Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
Anyone been using Xitter recently? The algorithm change is causing a lot of Japanese posts to show up on my feed. Further, the autotranslate has allowed for some of the most frictionless communication between Japanese and American users ever. This is the most fun I have ever had on Xitter. I urge everyone to try it while we're still in the honeymoon phase and before it gets changed.
Update: It seems that a lot of Japanese users have been getting annoyed because American Evangelicals have been proselytizing toward Japanese Twitter users. Theological debates have broken out. It seems that many Japanese people are annoyed with the holier-than-thou tone of the Evangelicals.
Man I even made the rice cooker pancake due to this trend. It was okay, not the best thing I've ever eaten.
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There was a tweet once along the lines of “Japan is Wakanda for white people”; I have to admit that I’m guilty of suffering from this view. So I can’t help but feel a sense of dismay towards this development. With the language barrier between the Anglophone internet and the Japanese internet torn down, all of the sludge from our side can freely diffuse into their previously-pristine reservoir, making one big globally-homogenized slurry. Your update sentence being an example of that.
(Of course, I need no reminder that sakoku ended a good 150 years ago, and that Japan’s culture is far from insulated from the West’s. And I don’t need any wake-up call to tell me that Japan isn’t some perfect weaboo paradise, and that its internet has plenty of its own toxicity (like “anti-“ threads). But still! There are levels to cultural connectedness.)
I think Noah Smith's take that Japan is "France for Millennials" fits the data a little better.
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It is admittedly a pet peeve of mine just how irredeemably exoticised Japan has become in the public imagination (largely because I cannot stop seeing it blow up on virtually all of my feeds), and as someone who's been interested in East Asian history and culture for a while, the senseless glazing gets tiring.
There's this idea of Japan as this uniquely Galapagos-like nation stemming from a lot of misconceptions about sakoku as essentially blocking out foreign influence, when in reality Japan maintained contact with the outside world through not one, not two, not three, but four trading portals (Satsuma, Tsushima, Matsumae, and Nagasaki) that brought them directly and indirectly into contact with external ideas, and they would not have used the word "national seclusion" to describe their foreign policy at the time - their foreign policy was in reality not very much more isolationist than China, Korea, or Ryukyu, who all maintained comparable trade restrictions. The word they used at the time was the much softer term of kaikin (maritime restrictions), and it was a word they actually borrowed from what the Ming called their own foreign policy: haijin.
This kind of trade restriction was a common grammar of East Asian foreign policy and there are striking similarities between the Japanese system and the Canton system. It did not wholesale prohibit foreign ideas from making its way into Japan, hell, ample Western influence even shows up in Edo-period art; you can see Western perspective techniques and pigments like Prussian blue making its way into ukiyo-e, including the works of famous artists like Hokusai. They would not have been a "pristine reservoir" even during the years of sakoku, though it would certainly have accelerated after the Meiji period.
Is it isolated? Sure, to a greater degree than Western countries are from each other, but I would argue they're not different from most other Asian countries in this regard (in fact I regard them as more receptive to Western import than most Asian countries apart from Korea). Japan has been obsessed with The Amazing Digital Circus recently, there's always been crosstalk. I'd argue the draw of Japan to a lot of the West is largely because it's culturally similar enough to offer a certain degree of relatability, whereas a China or Malaysia offers such a great degree of cultural distance that it can appear impenetrable and off-putting.
Thanks for this; I was familiar with rangaku and the Dutch trading ports, but I wasn’t aware of how the policy fit into a broader East Asian model (or the Prussian Blue fact!) and I do always appreciate having any oversimplified assumptions of mine corrected.
Only tangentially related, but on the topic of Edo Japan, I happened to read yesterday a paper written by a Japanese historian weighing in on the Anglophone discourse about how the Edo era provides a successful example of gun control policies (which America ought emulate). There was a book written in 1979 by an American professor (of English, according to the paper, not history) arguing that there were approximately no guns in Edo-era Japan, and that the resulting level of peace in society was due to this voluntary society-wide abandonment of the gun. It’s thus an existence proof of a society that made a choice (one that America could make as well) to put away guns, so naturally, this book ended up cited quite a bit (even in the past decade) in “mainstream” discourse about American gun control.
Only problem is, as the paper’s author shows, this book was just wrong: guns were rather widespread in Edo-era Japan (to the point of being a primary weapon used on both sides of one particular rebellion, albeit one that happened relatively early on), even if their use was heavily regulated by government (like violence in general, rather than gun violence qua gun violence; the author paints a picture of a government with a rather large state capacity and a willingness to use it). So the causality here is less “no guns -> no guns fired in anger -> peaceful society” and more “large state capacity -> no guns fired in anger -> peaceful society”.
Anyway, I bring this up not due to any object-level concerns, but rather because to me, this seems like another example of Wakandaism, where Westerners like me invent their own image of Japan to serve as a (fictional) example illustrating why their politics are correct. (There’s gotta be a better word for this than Wakandaism; maybe Orientalism?) You pointed out correctly that Edo Japan wasn’t untainted by the corrupting influence of the West, and apparently it also wasn’t untainted by guns either. At least, that’s my read on it.
I pretty much agree, yeah. Though Orientalism seems to imply that this viewpoint is one unilaterally imposed on Japan by Westerners; while that can be the case and it perhaps was in the example you offer up, I'd note it can be a two way thing where the romanticism is sometimes the intended outcome. The current-day Wakandaism of Japan was partially stimulated and encouraged by Japan itself in the post-war period to rehabilitate their global image from being that of an imperialistic enemy-state (see "Cool Japan"). There were both economic and geopolitical incentives to produce cultural exports, and there was government interest in using pop-culture diplomacy as a branding strategy (especially in the 1990s onwards).
The fact that there are weeaboos is not surprising; many things that Japan produced with its newfound economic power were massively intended for foreign consumption, with local Japanese elements downplayed for that reason. An early example of extremely successful Japanese cultural export was NHK's "Oshin", which was aired in many countries essentially free as a soft power gambit, with care taken to not trigger a sense of "cultural invasion". The kawaiiness and globalised nature of Japanese media was a way to make the product maximally approachable and unthreatening to international audiences (see the concept of mukokuseki (無国籍), or statelessness). These trends eventually also ended up spilling over into the local media landscape - in this light, the notion of Japan as an untouched land is a bit ironic. It's sometimes hard to know if the Wakandaism stems from people wanting to promote an untainted view of Japan because it legitimises their politics, or if it's the other way around and people attach their politics to something already high-status and exoticised for legitimacy.
South Korea seems to be undergoing a similar trajectory, gaining a huge amount of soft power by consciously adopting international idioms for broader appeal. And this is not to say I think this media is bad at all - I quite enjoy a good amount of Japanese and South Korean media. OTOH, a stark counterfactual is China, who in spite of economic success failed to develop significant soft power overseas and never really appropriately globalised their media (I actually really like many Mainland Chinese media properties, and this is not to say China absorbed zero foreign influence either, but there's a certain obstinate insularity to Chinese media; appreciation often relies on a preexisting understanding of a foreign cultural meta).
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That seems reasonable. Lots of older writing does similar things with imperial Chinese bureaucracy - projecting the author's ideal society onto a distant exotic land. And the original orientalists did the same with the "golden age of Islam" version of the Middle East.
I tend to think of the general phenomenon as "utopian foreign" for lack of a better term, after seeing a bunch of similar thinking in old media about Europe/America in other languages.
(Funnily enough, the only weeb I know in real life is a black DBZ fan. But that's obviously regional.)
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Lol. What does that even mean? Japan and American culture are very proximal but it's a misnomer to not think of them as insulated. There's some bleed over with a mutual fascination between one another. My ex-girlfriend once described Japan as a society of "polite xenophobes." I think I understood what she meant.
I think the meaning is that Japan is some idealized version of what a European society would look like. Rules-based, polite, and homogenous. Of course, the Wakanda comparison breaks down when we realize that Wakanda was made up by people trying to sell comic books and Japan is a real-world place with a real-world culture and society.
You’ve got it backwards, I think.
Glorious Nihon was also made up by people selling comic books. Er, manga. The average weaboo is vastly overconfident in his knowledge of Japan.
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The joke of the original tweet (as I understood it) was the implication that the weeaboo’s idea of Japan is also made up, even if not quite as fictional as Wakanda.
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I agree on some level, but on the other hand, it's nice to know that true cultural exchange is still possible. I think that overall the effect will be positive.
Hopefully so. It’d be interesting to see what might come from this meeting of cultures on the Anglophone side of things in the long term. (Given that lots of 2000’s-era Anglophone internet culture was directly lifted from or inspired from the Japanese, maybe there will be a similar rebirth of creativity.)
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Be the American the Japanese imagine you to be.
redtail_hawk.wav
This but without the hint of irony.
They like Fighter Jets Barbeque and Baseball I like Fighter Jets Barbeque and Baseball now we can all talk about Fighter Jets Barbeque and Baseball.
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How do the Japanese imagine Americans to be?
I have extended family that live on the far east coast of the US. Whenever we talk, they can always recount stories of people there asking what it's like being from and living in California and they always reply, "... Uh. Normal?," but when they get into it they usually find out what they're really asking. A lot of Americans think people from California bleach their hair blonde, all own surfboards and talk in one of those "duuuude...," type vernaculars that come right out of a 1980's B movie. It's actually quite shocking to them when they find out that isn't 'at all' how Californians sound like. There's even a big cultural divide among different parts of California. When I go back home to where I'm from, people I know can detect certain changes in me and they ask if that's what people in the Bay Area do. So I still have to code switch a few different ways depending on where in California I am. There are things I see people do in the Bay that would definitely get your ass kicked if you did them where I'm from, or at least would have everyone stop and look at you. But it's normal and acceptable there. And there are things I've done in the Bay that had people call the cops on me because of behaviors you're taught in provincial areas of the state that you're not supposed to do. They've been to and travel through the Bay on a regular basis, but not enough to learn the minute, personal idiosyncrasies of the people that live there. When I once saw Eliezer, I remember someone remarking that he sounds like a "male valley girl." It made me burst out laughing because "you're not supposed to talk like that."
America is actually a lot of different subcultures in a way. There's this weak idea of what we are as a national culture but it's nowhere near as strong as a national culture of somewhere like Russia. Not even close. Russians are 'extremely' nationalistic and patriotic. America isn't culturally all that unified. If you just look at football teams for instance, I know several people in California who love the 49ers and hate the Raiders. The other half love the Raiders and hate the 49ers. Why? Because the 49ers are from San Francisco, that's the Mecca of "faggot land," or weak effeminate men to them. Why do they love the Raiders? Because back in their heyday, the Raiders were the bad boys of the NFL. They were truly out to injure and hurt people. They were hyper-masculine and played like gangsters. They had a live fast die young attitude. I know places and people where that mindset still persists.
Examples?
Where I grew up:
You don’t interject over people in conversation at all. You speak when spoken to. I’ve seen people openly yelled at and be told to “shut the fuck up,” in front of massive crowds of people for doing that. Precision of language was something I always remember. People hated dealing with others who could never be held to anything they ever said. I remember getting into an argument with someone in the Bay Area over something he said and at one point he goes, “… look if you want to take a fine tooth comb to everything I’ve said then go ahead but…,” and I remember replying, “… so what are you saying then? That I shouldn’t listen to you or take anything you say seriously?… Do you just talk out of your ass everytime you open your mouth or something?…” I was replying to exactly what this guy was saying. If he doesn’t mean what he’s saying, then I don’t even know what this exercise is.
You eat at the dinner table with the rest of your family. Not doing so would get you grounded at the very least. When it’s time to eat you come and you come now. You were told in advance when dinner was ready.
You’d walk to work or school with a black eye if you talked back to your parents. You obey those above you. Complete independence was not a thing. Whether you’re 13 or 35, you live with your parents or spouse, you’re under curfew. This one I can remember being somewhat malleable. There were kids when I was 12-14 walking back from parties with their friends at midnight, back home. Provided you could only prove you were being responsible to the fullest, you had a lot of latitude. And most ‘definitely’ in contrast to the Bay Area, the kids of the region I’m from were far more mature and respectable than the kids there, by a long shot.
You don’t associate with the other gender freely except within narrow limits. I saw ass kickings regularly over this kind of thing.
You show respect to everyone. No matter who they are, what they look like or where they come from and people were obliged to return the favor in kind. The way people behave around here would earn them black eyes, bruised cheeks and bloody noses visible to everyone when they step outside.
You ‘always’ make good on your promises and obligations, regardless if that means having to burn down your own house to achieve it. You always deliver on your promises to others. If you owe money or a debt to someone, you pay it absolutely, in full ahead of time and go far out of your way to take care of things for them if they need it.
Just a handful among many.
I find it somehow thrilling that somewhere in the American heartland there's an honor culture that's halfway between me and the Taliban.
I read an analysis once that did the political demographic split of the area I’m from and we’re almost ‘perfectly’ split between Republican and Democrat, something like 50.x% - 49.x%. But even so, red and blue mean different things in different places. In the Bay Area I’d be considered blood red if I openly expressed my views, even though I’m far from Republican. In the Midwest I’d be considered solid blue even though I’m far from them too. The kind of “right-wing” I am you’d find in a place like Russia or the People’s Action Party in Singapore. “Authoritarianism” and “collectivism” are not pejorative terms in my political vocabulary. It was core to the functioning culture we had growing up. You can have it in both good and bad ways. But they exist all over the place.
There are cultural pockets all across the country that develop unique subcultures of their own. The bonds are no longer as strong as they used to be due to technology and at the time I was growing up, lots of changes were taking place as well, but I was definitely raised with the old guard mentality and so were my peers. The way it was once put to me by someone was that that area is group of educated / cultured thugs. It made me smirk but in retrospect it was accurate. Our community produced a lot of very intelligent young kids who had to grow up in an area that was pretty difficult to live in; especially with the changes that were happening at that time. They weren’t just street smart, I met a lot of IQ smart people there who had this… "edge" about them.
The only thing I really know how to liken it to is someone like Bane from Dark Knight Rises. He wasn’t represented entirely accurately based on the comics, but Christopher Nolan nevertheless did a good job getting Tom Hardy to play the role. Bane was a gangster who was a genius. He wore lab coats, contributed to various scientific fields and moonlighted as a gangbanger. If you crossed a geek with a gangbanger, you’d get good collection of the kind of kids we had. They could talk physics with you, how to fix a car, British history, read books, etc., and they were affiliated with the gangs if they weren't gangbangers outright. They also got into fights, played rap music, wore the colors and icons of the gangs; were entrenched in the politics of the hood and they could code switch between the two.
It was normal to us, but I can see how people in the Bay Area would find it strange.
But your characterization is also quite accurate.
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Where are you from? A lot of this reminds me of like the culture of Philly or Jersey area but I feel like east coasters interrupt each other constantly. Northern Appalachia maybe? I'm guessing you're in your 40s or older?
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It's funny how it looks like the exact opposite of what I see observing from Russia.
Consider it a western prejudice if it isn't true. I've never been there, but based on what I've read about the place that's certainly the impression I've got. Russia is also a very diverse place. Even more diverse than the US in some ways.
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I'm curious about what's so fun about it?
To be honest, it's refreshing from the normal spew of raw sewage that Xitter provides normally. The Japanese are enthusiastic about niche parts of American culture, and it's very fun to meet their enthusiasm with mine for their culture. I had a chat with some Japanese people about popular conspiracy theories in Japan. Apparently a large minority of Japanese people believe that after WWII, the royal family was replaced by other high ranking nobles who sided with America. I taught them about the reptilians that run our government and businesses.
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I wouldn't say that Japanese culture is perfect, but what's on Xitter and showing up on American timelines is generally polite/respectful while also being humorous. It's a refreshing change from political outrage slop and video bait.
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Even my Today's News feed is filled with "Japanese X users discover American culture." I'm so happy I was able to be here.
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