I imagine that when most people think of Japan they think of the media that Japan produces, and it’s really incredible. There’s anime, manga, variety shows… and there is so much more for Japan to offer. It’s completely understandable that people from other countries might latch on to the otherness of Japanese culture and kind of worship it. And there are quite a few people who do that.
But as you learn about Japan – I mean, really learn, and not just from their mass media or television, a different picture starts to be painted. A picture of an ancient, insular culture that has very recently been thrust into a larger world where they don’t know what to do with us anymore than we know what to do with them, sometimes. There are so many beautiful things in their culture, and so many destructive things as well. Karoushi, suicides, the slow and seemingly inevitable decline of their culture even as they struggle to find their place in the world and even amongst themselves.
Worshipping their culture seems to be doing everyone a disservice. For a culture that prizes unity and purity as much as they do, they just seem so.. I don’t know. broken.
This isn’t intended to demean them at all. In some ways they have so much to teach us about how to live in community. We in the west value individualism so deeply that we’re willing to sacrifice community harmony (if this weren’t true, then “identity politics” wouldn’t be the troublesome thing they are today), but the Japanese seem to value community harmony so highly that the travails of the individual don’t really seem to matter all that much.
And in this case, I’m not sure who, if anyone, is right. Both approaches have their upsides and downsides.
But the more I learn about Japan, the more sad I become, in some ways. It feels like an ancient culture, full of beauty, in a slow motion collision with forces that maybe they won’t be able to recover from.
I don’t worship their culture. I love many aspects of their culture, but I don’t worship it. For, all else aside, they are, if nothing else, just as human as I am. And when you truly love something, you love their warts as much as their beauty.
I wonder if they feel as lost in this world as I do, sometimes.