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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26965 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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I think this changing idea of the "size of the world" may, at least in certain aspects, purely be a matter of the self-understanding of the same Western culture you hail from and are speaking to. For a specific example, in 1990, Japanese was more important than it is today: the bubble had not popped yet, the population was peaking, a big fraction of the dominant tech companies were Japanese, people's English was worse and they had no Google Translate to pull out in an emergency, and American pundits were actively and credibly nursing fears of a future of complete Japanese dominance. Now Japan is where the Chinese fly to do their low-cost duty-free shopping and Westerners make off-grid LARP videos where they buy some abandoned house in the mountains and farm cucumbers. Yet, a modern James Bond would be considered more cringe for not knowing Japanese than a 1990 James Bond was.

It doesn't affect the substance of the argument you are making, but James Bond did speak Japanese.

James Bond read Oriental Studies at Cambridge, which requires you to study two Middle Eastern or Asian languages to fluency, and given his known interest in Asian culture and lack of interest in Middle Eastern culture, I suspect Japanese was one of them. On-screen translation convention means we can't be sure, but there are scenes in You Only Live Twice which only make sense if Bond is speaking Japanese. This isn't in Fleming, but it's been in the films consistently since long before Japan was a threat to take over the world in the 1980's.

Bond actually adventured and lived in Japan in the novels.

Interesting - I wondered where EON got the idea that he was an Oriental Studies major from.

I think this changing idea of the "size of the world" may, at least in certain aspects, purely be a matter of the self-understanding of the same Western culture you hail from and are speaking to.

Absolutely. Up until the 90's "the world" meant Europe and maybe Japan. Everything else was a bit player. Now, China is a pole, and I don't think the West has any kind of traditional method of grappling with how different their culture is, much less offering the opportunity for deep understanding or even passing.

Europe has become more samey, but there's no Chinese/Indian equivalent of The Grand Tour to develop a cadre of people who grok those cultures.

Does anyone remember the flurry of books in the 90’s about the Japanese economic miracle? I remember all the hoopla in books like The Emerging Japanese Superstate that they were going to overtake the US economy. Then the bubble popped. I remember my father explaining to me as a kid how the gardens of the imperial palace were valued more than the entire state of California. Yeah. That’s a bubble.

Well, if it was written before the effects of the plaza accords kneecapped japan's economy, it's understandable.

It was certainly a common cultural trope at the time. TV Tropes has a better list than I could come up with offhand, but it's IMO most interesting as an uncommented-on undercurrent like in movies Back to the Future II, Die Hard, or Alien, but there are some works of literature that comment on it on more directly: Crichton's Rising Sun, Stephenson's Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.

I think it's an interesting example of how the zeitgeist can be wrong: Japan remains a world power, but it's projected continued ascent was oversold.

I had a hilarious conversation once of my relatives once where we were brought up movies as an example of American arrogance to the rest of the world. Two of the movies we came up with were Die Hard and Independence Day. If you try to look at them with our inborn cultural blinders off but as someone who’s a complete new initiate to our way of life, they’re actually incredibly chauvinistic movies when you think about it.

Not just chauvinistic, solipsistic.

The old joke is that the British overconfidence is thinking everyone secretly wants to be British, whereas American overconfidence is thinking everyone secretly already is American.

Yet, a modern James Bond would be considered more cringe for not knowing Japanese than a 1990 James Bond was.

Are we all forgetting You Only Live Twice? Probably would be excoriated for yellowface amongst many other crimes as well as being generally cringe, but the 60s also were interested in Japan as a modern, post-war nation taking a role on the global stage. (The novel seems to be a little more complex in its exploration of Bond's character than the movie, which naturally was more oriented towards being in sync with the suave spy theme of the Bond movies).

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