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How the New Yorker Fell into the “Weird Japan” Trap
- tjpnz 6y agoI've lived in Japan going on six years and was initially surprised by how ordinary things were - and that that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sure, there's an element of truth to some of these articles but you have to go looking hard to find it.
- ashtonkem 6y agoAs a general rule, people are people the world over, and differences between cultures are often overstated.
- ethbr0 6y agoOnly visited Tokyo briefly, but I found everything remotely odd the result of (1) history, or (2) having to find a way to live harmoniously around that many other people (and they with you). In general, it felt pretty normal.
- Razengan 6y ago(3) people assuming anything that isn’t exactly like wherever they’re from is ""odd""
- neolog 6y agohow is it an assumption? it's almost a definition.
- ashtonkem 6y ago"Odd" implies that the familiar is "normal", which tends towards there being a right and wrong way to do mundane things. If I came over to your house and said "that's an odd way to clean your house" you would reasonably assume that I think you're doing it wrong but am being polite. If they'd said "surprising", "confusing", or "unfamiliar", those are all statements that are relative to the speaker's experience.
- klmadfejno 6y agoI was running around japan for a while with a group of americans and japanese college students. Never felt anything like culture shock. Until one day two of the young male japanese students asked in hushed tones if it was true that the extremely flamboyant guy in our group was gay. Kinda weird, but ok, maybe that's just not something that's culturally normal to acknowledge in Japan. They then continued, saying they were concerned that, since they were unable to get dates, they would become gay. That was a fairly shocking moment.
- dehrmann 6y ago> how ordinary things were Even the game shows? Edit: quickly found this gem on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fend1-nnNKk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fend1-nnNKk
- gfxgirl 6y agoYou mean like Fear Factor?
- ineedasername 6y agoMaybe I just tuned in at all the wrong times, but that show always seemed less about fear, and more about eating gross things.
- gregimba 6y agoNot trying start an off topic thread but game shows seem to push for bizarre. I recall german game shows being on par with the clips I've seen from Japanese game shows.
- howlgarnish 6y agoI'd be keen to hear your commentary on what the following footage on Nickelodeon can tell us about the inscrutable Occidental culture of the Nacirema. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY6SC2W5nMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY6SC2W5nMc
- woutr_be 6y ago> I've lived in Japan going on six years and was initially surprised by how ordinary things were I've visited Japan many times over the years, during my first time I was amazed by it all. Even though I spend many years in Asia at that point, and had gotten used to the culture, Tokyo was different. After a few days that feeling wore off, and the things that were different compared to other cities just became normal. I went back last year, and I'm still amazed by the city, but there's not really many things that stand out anymore. But one thing I've learned after almost 10 years in Asia, things that look "weird" to Westerners, are often completely normal to people living in Asia. And things that are "normal" in the West might be weird to people in Asia. (That really goes for any kind of cultural difference)
- sunstone 6y agoTokugawa's shadow lies heavy still on the land of the rising sun, and it's not hard to find with a little perception.
- aabhay 6y agoI interned at Sony in Tokyo one summer. I was hugely surprised that nobody had heard of all the animes and cultural icons that I thought were household names — Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, etc etc. There’s a huge bias in the US towards taking niche cultural phenomena in Japan and putting them on a pedestal.
- selimthegrim 6y agoHow niche was Rurouni Kenshin I wonder (pre the artist’s arrest of course)
- vmception 6y agoReading light novels - of which manga is a respected category - is proportionately more popular in Japan. Rurouni Kenshin selling something like 70 million copies of the manga by some old record I saw. Anime programming on TV is a fact of life and not something people need to be "into". But that is to say that there is a lot more dramas and mundane animated programming that wouldn't have an economic rationale outside of Japan. A lot of it falls by the way side and then later turns out to appeal to Western audiences, even more rarely circling back to Japan for a closer look. The anime subculture is niche in Japan. ie. The niche where people collect merchandise and have whole shelfs on display as a point of pride. That garners the same discomfort from the general population and potential dates as it would in the West. That being said, the western market is MASSIVE as it is just a larger market and vibrant economy. Something doing "okay" in the US would be the same as shattering records in a Japan-only release. So enterprisers can resyndicate all the crap over to here and see what sticks.
- ineedasername 6y agoSo it sounds like a lot of anime popular in the West is the equivalent of a low budget made-for-tv movie in the US hitting paydirt with a foreign audience. I guess that makes sense, I'm sure that happens too.
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- yutopia 6y agoIf we set aside superficial differences such as language and mannerisms, I never thought we're all that different from Americans, Germans, etc. — we're just humans living in the same modern, capitalistic world. Maybe we were different in the feudal era, but not anymore. But very few people have the ability to overcome those superficial differences.
- astrobe_ 6y agoOh, really. Like, for instance, the Japanese polytheism is a "superficial difference" with the European monotheism? I don't think so. If it was all superficial, it wouldn't be called "culture" and we would not a make such a big deal out of it. I will certainly disagree with you on some things because our cultures are different. You yourself fall into "forests are just trees" trap, and it doesn't matters if some kind of mushroom can grow in my forest and some other in your forest. Worse, you seem to give up to the idea that "modern capitalistic world" will make all the forests the same anyway - hopefully you don't believe it is for the better (or rather, hopefully you do!). I think you underestimate the role of culture because you misunderstand the culture of others. Perhaps because a culture is made of thousands of big and little differences, and its difficult to see how they affects people's daily choices or behavior.
- yutopia 6y agoNot quite sure what you’re getting at, I never said there were no differences between cultures. However the differences are often overstated, and with regards to Japanese culture some people seem to harbor strange preconceptions that make them blind to rather obvious falsehoods, leading to debacles like the New Yorker article described in OP. It goes both ways of course; a lot of Japanese people seem to have bizarre ideas about the US for example, perhaps I would too if I hadn’t lived there for a decade. It’s easy to form a skewed image of Americans if your knowledge only came from Hollywood films. I’d say that in general, the more years you spend immersed in cultures outside of your own, the more you’ll be able to see beneath the surface and appreciate how similar we all are — for better or worse. Just look at the number of comments in this thread from (presumably) Western expats pointing out how "ordinary" Japan is in reality. That realization comes from actually living here and being directly exposed to the culture. Not from watching anime.
- mathattack 6y agoI’ve spent a lot of time in Japan. I never observed the weird stereotypes, but I did experience obsessions. No niche was too big or small for Japanese fanatics: French wine, MMA, video games, etc.
- bschne 6y agoDid you find these obsessions to be more common than e.g. in the US or Europe? It seems we have a lot of people who are weirdly obsessive about their niche hobbies / interests as well...
- reustle 6y agoFrom my few years of experience here in Tokyo, what I feel is that an obsession about something here (being an otaku) doesn't have a negative connotation in most cases, whereas in the US, being a "fanatic" is generally not usually a positive term.
- x3iv130f 6y agoI think as westerners we view Japan as being a lot more homogeneous than it actually is.
- goatinaboat 6y agoNo niche was too big or small for Japanese fanatics: French wine, MMA, video games, etc All of those things have obsessive followers in every Western country too, so I’m not sure what point you are making?
- mathattack 6y agoI found the focus more intense. Hard to explain or quantify other than it seems they took their hobbies more seriously than Americans.
- underseacables 6y agoI think journalism is falling into a death spiral of “publish-popular-clickable-articles” or perish. Journalists no longer have the time to truly dig into a story, to fact check it, and to make sure it’s written accurately. They get behind, they get desperate, and they fall into these traps - self-made or otherwise.
- unreal6 6y agoIt also seems that there is generally a shorter collective memory about veracity in news stories. The prime example to me is Bloomberg's seemingly baseless story alleging Chinese hardware-level hacking of US computing equipment. More than two years later, and Bloomberg still has not retracted the story [1]. It doesn't seem to me that Bloomberg has been discounted as a reliable source of news in the general discourse due to their reluctance to admit to their mistakes in their reporting of this story. At least in this case there is an apology. [1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/10/07/bloombergs-big-crap https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/10/07/bloombergs-big-...
- markus_zhang 6y agoAnd sometimes jounalism is just a small part of politics.
- Traster 6y agoFrankly, I think this view is incredibly popular, and misinformed about the state of journalism. There was a time, about a little over a decade ago where ad-supported journalism was considered the future, and companies like Buzzfeed started to emerge. Companies started optimizing for page views to boost their revenue and the explosion in clickbait happened. However, even by 2011 Buzzfeed had started to try to pivot to more long-form content hiring the former editor in cheif of Politico. By 2015 we saw the "Pivot to video" where outlets had identified that this clickbait stuff had really run it's course and were now moving to video as a way to bring in viewers and revenue. Of course that notoriously failed - having cut editorial staff to focus on video production, it was only about 24 months before they were cutting video production too because it produced no revenue. Vox Media cut 5% of their staff at the beginning of 2018. So let's look at what actually is happening in the news media today: The Atlantic, TNR, NYT, WashPo. All of them are marketing themselves as high value premium products that are funded almost exclusively by subscription revenue. The new media companies that are still persisting with an advertising strategy are bringing their ad-networks in house and attempting to hit scale in a way that let's them compete with Facebook. The jury is still very much out on whether that's viable of whether they end up being forced to merge or being bought out by a large player like Spotify. We aren't in the death spiral of chasing views anymore, we're very much back in a stable area where high quality content is available if you're willing to pay for it. The problem is that people are still judging the NYT by what they see on Buzzfeed - because they don't pay for the NYT and assume it's like Buzzfeed. It's going to take a while for the reputations to recover but we do need to actually understand the business as it is today.
- brigandish 6y agoThere are too many myths peddled about Japan, internally and externally, to list here, and the article provides just one more example. It's not just the media's desire to draw wide ranging conclusions from specific, interesting stories, but also due to Japanese culture itself, a culture of putting appearances before truth, conveniently wrapped up in the (ironically) anodyne phrase "don't disturb the wa". One dangerous example being the distortion of the truth about COVID-19 spread in the run up to the Olympics. I expect the same over the next few months. As to the larger picture though, I'm not sure why anyone trusts journalists nowadays. In an age of greater access to information their previous stranglehold on "the truth" has repeatedly been shown to be a sham and trusting factcheckers seems to be repeating exactly the same mistake over again but with added naïveté - "Oh, they're factcheckers, that must be true! Giving them that title immediately renders these humans incapable of bias…". The article even wants us to continue to swallow the blatant lie that some reasonably large proportion of stories go through a "rigorous fact-checking process" and even then couldn't withstand lies from sources. Please, you may as well tell me Santa is really going to drop off my presents this year, which would nice given the chaos at ports (thanks again, COVID-19 and lies about contagion). The "age of big data" and democratised access to data and communication (something that governments and media companies, old and new, have been seeking to reverse) has inadvertently created an "age of epistemology" for which most seem unprepared, journalists being among the least prepared. I have precisely zero sympathy.
- nilsleep 6y agoAgreed but it's not just Japan but pretty much every country in the world. And all countries do the same to each other. Projecting their own fears and insecurities into others.
- gaudat 6y agoI have always been thinking what the role fact-checkers act in our way of consuming information. Every time I see "fact-checkers" exist it is to reiterate the view of the readers, or even worse, to assert bias. It's like critical thinking is never taught to or discovered by them.
- howlgarnish 6y ago
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- boxmonster 6y agoThe Atlantic and The New Yorker are both first class magazines and I would expect nothing less of them to deal with their mistakes in a public and accountable fashion. Contrast their response that of many mainstream magazines that never post a correction, much less a retraction.
- raunakdag 6y agoI started to read only good “quality” news and magazines recently. Here’s my list so far: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New Republic. Anything similar to those genres that I’m missing that you or anyone else would recommend?
- randycupertino 6y agoBBC for news, and if you like longform articles, California Sunday Magazine and Texas Monthly both have fantastic long form articles. This one about the "Pom" juice pomegranate farming family is incredible: https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-dust https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-du...
- thegjp210 6y agomy absolute personal favorites are the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. Less magazines, more papers - of long form literary and cultural essays on eclectic topics.
- Scapeghost 6y agoAnglocentric chauvinism has always had a gross habit of looking at other cultures in a patronizing way. Though to be fair other cultures are guilty of this too when viewing those different than them. Ever since antiquated Orientalism, it's rarely been an honest curiosity but more of a high-nosed "what's wrong with them" or seen as an exotic escape from the West's own mundanity. The latter of course often ends in disillusionment, prompting generalized complaints about the object of fetish (if you lurk on any expat forums you may know what I'm talking about). It can be really annoying to other people, specially when they have to either live up to some stupid assumption or defend against it.
- parsimoniousplb 6y agoSurly noone in the orient ever expressed such opinions, least of which the japanese --known throughout asia and the world for their love and admiration of other races -- which is why the west is in desperate need to turn the lookingglass around and cleanse itself from all forms of racism, which it is uniquely capable of doing. Other races needn't play in this game. One could say that this is merely the continuation of chauvinistic anglocentrism by other means, but to do so would embarass self-professed "anti-racists", hence white supermacy gets a new lease on life deep within the liberal mindset that nominally opposes it.
- steele 6y agoJust say "you people invented racism" and slither back to Parler.
- totetsu 6y agoIm no expert, but from what Ive read, some of the imperialistic ideas and hiarchy of races ideas in Japan do have their roots in a historical period where Japan's Eliets were looking to Europe for a model of how to be a part of the world.
- lasagnaphil 6y ago“japanese--known throughout asia and the world for their love and admiration of other races” Tell that to anyone actually living in Asia and most will absolutely scoff at you. There is too much historical baggage about what horrifying things the Japanese did to other Asians during its colonial era (early to mid 20th century), especially with regards to Korea and China. Japanese resentment is still highly noticeable in countries where they colonized and raped them.
- yew 6y ago> As I wrote earlier this year, I long viewed the Japanese fondness for sanitary masks as evidence of some deep-seated cultural defect. [...]
- Scapeghost 6y agoOn the flip side of what most comments are talking about, here's a very cute and wholesome example of how a Japanese person views the US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVcU6i2k9-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVcU6i2k9-M (Highly recommended if you are in need of a smile on your face)
- crowf 6y ago> Barrett was a known plagiarist before The Atlantic granted her the assignment This here is the problem. Back in my days being caught plagiarizing or faking facts basically expelled you from publishing for life. Journalists will only start caring about facts ones the consequences for getting caught are high enough.
- smcl 6y agoThis surprises me too. Particularly since traditional media seem to be struggling and have endured decades of falling profits and belt-tightening. You'd imagine that competition for journalist positions would be tight and one of the easiest "filters" would be "Did this person leave a recent job because of plagiarism?"
- yaboy 6y ago>An emerging theme in both controversies is that there is a fatal chink in the armor of even the most rigorous fact-checking process It’s almost 2021. Really?
- tashi 6y agoIt seems like it would be easier now than ever before! A source who wants to get their lies published can create entire networks of fake web pages that appear to back up their claims.
- andomar 6y agoWhen I visited Japan over 10 years ago much of what I thought strange has since become normal. The exaggerated fear of criminals, even though Japan is very safe. Very low interest rates and lots of public debt. In the wealthier parts of Japan newspapers featured articles on flu, with maps and graphs charting its activity. Many people wore masks and if I coughed in public people would take a wide path around me and look at me as if I were a barbarian. Exactly like it is in Europe now. In terms of having an old population Japan was more than 10 years ahead of Europe. So it makes sense Japan was the future Europe.
- euske 6y agoI think that the perception runs both ways - many Japanese people here enjoy being recognized as "polite", "super clean" and "obsessively precise", etc throughout the globe. And for some weird things - eating raw squid or raw egg for example - people are secretly relieved as Westerners never understand the "true Japanese delicacy". It gives people a sense of superiority.
- tkgally 6y agoIf anyone is interested in how Japan was viewed by American and British visitors more than a century ago, I have put together an anthology called "Japan As They Saw It" at http://gally.net/jatsi/ http://gally.net/jatsi/
- ulucs 6y agoI'm cutting through with Hanlon's Razor: the journalist herself is a foreigner living in US, which is a pretty weird country if you weren't born there. This makes the necessary additional logical jump way smaller to believe Japan also has different weird things going on.
- samirillian 6y agoI find an interesting rural/urban divide in non-fiction portrayals of Japan. I only knew/spent time in rural Japan, which in my own "essentializing" imagination is indeed the Japan of Miyazaki and some of the great 20th century novelists. The romance of bumping along a mountain road in a little truck! But the Japan of these "high-brow" magazines is always extremely urban.
- shalmanese 6y agoThe most important article I ever read was a piece by James Palmer titled "For American pundits, China isn’t a country. It’s a fantasyland." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-american-pundits-china-isnt-a-country-its-a-fantasyland/2015/05/29/24ba60e0-0431-11e5-a428-c984eb077d4e_story.html?utm_source=reddit.com&utm_term=.15e8748766f8 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-american-pundits... > The people telling these tales aren’t interested in complexities or, really, in China. They’re making domestic arguments and expressing parochial fears. Their China isn’t a real place but a rhetorical trope, less a genuine rival than a fairy-tale bogeyman. > [But] when we treat China as a fantasyland of instruction for ourselves, we end up ignoring the Chinese. Like Voltaire’s mandarins or the happy peasants of Maoist propaganda, they cease to be real people and become perfect puppets deployed for rhetorical ends. I read it having just arrived in China after many years away and it helped contextualized just how vastly different the China was that appeared in even sophisticated English language publications and the raw truth on the ground. It gave me a powerful lens to critically analyze media from, about how people are reduced to symbols to feed a story that the audience wants to believe rather than the data driven complexity of real ground truth.
- nicbou 6y agoThe same is true for the rest of the world too. Americans seem to know two things about Germany: the war and the wall, and they don't know that much about either. It really shows when reddit discusses Germany, because they see everything through that pinhole. Reporters are hardly better. Hell, I live in Germany, and I can't pretend to know much about rural life there, despite leaving the city more often than the average Berliner. I was stunned by the NPD's slogans, because they never reached Berlin. I could also say the same about America. I only know reddit's America, and perhaps a few things from living just north of the border. The Internet gave me false confidence in my understanding of America. Bottom line is you shouldn't use a few headlines convince you that you understand how things run in another country. You also can't judge their actions based on your culture and your legal system.