imomus | The Japanese are living in the Upper Trilesian Osnian 1950s

You know me by now; I'm Momus, the well-known web interpreter from the town of Bzrkyr in Upper Trilesian Osnia. To take a break from -- and freshen myself spiritually for -- my duties (studying the web, facilitating the improvement of my students' moral character, expounding the holy laws), I like to travel, and Japan has become a favourite destination. What I like about Japan is that it's different from Upper Trilesian Osnia, but not too different. Basically, today's Japanese are very much like Upper Trilesian Osnians in the 1950s.

Here I am at the "Hachiko" crossing in front of Shibuya Station. Now, a yokel would probably go crazy and dance around and say "Wow, look at the lights! Such big video screens!" But I take this crossing very much in my stride. We have a similar square in Bzrkyr with even more TV screens -- super-miniature ones the Japanese haven't even invented yet -- and even more people running around. In Bzrkyr you'd have seventeen realistic dogs yapping at your ankles rather than one lumpen statue dog sitting on a pedestal. In fact, compared to the Krsyzicnny Crossing, this place is tame and quiet; ideal for a bit of relaxation. (Give it a decade or so, though, and I expect it'll be indistinguishable from any Trilesian town.)

Ah, here's a cinema! Quaint! In Upper Trilesian Osnia we don't have these fleapits any more. We download joke videos from YouTube, household accidents, that sort of thing. If the Japanese still apparently have the attention span to sit for ninety minutes in a dark hall in a building draped with metal curtains, well, good on them, I say! They should enjoy it while they can, because -- if Upper Trilesian Osnian developments are anything to go by -- it'll soon be "curtains" for this type of entertainment.

A Trilesian also gets a good waft of nostalgia entering a place like Libro Books, in the basement of the Parco department store. Both department stores and magazines long ago disappeared from Upper Trilesian Osnia, replaced by outdoor markets and word of mouth, so this kind of place feels like a museum to us. When I took the picture above the "sales assistant" asked me what I was doing and I just chuckled. I was tempted to say: "Just wait a couple of decades, my friend! Photos like this will be the only evidence that this Libro place ever existed!" But, you know, the first law of time travel is that you're not allowed to influence the past. We have to leave it to the Japanese to discover the future in their own time, and their own way.

What could be nicer after a stressful day not-shopping (we Upper Trilesian Osnians are so over consumerism, though the Japanese are only starting to make the most tentative steps in this direction) than a cup of iced chai in a Jungle Cafe? I can't really say that without blushing a bit inside; back in the day, it's whispered, Upper Trilesian Osnia had dozens of these Jungle Cafes, places where people could escape the icy weather and indulge in fantasies of the tropics while sipping coconut juice. Later, of course, it was considered politically off-colour to talk about "the jungle" or create reductive masquerade versions of "cafes in hot places". Now in Upper Trilesian Osnia the cafes are freezing, as they bloody well ought to be. I expect Japanese cafes will be too, soon enough. In the meantime, relaxing on fantasy wicker furniture surrounded by fake jungle is, I have to confess, a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. Might as well enjoy it before the Japanese come to their senses.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From: (Anonymous)

You read Boing Boing, huh?

Marxy

From: (Anonymous)

Are you two going to hook up? Or has the feud gone too far?

From: (Anonymous)

hey unrelated. . . . what did you think of the documentary about you. . on netflix?

From:

milky-eyes.livejournal.com

:)

you changed into normal clothes...
hmmm,

this girl would take you to task.... so better not relax too much...

From: (Anonymous)

you joke, but real people suffer from very real cultural strictures.

From: (Anonymous)

Bzrkyr sounds like a real shithole. Take some progressive shit back there from Japan.

BTW, who's the guy in the glasses checking out the bookstore employee's ass?

And apparently, from the looks of Shibuya (?) scramble, they're still having a "dantou" in Yamato these days?

From: (Anonymous)

Momus, have you given any thought as to what you'll do when you finally go bald? You're getting pretty thin on top there! Will you resurrect the comedy wig? Or are going to be an out-and-proud alopecian?

From: (Anonymous)

Momus, I was listening to an interview with libertarian academic Kenneth Minogue the other day, and I was really struck by the fact that his main targets seemed to be exactly the same as your targets - namely political correctness, victim culture, human rights etc. Now, I'm familiar with your argument that just because the Nazis liked tennis doesn't mean we all have to hate tennis, so no need to trot that one out again. But I think something very different seems to be happening here. It's not just a few random bits & pieces that are being taken up by both you and the neo-libertarians. It's really core stuff. And not only that, the arguments are often argued from the same principles as well. Any comments?

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

I just read an interview with Minogue and disagreed with almost everything he said. I'm pro-EU, he's anti, I'm pro-redistribution, he's anti, I believe individual liberty is largely illusory, he's a libertarian, I'm a femininist, he's fairly misogynist (because he thinks women vote for nanny state socialism). He's dismissive of Marxism, I think it's the most relevant political philosophy of the last century.

His attacks on victim culture, PC and identity politics come from a very different place than mine. For me, PC is willful intellectual mediocrity, a refusal to look at inequalities which need to be addressed, a shrinkage of politics down into a new puritan etiquette where reparation is made, not in the real world, but in a new type of spun, euphemistic language.

Edited Date: 2009-12-15 02:50 pm (UTC)

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

To take an example, today's entry is clearly a spoof on the idea that some cultures are behind others. A PC response to this would be to ignore that idea completely and focus on the forecurls, and ask "Did any Jewish people [and that would read in the syntax as "victims"] get their feelings hurt by these pictures?"

Behind that thought would be, I think, a series of associations which enact, under the sign of "anti-prejudice", all the same semantic manoeuvres that would be enacted under the sign of "prejudice". This is what I mean when I say that anti-sexism contains too much sexism. The PC view would be that Jews are victims, but -- on a deeper level -- the assumption would be that me "being semitic" in the photos was me "being anti-semitic". This is, it seems to me, the secret and insane logic behind PC: that being semitic is being anti-semitic, being female is being anti-female, being black is racist, and so on. This happens because PC does no work to deconstruct stigma; rather, it accepts that minorities are inherently stigmatic entities, and devotes all its effort to concealing (and therefore clumsily "revealing") that, like John Cleese hissing "Don't mention the war!"

From:

milky-eyes.livejournal.com

SO TRUE.... (although my meager mind wasnt able to grasp at the clearly layed out spoof... but the explination is spot on)

like John Cleese hissing "Don't mention the war!"

:) very funny and true

this idea seems to be THE stumbling block for 99% people... it's maddening to watch.

From: (Anonymous)

But isn't the idea that you can't say one culture is ahead of another just a way of hiding inequalities that need to be addressed? Isn't your culturist outlook, in other words, very like PC?

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