Trainman: lie or copy?

[imomus]

It's business as usual over on Neomarxisme: American St Georges are crusading to free Japan of its dragons, even when these "dragons" consist of the entire population of the country and all its institutions. Yesterday's dragon victims were the credulous Japanese public and the PR-driven publishing and media companies that lie to them. Marxy turned his attention to Densha Otoko, the "Trainman" story which began as an advice thread on BBS 2-ch, became a best-selling book, is now a film and a Fuji TV serial, and will soon see manga and, inevitably, porn spoof spin-offs. Trainman is a 22 year-old otaku or hikikomori type who's never dated a girl. He saves one from the attentions of a drunk on a train, and starts a 2-ch thread asking for advice on what to do next, very much as Allan in Woody Allen's Play It Again Sam solicits advice from an imaginary Humphrey Bogart. Well, thanks to the thousands of Bogarts giving him advice on the bulletinboard, the nerdy Trainman transforms himself into a cool dude and wins the girl in the end.

It's always interesting to read Marxy's pieces on Japanese pop culture (although readers of Jean Snow's excellent site learned about the Trainman saga eight months ago) but unfortunately there comes a moment in each one when he climbs atop a soapbox and delivers a sermon, an editorial, a complaint or a jeremiad concerning Japan's "original sin" or "termial decline". This usually involves a conspiracy of some kind, a lie by the authorities, or an idiocy on the part of the public. Sure enough, this time Marxy is irritated that the Trainman story is being presented as "a true story". He suspects that the whole thing was fabricated. In order to help him (and his many Junior St Georges, like the American who suggests, in the comments, that Marxy should alert the New York Times Tokyo bureau to the fraud, which would otherwise be covered up by the complicit Japanese media), I've gone through the Trainman plot stage by stage, assigning probabilities to each twist in the form of percentages. (0% = I think this didn't happen, 100% = I think it happened.)

1. Chance encounter in the train. May have happened, or may be a figment of Trainman's imagination. I'll give it 50%.

2. Saves girl from a drunk. A lot of chikkans and drunks abound on Tokyo trains, 90% likely.

3. Receives a set of Hermes teacups from her as a thank-you gift. Japanese do give a lot of gifts, but I find this somewhat excessive. 35% likely.

4. Obsesses online on whether or not to telephone her and ask for a date. More and more Japanese obsess online, 99% likely.

5. Finally plucks up the courage to call her and they agree to meet for dinner -- his first ever date with a woman. A 22 year-old hikikomori seems plausible to me. I myself didn't really have a proper date until I was 21, and I left home, which is more than these hikis do. 72% likely.

6. With the advice of his online supporters, he gets a stylish new haircut, buys new clothes, and decides to get contact lenses. I've seen a lot of Hair and Make salons, clothes shops and contact lens shops around Tokyo, I'll give this 100% on the credibility scale.

7. They have another dinner date, at which a friend of hers checks him out. Friends do tend to check you out, and are useful as chaperones if the fellow is too impatient, or conversation partners should he be tongue-tied. 87%.

8. They start exchanging cell-phone messages daily. 10,475,630 cell-phone messages fly across Japan daily, this is 100% true, I feel.

9. In April they have tea together at her home using the gift teacups. I smell a fish, didn't she give the teacups to him? So what are they doing at her home? 25%.

10. In May he goes shopping with her for a computer. May is a busy time at Sofmap, I'll buy that at 68%.

11. Later that day in a park he confesses his feelings to her and she reveals that she returns them. Pure otaku wish-fulfillment. This isn't a Yon-Sama melodrama, you know! Get back to your porn sites! 25%.

12. They kiss for the first time. Oh honestly, who would believe that? Wouldn't the birthrate be higher if this sort of thing were so easy? 7%.

Okay, perhaps I made my point. Art is "the lie that tells the truth", and the moment we write anything down for entertainment purposes, it becomes art. That doesn't stop its archetypes—boys meets girl, Bogart guides nerd—from remaining deeply true.

It's impossible, and pretty pointless, to disentangle truth from fabrication in a cultural product, just as it's impossible, often, to attribute ownership to a big archetypal idea, an idea that comes out of common lived experience. But, deep in the epistemological morass of the "truth v. fiction" angle, Marxy has missed a shot at one of his favourite themes, Japanese pakuri or plagiarism. Someone called Steve Stratton signed Jean Snow's comments page in April with a claim to have written "Densha Man" with the same title and same plot , based on his own experiences in Japan, ten years ago. Stratton claims to have published extracts on the web six years ago. "Be assured," he says bitterly, "when the movie goes into production, my lawyers will be hunting for the Japanese clown who wrote the utter piece of crap Densha Otoko."

I look forward eagerly to the day Mr Stratton's gaijin Trainman replaces the Japanese copy on Japanese screens, and Marxy writes a tubthumping piece about how the American Trainman is hoodwinking Japan.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I could never (and would never presume to) do it better than the Japanese themselves do: they're the world's best filterers and curators of the best of the West. They do it so well that, when you're there, the West looks pretty good. Maybe you need to go home a bit more to see how well the Japanese curate, and how disappointing the West actually is!

[(Anonymous)]

And in turn, since you can neither read nor speak Japanese, your version of Japan is filtered by those who can. You can only write about Trainman because someone else wrote about it first in English. You can't read the text itself, and you can't situate it within all the other texts that surround it and give it meaning.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I get rapped on the knuckles every time for this, but I wonder if it really matters that much? I wonder whether speaking and reading the language isn't somewhat over-rated. My information about Japan comes from many trips to the country, a constant stream of non-verbal signals and experiences, some very basic knowledge of the language and of the buzzy "keywords" of the day, and a continuous flow of stories and interpretation from bloggers, my Japanese girlfriend, and many Japanese friends, who usually exclaim "Wow, you know more about what's going on in Japan than we do!" Yes, it's very reprehensible of me not to have learned the language, but I don't think merely speaking Japanese guarantees subtle or penetrating cultural insight. If it did, how would Marxy be so amazingly wrongheaded so often?

[(Anonymous)]

Language is often used to hide what is going on in a country. Maybe a double-edged sword that can add more colour but also conceal - depending on the ear of the beholder.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's like the story of the blind men and the elephant. One, holding the elephant's trunk, says it's a bit like a vacuum cleaner. One, patting its side, says it's like a stone wall. Well, the blind man who hears the elephant speak a coherent sentence says "No, no, you're all wrong, an elephant is very like a dictionary!"

[(Anonymous)]

I find the TV to be at its most revealing when I turn the sound down.

Language will simply confirm a lot of the things that are plainly observable, however it is very often used to try and deny their existence!

If you can tell the difference between honesty and lies, I'm sure that language must be an even richer source of information than plain observation. It shouldn't differ in content, just be richer in nuance, since it is a faculty unique to man.

in the country of the blind, the one-eyed is king

[(Anonymous)]

hummm...here's an interesting spin on this whole thing. st. nick is fond of brandishing his "bind man" parable, we all know the story, so i won't repeat it here. anyway, i'd just like to point out a chink in the intellectual armor.

here goes: while most of the "blind men" (marxy, myself, and a few thousand others out there) who are, in an effort to try and understand japan as deeply as possible, trying to use ALL of our various "intelligences"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences

nick, on the other hand, has WILLINGLY discarded one of his "intelligences" (verbal-linguistic) and then in an effort to justify this, frequenty questions the "merits" of our "linguistic understandings" of japan.

the problem with this is, by focusing on the relative merits of his virtually senseless ("sans-sense") position, he implies that we AREN'T employing all of our other senses too! well, OF COURSE WE ARE! we are feeling, touching, tasting, smelling, etc. the "sensory" japan just as much as he is, if not more since we are here 24/7 and he is not.

of course, the next logical step for nick at this point, if he wan't to spend his time and energy to salvage this line of reasoning, is to concede my point, and then argue that he is simply more "intelligent" in the sensory areas that he has decided to focus on. this is a moot point, and i will not argue it here.

now if nick were somehow an idiot savant, and were INCAPABLE of speaking another language, or even his native one, then his position would be forgivable. even though his statements sometimes make me up this into question, i'm convinced he is in full possession of his mental faculties. therefore, no sympathy for him, and his whole intellectual edifice build around this parable as a kind of post-modern excuse is a complete sham.

imagine an astrophysicist who decided to throw away his "logical-mathematical intelligence" and decided to focus on exploring the chemical structure of stars with his "body-kinesthetic
intelligence"...or to put things another way: i'm sure IF stephen hawking were CAPABLE of doing just this, he would. sadly, he can't.

nick can no longer make use of this excuse, thank goodness.

now i'm off. bigger "pakura" to fry...

hi-five,
r.
http://glitchslaptko.blogspot.com/

[(Anonymous)]

Your vision of Japan is so relentlessly positive that you lose credibility, since things in general, and especially things the size of a country, are rarely so uniformly great. Your zeal of the converted comes over as a little unreal, and I wonder if part of your being able to maintain it is your ignorance of the language and the added texture and shades of grey that it brings. I mean, I know plenty of Japanese and although they might be largely positive about their country, none of them are quite as uncritical as you!

I just wonder what you'd make of a Chinese guy who spoke no English and who occasionally visited Edinburgh and who continually wrote great paeans to Scotland in his blog - wouldn't you take it all with a pinch of salt? Is this a blog you'd really go to get the lowdown on what Scotland was really like?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Actually there is a book about Edinburgh by a Chinese man who, as far as I know, didn't speak English. There are lovely watercolours he made of Princes Street Gardens etc, and it's fascinating to read his (translated) accounts of familiar scenes, just as it's wonderful to look at (Czech) M. Sasek (http://www.ilike.org.uk/people/sasek/)'s "This is Edinburgh".

Citizens of a place often re-adjust their perspectives according to such accounts, if they're charmed by them. Edinburgh band Josef K, for instance, did a pastiche of a Sasek Edinburgh skyline on their album "The Only Fun In Town". And when I visit Edinburgh now I see nothing but ghost tours and whisky museums, pandering to the perceptions of foreigners. I don't really have an issue: are ghosts "real"? Well, economically they're certainly real; they're now an important part of Edinburgh's self-image, and its tourist receipts.

[(Anonymous)]

His name is Sumom and he loves rock music and Jesus. And, uh, he has a hearing aid in one ear.

[(Anonymous)]

His name is Sumom and he's in a Christian rock band (and as a result is deaf in one ear).

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

There's really nothing wrong with Nick's fanatic devotion to Japan...people like him keep Japan fresh in the minds of foreigners and help the tourism industry out a lot.

He'll learn as he goes along. Japan is a place that has to be learned about, but it also has to be experienced and Momus has plenty of experience. The learning will come naturally.



Go easy on him, Guvna.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

Well, I give you lots of credit for being more culturally and artistically perceptive than most foreigners in Japan, but you really DO need to learn the language to understand the Japs.

As a Japanese-American, I thought I knew the culture, but I got a sort of cliched and Americanized version...sort of like how immigrants kept traditions alive in their new countries and they naturally diverged into uniqueness while some things stayed strictly traditional. It wasn't until I went and lived in Japan and used my language skills as the basis for iishindenshin and enryo and all that other good stuff that really let me know of the true duplicity and deviousness of native Japanese...Well, I also love native Japanese. Don't get me wrong, heh heh.


But you need to learn Japanese if your understanding of Japan is to ever get past the "obsessed fanboy" stage and more into the "guy who knowingly nods his head whenever Japan is mentioned" stage.

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

Japanese is one of the easier languages to learn to speak (though admittedly difficult to master). It couldn't hurt to dive in and learn it. Having a native speaker close at hand can only help.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

That wasn't me. I CAN read Japanese, but I've got the bollocks to put my name to my comments.

Reading translations is fine...it's how the Japanese learn about us, so it's appropriate for us to use translated works to learn about them. Once the basics are learned, THEN original language works can be studied for polishing on an already-sharp understanding. Momus knows his Japan, at least the Tokyo parts (which I am woefully ignorant, since my fambly's from Okinawa and I've only ever lived in the Kinki region), so I enjoy reading his take on that part of the culture. He's an ambassador for Shibuya culture, I think. Good on ya, Nick.