The trip inside
Sep. 14th, 2006 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI'm iChatting with Hisae. She's in Osaka. "Japan is nice to visit," she says, "but when you're here for a while it can get a bit boring. Food is good, though. And going to the sento." We decide the thing to do is live and work in Germany, but visit Japan each year. For the food. And the bathing.
Here's Richard Lloyd Parry in the LRB, reviewing Donald Richie's Japan Journals: "Greater Tokyo contains thirty million people; it is far and away the largest city that has ever existed. And yet to the Westerner with intellectual aspirations it is a small pond. The Catholic novelist Shusaku Endo compared Japan to a tropical mud swamp: when living flowers are transplanted from elsewhere they grow vigorously for a while, put out lurid blooms, but eventually wither in the strange minerals of the new soil. In 150 years, foreigners in Japan have produced important works of history, political science, anthropology and journalism, but no lasting work of literature."
Here's Roddy Schrock on his blog, talking about the same LRB piece: "Why is this? What are the limitations placed on foreign minds? Why are people living as gaijin not electrified and inspired to write on a daily basis?"
Parry in the LRB: "Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles."
Bowles and Barthes come up in my Metropolis magazine piece about "the pleasures of staying foreign". One of the things I did in my Tokyo apartment was listen to a CD someone had left lying around, a Talking Book of Paul Bowles short stories.
I'm talking to some interviewer about Tokyo. "Of course, the art world there is very small," I say. "There's nowhere like New York's Chelsea or the East End of London for galleries. There are just a few commercial galleries. People in Japan don't really buy art. It's a bit like Berlin in that way." The art world, too, is a small pond.
The Tokyo Chronicles details my first impressions when I went to live in Tokyo in 2001. "Grey, anxious, neat and tidy, hyper-industrialised, Japan has a different atmosphere," I write. I can't quite decide if it's Athens or Mars.
Here's David Bowie, in a radio interview in the late 70s. "I go to Japan a lot, but I'm a bit afraid that if I settle there I'll get very Zen about things and my writing will dry up." The idea is that you need conflict and strife to create, and Japan just doesn't have it.
Here's my Design Zen piece from May 2001. I'm settling into Tokyo, getting comfortable with the alienation. "Tokyo is a city trapped under the iron thumb of 'aesthetic correctness'," I write. "It's the greatest good fortune, and the greatest misfortune. I'm still trying to decide if it's heaven or hell." At the end I quote Cornelius saying that the recession or an earthquake could erase Japan's drama-less-ness at one fell swoop. This lack of tension is itself tense.
I manage to make an album in Japan. It's not literature, but it's literary. Stuff about Scottish vaudeville, Jacques Tati, Modernism, slapstick, Beowulf. Because I feel rather outside things in Tokyo, I retreat in my writing to my core self, my past, my dreams, my language.
Richard Lloyd Parry again: "Densely hierarchical, structured by invisible networks of deference, obligation and taboo, conventional Japanese society offers no formal place to the ‘outside person’. But this alienation is so absolute that it is experienced as something close to liberation, a stimulus to observation and analysis. ‘Japan has afforded him’ – the author – ‘a situation of writing,’ Roland Barthes wrote in Empire of Signs. This situation is ‘one in which a certain disturbance of the person occurs, a subversion of earlier readings, a shock of meaning lacerated, extenuated to the point of its irreplaceable void.’ Japan, to put it in drastically un-French terms, puts you on your mettle."
Donald Richie: "In Japan I interpret, assess an action, infer a meaning. Every day, every hour, every minute. Life here means never taking life for granted, never not noticing. For me alone I wonder? I do not see how a foreigner can live here and construct that shroud of inattention, which in the land from whence he came is his natural right and his natural tomb . . . it is with this live connection that the alert foreigner here lives. The electric current is turned on during all the waking hours: he or she is always occupied in noticing, evaluating, discovering and concluding . . . It is the difference between just going to a movie and living it for a few hours, and going to the same film as a reviewer, taking notes, standing apart, criticising, knowing that I must make an accounting of it. The former is more comfortable; the latter is better... Being at home means taking for granted going blind and deaf, eventually not even thinking. It means only comfort. I would hate to be at home."
Parry: "As he grows older [he's in his 80s] Richie begins to panic about the cost of having no home, not for its human comforts, but its intellectual stimulations. At his most optimistic, he takes pride in his outsideness (‘undisturbed by vagaries, I can regard what I think of as eternal’). But he sees that New York friends ‘live in an element I do not. Theirs is the current of contemporary thought, and they swim – mostly against it – and grow sleek. I have no intellectual climate at all. I have no one with whom to speak of these concerns, no one to learn from, no one to teach. For fifty years I have lived alone in the library of my skull."
The only escape is sex. Parry tells us Richie seeks it in parks, clubs, saunas, with boys who will "stand for Japan". He recorded it all in his diary, but cut it out. It may appear in a separate book, a Vita Sexualis. But it's key. It's why foreigners end up staying in a place with "no intellectual climate at all". It's an escape from alienation that only adds to it. Sex: the punishing reward. Salty water that only makes you thirstier. The outsider's only permitted trip inside.
Here's Richard Lloyd Parry in the LRB, reviewing Donald Richie's Japan Journals: "Greater Tokyo contains thirty million people; it is far and away the largest city that has ever existed. And yet to the Westerner with intellectual aspirations it is a small pond. The Catholic novelist Shusaku Endo compared Japan to a tropical mud swamp: when living flowers are transplanted from elsewhere they grow vigorously for a while, put out lurid blooms, but eventually wither in the strange minerals of the new soil. In 150 years, foreigners in Japan have produced important works of history, political science, anthropology and journalism, but no lasting work of literature."
Here's Roddy Schrock on his blog, talking about the same LRB piece: "Why is this? What are the limitations placed on foreign minds? Why are people living as gaijin not electrified and inspired to write on a daily basis?"
Parry in the LRB: "Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles."
Bowles and Barthes come up in my Metropolis magazine piece about "the pleasures of staying foreign". One of the things I did in my Tokyo apartment was listen to a CD someone had left lying around, a Talking Book of Paul Bowles short stories.
I'm talking to some interviewer about Tokyo. "Of course, the art world there is very small," I say. "There's nowhere like New York's Chelsea or the East End of London for galleries. There are just a few commercial galleries. People in Japan don't really buy art. It's a bit like Berlin in that way." The art world, too, is a small pond.
The Tokyo Chronicles details my first impressions when I went to live in Tokyo in 2001. "Grey, anxious, neat and tidy, hyper-industrialised, Japan has a different atmosphere," I write. I can't quite decide if it's Athens or Mars.
Here's David Bowie, in a radio interview in the late 70s. "I go to Japan a lot, but I'm a bit afraid that if I settle there I'll get very Zen about things and my writing will dry up." The idea is that you need conflict and strife to create, and Japan just doesn't have it.
Here's my Design Zen piece from May 2001. I'm settling into Tokyo, getting comfortable with the alienation. "Tokyo is a city trapped under the iron thumb of 'aesthetic correctness'," I write. "It's the greatest good fortune, and the greatest misfortune. I'm still trying to decide if it's heaven or hell." At the end I quote Cornelius saying that the recession or an earthquake could erase Japan's drama-less-ness at one fell swoop. This lack of tension is itself tense.
I manage to make an album in Japan. It's not literature, but it's literary. Stuff about Scottish vaudeville, Jacques Tati, Modernism, slapstick, Beowulf. Because I feel rather outside things in Tokyo, I retreat in my writing to my core self, my past, my dreams, my language.
Richard Lloyd Parry again: "Densely hierarchical, structured by invisible networks of deference, obligation and taboo, conventional Japanese society offers no formal place to the ‘outside person’. But this alienation is so absolute that it is experienced as something close to liberation, a stimulus to observation and analysis. ‘Japan has afforded him’ – the author – ‘a situation of writing,’ Roland Barthes wrote in Empire of Signs. This situation is ‘one in which a certain disturbance of the person occurs, a subversion of earlier readings, a shock of meaning lacerated, extenuated to the point of its irreplaceable void.’ Japan, to put it in drastically un-French terms, puts you on your mettle."
Donald Richie: "In Japan I interpret, assess an action, infer a meaning. Every day, every hour, every minute. Life here means never taking life for granted, never not noticing. For me alone I wonder? I do not see how a foreigner can live here and construct that shroud of inattention, which in the land from whence he came is his natural right and his natural tomb . . . it is with this live connection that the alert foreigner here lives. The electric current is turned on during all the waking hours: he or she is always occupied in noticing, evaluating, discovering and concluding . . . It is the difference between just going to a movie and living it for a few hours, and going to the same film as a reviewer, taking notes, standing apart, criticising, knowing that I must make an accounting of it. The former is more comfortable; the latter is better... Being at home means taking for granted going blind and deaf, eventually not even thinking. It means only comfort. I would hate to be at home."
Parry: "As he grows older [he's in his 80s] Richie begins to panic about the cost of having no home, not for its human comforts, but its intellectual stimulations. At his most optimistic, he takes pride in his outsideness (‘undisturbed by vagaries, I can regard what I think of as eternal’). But he sees that New York friends ‘live in an element I do not. Theirs is the current of contemporary thought, and they swim – mostly against it – and grow sleek. I have no intellectual climate at all. I have no one with whom to speak of these concerns, no one to learn from, no one to teach. For fifty years I have lived alone in the library of my skull."
The only escape is sex. Parry tells us Richie seeks it in parks, clubs, saunas, with boys who will "stand for Japan". He recorded it all in his diary, but cut it out. It may appear in a separate book, a Vita Sexualis. But it's key. It's why foreigners end up staying in a place with "no intellectual climate at all". It's an escape from alienation that only adds to it. Sex: the punishing reward. Salty water that only makes you thirstier. The outsider's only permitted trip inside.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 09:43 pm (UTC)I really want to go to TOKYO... I want it so bad! Since so long~
KYOTO and OSAKA sounds great too!
(yes, another useless comment, désolé!)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 10:28 pm (UTC)As for me, I was an adolescent in Japan, and it all came to much the same thing, feeling "different" and being "different". The question there is, Have I grown out of it? Is that why I wouldn't go back there to live now without a really good reason, a job I really loved, a hobby that paid my way, a function? Did I get tired of a 2D role I could only be (gaijin student of Japanese) and give it up for a 4D role with action and verbs in it, a role to do (my current career)?
I wonder if, had I been sexually active when I was in Japan, I would have enjoyed myself more in the line of doing.
but does it have to be that way?
Date: 2006-09-13 10:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 11:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 11:55 pm (UTC)I believe that the Japanese aesthetic of Zen has nothing to do with the lack of creativity. Rather, it's the idea that there is a sort of feeling of surviving in a large city that makes the attention shift from frivolous creation to daily living. When the reward of daily life is so great (sex, good food, neon lights, TV and so on), the need to create to fill the void is somewhat lessened. Artists are inherently insecure and hungry inside for some sort of fulfillment. It's easy to get a base level of fulfillment in Japan by just working hard...so why bother painting masterpieces when lesser works can do the same thing?
Maybe if you lived with 15 other Brazilians in a tiny apartment and only had two pairs of pants that you all had to take turns wearing you could bring about that sort of sharp feeling of need that creative art satisfies.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 05:39 am (UTC)I know a lot of people who cease their creative pursuits once they move to New York, and I think this is in part why it happens. Strange how cities can simultaneously excite and dampen the creative impulse--and there's no telling how one will react to that environment until they are in the mix, which by then it's too late.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 01:19 pm (UTC)As far as gender goes, it's usually the male experience that gets the most press, but women are fairly miserable over there because the native men are either too busy or shy to allow for the same sort of romping and sexual conquest that most white dudes fall into.
Maybe Momus needs to be a woman to get that internal suffering going while walking through Shinjuku?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 12:32 am (UTC)This is simply too true. Yearly pilgrimages to Mexico are what keep my mirror polished enough to feel "awake" in life. I have always felt limitations to my energy and freedom of mind while here. I figured it would be a process of adaptation and "culture shock" of a sort, but it has taken almost 2 years to even begin to push through it. Japan is amazing, and I have learned and changed so much. I am referring to the free movement of my energy in this space.
Enormous population density seems to have led this superbly civilized populace to withdraw from public space with an almost surreal effectiveness, demanding you to do the same. It is effective to the point that no matter what manifestation of "dark Japan" you stumble into, in a doesn't make you feel danger, or rage, or anything in particular because you are almot completely disconnected from it. Not only for being a foreigner, but thanks to a refined version of the "modernizing" process that isolates neighbor from neighbor, and man from gut-reality.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 01:09 am (UTC)I think this an unfair thing to judge Japan on seeing that 1) it was not a colony (Kipling) 2) not the center of civilization (like Paris for the lost generation) 3) not the site of a civil war that brought the civilized world into help (Spain) 4) not a resort/vacation area with piece of mind (like Maughm in Capri) 5) nor a place where foreigners can just up and move to without either taking on an awful colonialist job teaching english or joining up with a local employment prison that fundamentally goes against a large number of Western ideals.
Japan attracts both the delusional and the pre-alienated, and until recently, brought in almost nobody except for pervs, regional scholars, mercantilistic entrepreneurs and the washed-up. The cultural explosion has brought a lot more interesting people these days, but it's still not exactly easy to live in Tokyo - for anybody, including the Japanese.
I find it interesting that you are now admitting that "you cannot live in Japan" after a decade of defending it to the death. I guess you want it preserved the way it is for when you go back - and to hell with all those who live their permanently. I am guessing your advice is for everyone in Japan to move to Germany for the low prices and cultural stimulation for 10 months of the year and move back to Japan when they become in need of hot baths and healthy food.
Marxy
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 04:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 09:39 pm (UTC)you wait. ihase back soon...
sie steht auf berlin.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 04:25 am (UTC)To comment on the numbing of one’s creativity in Japan or anywhere for that matter, I am sure it is the lack of excitement that dulls one’s artistry (“…once your life is too stable, your creativity dies” - Yoshitaka Amano), not over-stimulation or the pressures of survival.
The underlying motif of Japan being a barren vacuum for foreign creativity seems to me… odd. The tradition of sending the most-promising youth out into Japan in order to return a report to the townsfolk who funded his endeavor still holds true today (at least, metaphorically… its for Europe and America… not only for these days, but for the last 200 years). However, now, there is reciprocal interest coming from the West in Japan, not just from the wash-ups or the pre-inundated.
If there are any gaijin that can retain their creativity in Japan, let alone have jobs not involving teaching English as a second language, all within the tamagoyaki pan that is Tokyo, I am sure the architects, Mark Klein and Astrid Dytham of Klein Dytham Architecture (http://www.klein-dytham.com/), count as the few. I hear their Leaf Chapel is a pretty popular place to get hitched...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 05:53 am (UTC)That hasn't been my experience at all. I've done work for world-class museums, designed typefaces, written books, and had successful gallery shows in Chelsea, and I've lived in the sticks my entire life. I find that when you never have to provide your own intellectual stimulation, you can atrophy as well, becoming just another spoiled, ADHD-addled novelty addict who has to be constantly entertained like a toddler.
Neither starvation nor complete immersion is very healthy.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 09:02 pm (UTC)affectionate punch. pax man.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 06:10 am (UTC)I think there's a distinction to be made here between literary intellectuals and visual ones. I think all the people covered by Jean Snow's blog are flourishing in Japan. The culture works for the visually-oriented. It's the "man of letters" sort of literary intellectual whose blooms are stifled slowly there.
I'm odd in that my culture is half-and-half, visual and literary. So half of me dies slowly in Japan. But there's always the internet. You can continue your literary debates there.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 07:08 am (UTC)I also recommend having access to a good English-language academic library if you move here. Gets you through some down time.
Marxy
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 01:14 pm (UTC)Sometimes, it helps if one is at least partially ensconced in a culture before one tries to create in it. It seems like there is no shortage of artists and ex-pats that want to attempt to flower in a ceative desert like Tokyo to which they are not adapted by birth, cultural training or learning...just a "I'll bop over there, roger a few birds, eat a nibble of yakiniku and make a masterpiece that will show all my fellow _______s just how bloody creative I am because I have mastered the intricacies of Japan in months when it takes decades for the Japanese themselves."
Evolve your creative survival advantages BEFORE you get on the plane; you won't grow them while you're there.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 05:03 am (UTC)Momus, you so want to be David Bowie@! and who could blame you? I wish I could be David Bowie. He is a supersmart American intellectual. I think!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 06:50 am (UTC)I think you reveal a key to your argument here:
"There's nowhere like New York's Chelsea or the East End of London for galleries. There are just a few commercial galleries. People in Japan don't really buy art. It's a bit like Berlin in that way." The art world, too, is a small pond.
Do people buy art anywhere? Regardless, isn't the literary world also a small pond ... as publishing and film have given themselves over to the blockbuster/megahit, very few are interested in the musings of an expat in Japan. Perhaps the internet is part of this shift as well: Blogging replaces the book. Expatriate culture has the observant position of outsider, yet the weakness of a small minority position.
When I first delved into the biography of Lafcadio Hearn I thought it would make a great film, but I realized the bulge-eyed wanderer would be hard to sell in these days of Tom Cruise ...
BTW I watched Howls Moving Castle and was struck by the folk Baroque architecture they lifted directly from Czech towns. The visit to the palace with the steps is the museum at the top of Vaclavske Namesti.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 08:19 am (UTC)I'm not sure I buy that, though. Art does get collected in the West, in massive events like Art Basel Miami. There are still literary events, like Pinter's Nobel Prize speech, that rock the literary world, or what's left of it.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 12:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 12:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 07:17 am (UTC)It's not that no good literature has been made about Japan. It's that Japan is not a place where literary ex-pats thrive and do great work.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 08:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 08:41 am (UTC)In Boston in the 40s he "ran poetry events in public libraries and, with the help of his high-school friend Nat Hentoff, he started the country's first poetry radio programme. This programme featured readings by Robert Creeley, Stephen Spender, Theodore Roethke and many other Boston-based and visiting poets. He also spent some time at the Yaddo artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs."
In the 50s, he ran a poetry magazine called Origin, featuring poets like Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, Denise Levertov, William Bronk, Theodore Enslin, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Gary Snyder, Lorine Niedecker Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Paul Blackburn.
These are the alliances that lasted his whole life long, and provoked his most notable work. His "scene" is unmistakably an American scene.
He lived in Japan from 1958 to 1960. He married a Japanese TV presenter, and spent time in the 60s translating classical Japanese literature into English, for English audiences. He returned to Boston for the whole of the 70s, then retired to Kyoto in the 80s, living there until he died.
It's quite clear that he never gathered around him in Japan anything remotely like the literary scene he did in Boston, and that's the nub of the matter Parry raises. Why that difference?
Japan figures in most writer's lives as an experience of (more or less happy) solitude. Perhaps, rather than provoking poems (Yeats' line "mad Ireland hurt you into song" springs to mind) it is a poem. "My wife, my house in Kyoto, my retirement" (or, for Keene, "my sex with strangers"). For foreigners, it can beautify these private things, but it doesn't seem to encourage public, engaged literary life at all. Come on, we know this!
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 07:38 am (UTC)Having catalogued a library significantly comprised of Western travel writing about Japan, there's no doubting the volume of it. But the quality? Give it a hundred years and Chatwin's work might not seem any less dated than Isabella Bird's Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/b/bird/isabella/japan/) (1878). Kipling wrote at length about his Japan visit in From Sea To Sea (http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/FromSeaToSea/index.html) (1899) even if the country didn't "foster" him. As to Japanese writers in the UK? Err, Soseki was miserable in Clapham for two years and Mishima thought the Brighton seafront depressing.
None of these people became permanent residents and I doubt that this is really an issue to do with Japan at all. Rather, almost the entirety of literary types who head off in search of the new place that will give birth to a new life and new work fail. Writers like Bowles (Paul or Jane) are rare enough in any location. Japan is not really a special exception in this regard.
Keene's isolation sounds very miserable. Are we to believe that after living there for fifty years that this loneliness of the skull is the product of unassailable forces in Japanese society? Did he never consider analysis or a whack around the head from Azile (http://mac.softpedia.com/progScreenshots/Azile-Screenshot-8692.html)? Or do the songs of single old men sound the same in all countries? Where does ostranenie end and autism begin?
(Sorry, that's rather a lot of questions! I've got a lip like Pete Burns from a damaged tooth and something of that irritation might be coming through. Now they're open, to the dentist...)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 08:11 am (UTC)And yet it's only with those hated and abandoned people, his own peers from his own culture, that he can share his intellectual life. Since he's a writer, he's always making reports back to those people when he writes. He's internalized their perspective, because he writes in the English language, for English readers. He can shun them socially and sexually, but he can never escape them, however long he stays in self-imposed exile from their capital cities, London and New York.
And finally, he is judged as a writer by those capitals, not by Tokyo. As a lover... well, generations of gay young Japanese men know how he stands in that regard. I'm sure they won't be publishing their diaries in any language.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 12:34 pm (UTC)By which I mean "I think Richie's probably suffering from something I recognize all too well...", of course. Dunno why I'm calling him Keene!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 02:08 pm (UTC)Hey, I called him Keene first! Or did I? You'd think two Japan specialists could agree on not sharing the same name or at least have changed them to Donald Film and Donald Literature (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Keene) once they'd sorted out their area of interest.
literary expat in Japan
Date: 2006-09-14 08:08 am (UTC)Re: literary expat in Japan
Date: 2006-09-14 08:25 am (UTC)He's mentioned in the article.
Mitchell is the friend of an acquaintence in Hiroshima. Apparently he made very good use of his time in Japan to develop himself as a writer.
There are still many young aspiring writers who take advantage of the relatively good conditions for English teaching to jumpstart a career.
Donald Richie
Date: 2006-09-14 10:58 am (UTC)The Japan Journals covers over 50 years of the life of this American in Japan. It's a fascinating read, but probably not a lasting work of literature. The art is perhaps in the life itself and the country, rather than in the recording of it.
I wonder that perhaps a foreign artist who might produce a "lasting work" in New York finds that in Japan a more interesting work already exists - and he is living it.
Foreign writers in Japan tend to write about Japan. It's often non-fiction, and even when it is fiction the Japan aspect of the story that is centre stage. Does Japan itself trump art made by foreigners in Japan?
The Inland Sea is considered a classic in travel writing. Among books on Japan written by foreigners, I'd put it up there with Alan Booth's Looking for the Lost.
Re: Donald Richie
Date: 2006-09-14 11:47 am (UTC)Re: Donald Richie
Date: 2006-09-14 08:16 pm (UTC)Contrary to seemingly popular belief AIDS did and does exist in Japan.
Re: Donald Richie
Date: 2006-09-14 01:32 pm (UTC)And I'd same the same for Alan Booth's writing: good travel writing, but not literature.
Re: Donald Richie
Date: 2006-09-14 08:32 pm (UTC)I don't buy this argument. It reminds me of the time someone said there's so much crap art in San Francisco because it's easy to be overwhelmed by beautiful nature in this area. I'm calling BS on that one. If Japan trumps somebody's art it says more about the artist than Japanese culture.
Re: Donald Richie
Date: 2006-09-14 08:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 12:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 12:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 12:35 pm (UTC)The Richie case shows us that this isn't really a gender issue per se. If they were Japanese men, they would also not be contributing. I think the whole paradigm, the framework of what we think of as "lively intellectual debate" is just fundamentally non-Japanese. And, in turn, I'm totally frustrated by what seems to me the archetypal Japanese paradigm of public intellectual life: the panel discussion in which a curator interviews a guest (artist, film director, etc) with respectful, formulaic questions, and he responds with dull, measured answers. There's no overt disagreement, just a lot of humility and acknowledgement of one's debt to mentors and supporters. "Dick waving" is totally avoided, but the panel discussion ends as it began: with the same relationships of respect and obligation in place.
peace
Date: 2006-09-14 03:37 pm (UTC)Word has it he's now writing a new trilogy about Tokyo. Could be interesting.
Re: peace
Date: 2006-09-14 04:05 pm (UTC)Re: peace
Date: 2006-09-14 05:45 pm (UTC)Diet Library
Date: 2006-09-14 05:49 pm (UTC)Re: Diet Library
Date: 2006-09-14 08:49 pm (UTC)It's all about time
Date: 2006-09-14 10:17 pm (UTC)