Moniker, you said this morning you were not going to post again in this thread and I see that you have. Though it looks like you are way off on tangents to this thread and posting stuff which should be in the Telestial. I believe I have one post on topic which you could reply to the rest I'll do everyone a favor who should read this thread and not respond to you. If you don't have self control to stop, then I'll take over.
guy sajer wrote:
This is a long and drawn out thread. For what it's worth, Marg, I agree with Chap. I'm not an expert on Japan; I've spent 5 days there in my life. But the description you posted of Japanese society/culture strikes me too as a pretty gross caricature. It may indeed be accurate, but it has the aroma of broad stereotype.
Go ahead and disagree. I have no dog in this fight. I'm just providing another view point.
This is essentially off topic to the thread, though I suppose we are talking somewhat about critical thinking..so I'll post it here and if you respond or if it moves to telestial or whatever forum we can continue there if you wish.
Now, are you talking about the whole article? If so I'll post portions that resonated for me, by either personal observation or what I've heard/read about Japan and its history. I've listed quite a few portions so there is lots for you to comment on. If there is something there that you think is a gross exaggeration to the point of it is misrepresenting reality or is very unhumourous/offensive ...let me know. I'd be interested in your point of view. by the way..the writer is AA Gill information from wikipedia : " Adrian Anthony Gill (born June 28, 1954) is a British newspaper columnist and writer, using the byline A. A. Gill. He is currently employed by the Sunday Times as their restaurant reviewer and television critic. His essays are known for their humour and satirical content."
- They make the most elegant, delicate food in the world and then make it in plastic for every restaurant window.
- This is a country where the men pee in the street but it’s the height of bad manners to blow your nose,
- The atomic bomb that wiped out Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people and reducing a wooden city to ash and black rain, was, if you ask me, with the benefit of hindsight, all things considered, a good thing. As a direct result of Hiroshima, the war ended. The emperor overrode his military, who wanted a banzai suicide last battle, and broadcast their unconditional surrender.
- Well, hold on, Tojo. When it comes to apologies, Japan’s silence is cacophonous. What about your treatment of prisoners of war? “Oh, they were soldiers,” I’m told with a quiet, slow patronage. What about the Chinese massacres? “Exaggerated.” The Korean comfort women, don’t they deserve apologies? “Oh, they’re just making a fuss because Japan is rich and they want money. And 20,000 Koreans were killed in Hiroshima.” True, they were slaves, and when they asked if there could be a memorial for Koreans in this peace garden, the Japanese said no.
- Let’s get the Japanese as victims into perspective. During the war in the East, half a million allied soldiers died. Three million Japanese died and 20 million other Asians perished under Japan’s brief expansion into an empire. That’s 20 million we in the West rarely remember. As I stand here, the newspapers are full of Koreans and Chinese bitterly denouncing Japan’s new school history books, which deny any culpability. The Japanese don’t think they’re worth a sorry. The detonation of an atomic bomb above Hiroshima was the starting gun for modern Japan. It blew away not just the most deeply cruel military government but a thousand-year-old political and social system – the most inhuman and exploitative ever designed. The violent burst of the nuclear age was the best thing that ever happened to Japan. It didn’t destroy anything like as much as it created.
- Before the war, Japan had an economy that was a small fraction of America’s. A wood-and-rice peasant place, its main exports were textiles and soldiers. Today, even in the slough of a prolonged depression, it’s still the second biggest economy in the world, with a GDP as large as Britain’s, France’s and Germany’s combined. That’s astonishing, not least because Japan is about one-and-a-half times the size of UK with twice as many people and only a third of its land habitable, yet it has no natural resources to speak of. So, where did it all go wrong? How come Japan has such commercial success but still manages to be a socially weird disaster? Because, have no doubts, they’re not happy.
- And then there are geishas. In Kyoto’s wooden old town, hundreds of Japanese tourists loiter, cameras at the ready. Nothing happens in Japan unless it happens at 400 ASA. Kyoto has seven million tourists a year, 90% of them indigenous. It’s a pleasure to see that even at home they travel in gawky, bovine groups. They’re waiting for a glimpse of a geisha slipping into a teahouse. There used to be 20,000 geishas in Kyoto; now there are fewer than 200. They hobble out of their limousines, bowing in all their pristine, extravagant absurdity. Geishas are trained to devote their lives to rich, drunk men.
- Only the very, very rich can afford geishas. The salarymen dream of them. The trainee geishas, the backs of whose heads are dressed to represent vaginas, clip-clop down the road, their smiling white faces making their teeth look like little yellow cherry stones. A geisha’s raison d’être is to pour drinks, giggle behind her hand, tell men they are handsome, strong and amusing, listen to boastful lies, and never show any emotion except bliss. Occasionally, for a great deal of cash, some will allow men to copulate with them. We, of course, have geishas back in Blighty: we call them barmaids.
- After school-kids, retired men have the highest hara-kiri rate. In a country with no sense of individual value, belonging to a job is their only source of self-worth. A Japanese man tells me that the key to understanding Japan is to grasp that it is a shame-based culture.
- In the West, success is the carrot. In Japan, fear of failure and ostracism is the stick. This isn’t merely a semantic difference, it’s a basic mindset.
Sex is where the weirdness of the Japanese peaks. (I'll post a link re blow up dolls an example of weird sexual behavior I'm aware of that apparently is accepted in Japan
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/culture/waiwai/archive/news/2007/03/20070306p2g00m0dm0160 )
- Traditionally, the Japanese live with their in-laws, and, in a cramped apartment with paper walls, marital harmony can be strained. So harassed couples, carrying the shopping, sidle in for half an hour’s conjugal bliss. It takes the spontaneity out of sex, but then if you asked a Japanese man to do something spontaneous, he’d have to check his PalmPilot first.
- Women are either silent housework drudges or sex toys. You see this dehumanising view of women in manga. Manga are those ubiquitous pornographic comic books. Men read them openly on the trains and buses. You can buy them anywhere.
- Pick up almost any book at random and be prepared for a sharp intake of breath. The stories, such as they are, generally involve schoolgirls being attacked or raped; the scenarios are inventive in their nastiness. Children are abducted, gagged in their beds, dragged up dark alleys. The victims are small and defenceless, with unfeasibly large breasts and round, tearful eyes. They are regularly killed or commit suicide. I kept thinking that the last pages must be missing, the ones with the comeuppance, but there’s none. And, to add a peculiarly Japanese weirdness, the drawings are delicately censored. Minute slivers of genitalia are Tipp-Exed out. Nothing is as unnervingly sordid as manga, and nothing would so distress the European parents of a daughter. And the Japanese think less than nothing of it
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- - Japan has become the West’s stalker, a country of Elvis imitators.
- Japan has taken the worst of the West and discarded the best. So it has democracy without individualism. It has freedom of speech but is too frightened to say anything. It makes without creating. And, saddest and most telling, it has emotion without love. You never feel love here. They have obsession, yearning and cold observation – even beauty and devotion – but nothing is done or said with the spontaneous exuberance of love, and I have never seen anywhere else in the whole wide world where you could say that.
- I want to finish back in Hiroshima. After the war, the survivors of the atomic bomb were ostracised. People would hire private detectives to ensure that prospective spouses weren’t from Hiroshima. So the survivors lied and hid their guilty secret and trauma. Imperfect, embarrassing and tainted, they should have died. It’s the absence of the western idea of love – of brotherly, charitable love or sensual love, that finally explains Japan’s appalling, lunatic cruelty.