All tomorrow's posts belong to Japanese ghosts

[imomus]

I spent an hour or so yesterday reading bits of Click Opera into a tape recorder for an NPR show that'll air sometime around Christmas. The Morning Edition show is running a feature on a book called Ultimate Blogs -- masterworks from the wild web, due from Vintage in early February, in which "former New York Times reporter and critic Sarah Boxer travels through the blogosphere (roughly 71 million blogs) and finds some masterpieces along the way". So be warned -- you are now officially reading a "masterwork", which takes its place alongside other masterblogs made by, for instance, "an 18-year old woman in Singapore who likes pink a lot" and "an illustrator who draws a tiny saga of a rodent and a ball of crap".

Click Opera is an unusual blog, and not just because, as I explained to NPR, it's a daily blast of "pajamahadeen kulturkritik". It's mainly unusual -- and getting more so -- because it's not in Japanese. According to an interesting article in the Washington Post, the dominant language of world blogging is now Japanese, with 37% of all blogs being in Japanese and only 28% in English. And, the way the article describes things, Click Opera is the complete opposite of the typical Japanese blog.



"Blogging in Japan," says journalist Blaine Harden, "is a far tamer beast than in the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world. Japan's conformist culture has embraced a technology that Americans often use for abrasive self-promotion and refashioned it as a soothingly nonconfrontational medium for getting along. Bloggers here shy away from politics and barbed language. They rarely trumpet their expertise. While Americans blog to stand out, the Japanese do it to fit in, blogging about small stuff: cats and flowers, bicycles and breakfast, gadgets and TV stars. Compared with Americans, they write at less length, they write anonymously, and they write a whole lot more often."

Cornelius' cousin, Technorati board member Joichi Ito, is drafted in to tell us that "in Japan, it is not socially acceptable to pursue fame". Instead, as Cornelius did, people blog about what they ate for lunch, or about the growth and development of their pet or child. They often do it anonymously, and their entries get zero comments. A food blogger tells the Post that she would never say anything negative about a restaurant she visits, no matter how bad the food was. "There is a part of me that feels sorry for the restaurant, if it were to lose business because of what I write," she said. "I don't want to influence the diners... Because my blog may be read by people I don't know, I am cautious about revealing my inner thoughts". A father recording his son's growth does so without once revealing his face (the Post reveals it, though, in the video that accompanies the article).

So let's get this straight: the majority of the world's blogs are in Japanese. They're written by people who don't reveal their names or their inner thoughts because they don't know who's reading and don't want to give offense. They don't show faces and don't get comments. Their tone is neutral, humble, self-effacing. "Karaoke for shy people" is how the Post describes this posting style, but to me it sounds positively ghostly. The blogosphere is haunted.



But the newspaper thinks that breast-beating lecture-style blogging -- the kind that got me into the Vintage book of "blog masterworks" -- is on the way out; Joichi Ito predicts that "in the United States, as mobile phones and wireless networks improve, blogging will, in effect, become more Japanese. That means constant connection to one's blogging device while writing shorter but more frequent blog postings. It also means less chest thumping about wicked politicians, less trumpeting of one's expertise and more chatty postings about cats, kids and lunch."

This is one of those sobering moments when I realize that the world may Japanize without me. I think Ito is right -- people in the West are already blogging in the bland, brief, phatic, ghostly way the Post describes as characteristically Japanese. I get Google Blogs Alerts daily to see what people are saying about me. Some of it is about me, the rest is references to the Greek god, the cafe in Puccini's opera La Boheme, the Mardi Gras chapter. And then there's some British person blogging under the name Momus. This person's posts are short and frequent -- and amazingly trivial. Recent headlines on Momus' blog: "I got a cold!" and "I put the computer on my head for ten seconds" and "Burnt the beef stew" and "The hair in my nose is getting longer!"

These hold-the-front-page revelations receive zero comments, but seem to serve some sort of therapeutic purpose for their author, who seems to have adopted the persona of the god of criticism without any intention to criticize anything beyond his or her own nasal hygiene. When I first started getting these alerts it crossed my mind that this other Momus might be some sort of spoof, some trolling mockery of my high-flown style. But if the Post is right, this is how all blogs will one day read -- or go unread. Blogging will become the sport of ghosts, a sort of inaudible karaoke for people too shy to sing.

"The diary habit runs so deep in Japan," explains Ito, "that it transformed the craft of blogging from an American-style lecture to a Japanese-style personal narrative." Enjoy the hectoring, lecturing and bragging while it lasts, then -- all tomorrow's posts (according to the Post, anyway) belong to shy, modest Japanese ghosts.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The sooner the better. I had lentils with rice today.

[tako-to-ama.livejournal.com]

Interesting post, as always. I'm moderately concerned by how anonymous the internet is, in spite of the fact that there are consistent claims that it "brings people together."

As an aside after that thinly veiled pretext, might I be so bold as to ask who the artist on the second is?

[tako-to-ama.livejournal.com]

Er, the first, I meant to say, with the painter. I can't seem to get my words out correctly.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

'Tis Hokusai!

[tako-to-ama.livejournal.com]

Argh, I ought have known, considering!

As an additional aside, I like your beard, even if it is just a tiny bit scraggly.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Actually, Hokusai is the second image. The first is by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

[vitiosuslepros.livejournal.com]

It would be interesting for you to do this (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15859351).

[deepblack.livejournal.com]

Yet another classic case of Japan stealing a Western convention and making it their own. And since the whole point of blogs (in the West, anyway) is to express yourself, usually with deep and introspective thoughts, they've once again turned the convention on its head and volleyed it back at the West like Pokemon.

[funazushi.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the Japanese blogging stylee goes back to the discussion of the other day about uncritical consumption. It sounds a bit like blogging in the moment. It also makes me think of the facebook phenomena sweeping North America at the moment where one gets updates concerning the minutia of your "friends" daily life. I was thinking that it might have something to do with the way that people seem these days to seek validation through celebrity. It became really noticeable in the mid nineties when everyone started dressing as though they were a rockstar. I think that perhaps blogging gives a vent to this deep seeded need in our culture to seek that sort of validation.

You'll of course notice that I'm posting under a faceless(well actually futami seaworld seal) pseudonym. Does this speak to some kind of latent Japanese sensiblity and/ or a desire for some kind of celebrity. Hmmm....

[jwm.livejournal.com]

As far as I've been able to tell, the majority of livejournal content has been quotidian from it's inception. As is Myspace, for the pages which aren't simple informational place holders for musicians.

Whereas blogger, Moveable Type and Wordpress installs tend to be seen as 'blogs', have hooks built in to ping Technorati, use tracebacks to see what other people are saying about them and so forth, and they tend to be the domain of Anglophone political writing.

I suspect folks on Livejournal, Bebo, and other such communities look on the Technorati political blog sphere as another country. One which, on LJ at least, we can import into our flist, but who's pingback and traceback bindings our out of reach, so we're not quite part of that set (or at least, there's technical barriers.

So I wonder whether Ulitmate Blogs wants to talk about blogging as any writing on the web activity, but as far as the Anglophone domain is concerned, ends up being concerned only with the Technorati sphere, and the few blogs from other sources that match the type.

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

Actually, the original blogs were not about deep and introspective thoughts. They were commonplace books and wunderkammer where we stashed interesting things we found online.

At roughly the same time (1999-2000,) there was an online journaling movement, but the genre conventions were different than weblogs.

Weblogs for aggrandizement of a political stance grew out of the reaction to the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, plus the availability of Blogger.com that reduced the barriers to entry for people with strong opinions, but no technical chops.

[signorphibes (from livejournal.com)]

social network and microblogging service twitter
http://twitter.com/
is adding a phantasmagorical twist to western blogging
SP

[(Anonymous)]

Now this is a hold-the-front-page revelation: you're for once critical of something coming out of Japan? Or at least not switch-your-brain-off enthusiastic. What next?

der.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I had linsentopf, which is the same thing without the rice!

But this blog would be much worse if that was all I told you, no?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

If you want to see my basic attitude towards Japan as a "choice of evils", der -- and you probably do -- here's the dilemma. I can celebrate Japan because I recognize my own views, tastes, habits and opinions in the culture (that would be narcissism, egoism and self-projection). Or I can celebrate it precisely for its difference from me (that would be orientalism, masochism and hypocrisy).

Being German, though, I suspect you might be able to see this "choice" as, instead, a dialectic.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, poor Stephin, he feels the need to insert some lines about race into everything he does now.

[(Anonymous)]

Given the nature of your blog, what on earth made you choose Livejournal as the host? I mean, its demographic is largely American teenage girls blogging anonymously about the minutiae of their domestic lives...

[(Anonymous)]

Sure, we all have idealism practically in our genes.

Don't know why, but to me it seems you're always crying "dialectic" when you're too lazy to think something through.

Anyway, let's celebrate our differences (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xBq6Ry6Eew)

der.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Last month I read in a Swedish newspaper that many people are scared out of the thought that "everyone's got a blog" that could "blacken" them for their actions against the owner of the blog.

Anyways:



You're not wearing a pajamas in this interview...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I actually had no idea about any "class system" or perceived hierarchy said to exist between the various blogging platforms. It seemed to work, that's all.

But then I'm a guy who's quite happy to wear teenage girls' clothes, so maybe this is the blogging equivalent!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Don't know why, but to me it seems you're always crying "dialectic" when you're too lazy to think something through.

And you really think Japan isn't something I've thought through? Good Christ, people are usually complaining that I'm not lazy enough when it comes to thinking Japan through!

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

I got to say that Livejournal has a much more community feel than other blogging services. People seem less anonymous here than at blogspot or the likewise. You can meet new people much easier too!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Pajamahadeen is a state of mind -- your mind wears the pajamas!

many people are scared out of the thought that "everyone's got a blog" that could "blacken" them for their actions against the owner of the blog.

Can you expand on this? I don't quite understand the fear.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Well, if my mind serves me right the article said that many people are afraid that someone who they happen to behave badly against happen to have a blog in which their "victim" will talk shit about them. Most occasional Swedish blogs that I've read often refers to others in second person.

People are more or less afraid that their future employers will google their name and find the blog entries. It was something similar about Facebook saying that people should be aware about what they do there since future employers could find out about it.

I haven't seen or heard about any case where someone never got a job because of a blog or the persons facebook account.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

Faceless pseudonym?


Why, whatever could you mean? I would NEVER do such a thing!



That's my tatemae and I'm STICKING TO IT.