Japanese People Discovering Themselves
As a kind of follow up to my recent article at Chanpon.org on Japan “Losing its soul” I have also noticed a lot of posters in recent Japanese advertisements which claim that visiting some place will help you discover yourself—that is, discover one’s latent or forgotten Japanese identity. Today I noticed just such a poster on the bus going from Kinkakuji to Ryôanji promoting tourism to Kyoto:
「日本に、京都があってよかった。こころの風景、うつくしい時間にこだわった、千二百余年。時代をこえて、永遠をつなぐ風がこの町を駆け抜ける。平安をもとめつづけるこの都で、風に吹かれて出会うのは、”知らなかったワタシ”だったりする。」I am so glad Japan has this place called Kyoto. It is a landscape of the spirit that, for some thousand and two hundred years has devoted itself to spending time surrounded by beauty. Spanning the ages, a wind bound to eternity runs through this town. In this [ancient] capital that always yearned for peace (Heian) I think I might have found, blowing in the wind, “A Me that I have never known.”
Feel free to correct my translation, but if it seems a little on the cheesy side, I assure you it was no less so in the original. Sayaka noticed that the “Heian” is probably deliberately used with two meanings, peace (which is a very important component of Japan’s national identity in the postwar period), and as the name for the period when the capital was moved to Kyoto and also representative of its glory days.
This advertisements almost always feature a smiling face of a youthful Japanese woman or man, smiling happily and staring off into the sky in some direction (not entirely dissimilar to Chinese and North Korean political posters, or this recent Japanese campaign to promote the purchase of government bonds).
This kind of poster, we should note, is a slight twist on the average travel advertisement. You might go to Disneyland to discover “fun and adventure,” to Hawaii or Niagara Falls to discover “love and romance”, to the US mid-west to discover “the real America” and you might even go to Yoga lessons to discover “yourself” in the metaphysical sense. These advertisements, however, are appealing to Japanese, I believe, in the same way as the “losing the soul of Japan” advertisements do. They are urging Japanese to cast off their decadent and lifeless modern shells in order to reconnect with that beautiful and pure Japanese core inside. The Japanese just need to “find themselves” again. Ultimately, however, “finding themselves,” which is surely a prominent theme found in many countries around world that suffer from various “crises of modernity” often means returning to an idealized past. Whether it is Gandhi returning to an idealized India early Chinese anti-Manchu nationalists turning to the glory days of “Han” rule, there is nothing about this phenomenon unique to Japan.
It does, however, help explain how amazingly positive Japanese reactions have been to a movie like “The Last Samurai.” Most of the Japanese I have spoken to about this movie, especially older men, love that movie. The samurai prancing about mountain villages like an idyllic Native American community, the celebration of “Bushido values” without a single thought to what silliness this led to in modern times (not to mention pre-modern times), and of course, there is the maniacal devotion to the emperor—presumably all these things are a part of that noble old Japan, no matter what the reality was.
No, put that way, most people in Japan today would respond with disgust, but it brings into focus the problem with designating the past, not the least in the case of Japan, as the origin of virtue and the only legitimate source of identity.
Lots of people (including myself, I have to admit. Jazz Age!) are fascinated by the past because most of the surviving records and imagery focus on the richest, most privileged people of the time, who had enough to eat, servants to clean their filthy toilets, a smaller chance of dying of grotesque diseases, etc. The absolute best 10% of any age, however crapy at the time, looks better than the 100% of now we’re already frustrated with.
On another note, Japanese culture definitely has a higher tolerance for schmaltz than I was accustomed to before coming here. I’ve read people who claim that this derives from the classical poetry tradition, where poets searching for the best single image would too often “cheat” by using a pre-loaded word like “dream” or “wind”, but I don’t think that can be entirely it — if only because the poets who get the most respect (Basho, etc.) are exactly the ones who intentionally avoided this trap.
Although, I guess if you think about the Lifetime channel, Oprah, Neighbours, etc., every country has wildly popular schmaltz. Maybe it’s just that in our home cultures we’re able to find the alternatives more easily.
My wife, who is Japanese, said she found “The Last Samurai” not as bad as a movie made about Japan by Americans for an American audience could have been. In general, I agree. Stil, I thought it was pretty stupid, but, then, I hate Tom Cruise.
I wanted to see it just to see how egregiously they would get everything wrong and just how hackneyed it would be. While it was not as profoundly silly as other similar efforts (“Shogun” springs immediately to mind) the cherry blossoms being blown away by the wind as Katsumoto was dying, among other Japanesque cliches with whch the movie was riddled, did not disappoint.
It is interesting that the movie is popular in Japan. This is baffling until you realize that the Japanese often have a pathetic need to be approved of by gaijin. A foreigner coming to learn about Japan is proof to the Japanese that their culture has worth. Thus, all of these posters and commercials about foreigners who, spending a few years in Japan learning ikebana, somehow know more about the “true” Japan than people native to the place.
So, not only did a major American star of the stature of Tom Cruise think it was worth making a movie about the glories of Yamato Damashii, his character in the film, realizing the spiritual wasteland that is Western “culture” decides at the end to make his home in The Land of Wa, the repository of all truth, goodness and beauty. What Japanese would not swoon over this thinly disguised “Wareware Nipponjin Ron” message? And made by a famous American, yet! What could be better?
Earl Hartman
My wife, who is Japanese, said she found “The Last Samurai” not as bad as a movie made about Japan by Americans for an American audience could have been. In general, I agree. Stil, I thought it was pretty stupid, but, then, I hate Tom Cruise.
I wanted to see it just to see how egregiously they would get everything wrong and just how hackneyed it would be. While it was not as profoundly silly as other similar efforts (“Shogun” springs immediately to mind) the cherry blossoms being blown away by the wind as Katsumoto was dying, among other Japanesque cliches with whch the movie was riddled, did not disappoint.
It is interesting that the movie is popular in Japan. This is baffling until you realize that the Japanese often have a pathetic need to be approved of by gaijin. A foreigner coming to learn about Japan is proof to the Japanese that their culture has worth. Thus, all of these posters and commercials about foreigners who, spending a few years in Japan learning ikebana, somehow know more about the “true” Japan than people native to the place.
So, not only did a major American star of the stature of Tom Cruise think it was worth making a movie about the glories of Yamato Damashii, his character in the film, realizing the spiritual wasteland that is Western “culture” decides at the end to make his home in The Land of Wa, the repository of all truth, goodness and beauty. What Japanese would not swoon over this thinly disguised “Wareware Nipponjin Ron” message? And made by a famous American, yet! What could be better?
Earl Hartman
[...] Last year I wrote an article entitled Losing the Soul of Japan which was posted on the excellent weblog Chanpon. In the article I made some comments on the topic of nostalgia in Japan for an authentic Japanese culture. This has been widely written about (perhaps the most important work on this in English is Marilyn Ivy’s Discourses of the Vanishing) but my own motivation in this earlier article was to explore the use of foreigners in campaigns to create a sense of shame amongst Japanese over the loss of their own “pure” selves. I added more thoughts on this topic in another posting here. As a student of Japanese history, I think this phenomena is an especially useful portal through which to approach the far more complex and powerful images of cultural loss, nostalgia, and authenticity which inform the ideologies of nationalism prominent during Japan’s imperial age. [...]
Hi Earl, you may not remember me but my Name is Rosie formerly Dow, Mitzi’s friend who is now in Scotland. It’s funny to accross you after all this time, I’m sure you will hardly remember me as I was just a kid when I knew you. I remember the big slide in the back garden and the archery. Anyway hope everything is going well for you. Rosie