Most news that comes out of Japan is of the ‘quirky’ kind, in which we’re encouraged to view Japan as some bizarre culture we couldn’t possibly understand. (Note that ‘quirky’ is a loaded, condescending word, as explained by Miranda July.) There’s a distinct othering that happens when Westerners write about Japan. It has always annoyed me a bit. It annoyed me when I taught Japanese at a high school in New Zealand, and the Japanese exchange students were forced to perform a Maori Haka on stage in front of the entire school, who laughed and laughed, but it wasn’t the good kind. The Haka is a uniquely NZ thing — an uncomfortable thing to do if you haven’t grown up with it — and about as antithetical to the Japanese culture as you can get. So I asked the principal to put a stop to it. The Japanese are very good at making fun of themselves, and a lot of what’s shared about Japan on foreign TV and on social media is The Japanese Making Fun Of Themselves, but we somehow think they’re taking things seriously and we laugh at them rather than alongside.
I can’t guarantee the following articles don’t do that, but as someone who will always be endlessly fascinated by the contradiction that is Japan, I’m always a sucker for think pieces about the country that I spent 10 years studying.
The Japan Story from NYT
Japanese Dialects: From familiar to unintelligible at Lingua Lift
Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex? from The Guardian. This was being talked about 15 years ago when I was living there. Who knows if it’s true.
Ladies’ Night: Circling the Bases on Okinawa from Kyoto Journal
The inventor of karaoke went on to invent a cockroach-killing machine, and now lives atop a mountain in Kobe.
Photos of Leisure Time In Japan from Feature Shoot
The Thing About Luck is a children’s book written by Cynthia Kadohata. The book follows 12-year-old Summer as she travels with her Japanese grandparents for a season of harvesting work in the Midwest.
An elderly Japanese woman really loves her cat. Here are some photos from Beautiful Decay.
Japan’s Black Face Problem from Vox. Is this kind of racism really all that different from the gender equivalent we accept here in Australia — the Dame Edna kind, in which men dress up as women to embody the most awful parts of imagined womanhood?
Business In Japan is a RNZ interview with an American professor of Japanese business. Some of the oldest businesses in the world can be found in Japan, but why are they now going under? tl;dr Temple building businesses are failing to adapt and the Japanese are no longer prepared to pay a premium for salted squid guts.
