giving up on learning Japanese when he learned that even in scientific discourse, the same rules of politeness, modesty, honor, etc, of normal Japanese conversation (all rather complicated for a foreigner) still applied to scientific language as well.

Thank you thank you thank you!