Newsletter Number Thirteen
A trip to headquarters, strange cultural fascinations, and the influence of pre-internet media
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Hi all,
This week’s article is a piece I’ve had in my head and been trying to get down on paper for a while now. Though I suppose it needs to be built up to. Consider it a partial answer to the question posed here a couple of weeks ago.
Travel Diaries #11 – WTF Am I Doing in Japan?
Travel Diaries #14 – A Pilgrimage
Click here for a full archive of all posts.
I’m wondering how much of a massive nerd it might paint me as (which is why I’ve tried to not so subtly remind the reader that “oh but I don’t even play games any more”) but I did wonder a lot while I was in Japan on the nature of why we even want to go places we want to go to, or do things we think we want to do. Where do these influences come from, and are they our own?
I came across an online meme a while ago which sets two mundane things beside one another, say a train station platform or a non-descript looking shop front. If you look very closely, you can make out some Japanese alphabet characters in one of the pictures. The other one, presumably is from America or the UK or some other western country. They’re functionally identical and uninteresting non-things or non-places, yet the caption indicates that the one that’s in Japan elicits wild jubilation and ecstatic wonder in the viewer or experiencer of the former one, simply because “…but it’s in Japan”. The joke being that there’s a whole culture of unwarranted idolisation of Japanese culture which seems to exist partly as a meme in itself.
My point being that I was well aware of the stereotypes of Japanophiles (the origins of their interest and the, eh, effects of such interests) while I was there, and yet it is the case that my own curiosity about the place long preceded the existence of the internet – or even communication with other people who might have known anything about Japan – but was no doubt influenced largely through technological means all the same. You could call it media propaganda or brainwashing in a sense, but of a kind that would have been mirrored largely by exposure to The Simpsons and an endless array of other shows, films, music and media on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
The Japanese form just had a controller that let you interact with it. Perhaps that was the difference – that extra factor that lets impressionable young minds (they were always young in those days, though nowadays grown adults are just as engaged in the gaming world and presumably as susceptible to their charms) become so immersed in these virtual worlds as to wish to genuinely visit them.
It sounds a bit frightening, something your parents definitely would have worried about and warned you about as a kid, though remember that we’ve all been sucked into a different, more terrifying virtual matrix in the last decade and a half: the augmented reality of social media and the internet 2.0 at large.
Of course, the counter joke to the above meme about Japan-worship is that… well, they’re right. Everyone can agree that Japan is a cultural powerhouse, its food, traditions and media, both historical and modern, being recognisable to most people, on an almost instinctual level, like few other places. As I outline in the story, I knew about Japan before I was old enough to remember how. And with regards to the mundane: anyone who’s ever been to a kombini – a convenience store, like 7/11, Lawson’s or Family Mart – in Japan will know how glorious the mundane can be to us foreigners. This was something even Antony Bourdain knew, tribute being paid in one skit to the pre-packaged egg sandwich they sell in Lawson’s.
Japan has appropriated (which I say with no condemnation) so many facets of US culture over the twentieth century, and the results are fascinating – and usually beautiful – to behold, whether it’s jazz music or processed food. There is a truth to the idea that someone would see something completely ordinary and made of concrete and stand there mouth agape and starry eyed in wonder at its novelty. It serves to make complete tourists of us all, everything new, everything novel.
I didn’t get the culture shock I was expecting the first time I went to Japan, having got a flight from Hanoi, where I’d been living for almost a year at that stage. Now that was a genuine culture shock, and chaos to the senses personified for someone coming from where I’m from. Japan however was jarringly… normal. On the surface anyway. Or, same same but different as they say in Vietnam. In a less developed country one is almost primed to see certain things, done in a certain way, but when the foreign place is identical to your homeland in many ways – except not – then maybe there’s an uncanny valley effect happening which makes it all the more intriguing.
The danger of course is seeing all of these things as objects of intrigue rather than aspects of humanity. And the danger of being susceptible to the influence of the meme, the romanticisation and deification of any and all elements of a particular culture or place, is to neglect the things that aren’t perfect, or the unsavoury aspects of it. Not only that, it’s to ignore the fact that it’s a real place with real people, not some museum or art gallery that exists for your intellectual entertainment or amusement.
It's a two-way thing, the interaction between visitor and host, and the lines blur between tourist and traveller, immigrant and native. All of which I hope to explore a bit more next week and beyond.
For now though, enjoy this week’s story. It might even inspire a bit of nostalgia for your own youth. And don’t worry, I did at some point switch off the computer and begin to explore the real world.
It’s been quite the adventure.
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And I’d love to know your thoughts on any of the articles you’ve read, so please leave a comment.
Thanks for reading,
Gav