Lost In Translation

Cultural Relativism=Lousy Excuse

Is it just me or are the Japanese particularly sensitive to criticism. It seems that every time they are criticized, they resort to the cultural relativism argument. Parental abduction? Cultural difference. Eating dolphins? Cultural difference. 

Here are some quotes from the mixed reactions from the documentary “The Cove” about the dolphin slaughter in Taijima:

Junko Inoue, a resident of Saitama, said she found the final scene, where dozens of dolphins trapped in a hidden cove are speared by fishermen, turning the water blood red, “shocking.” But she didn’t think the hunt should be stopped entirely. “There are a lot of cultural differences in people’s eating habits,” she said.



“Westerners say it’s OK to kill and eat cows, but not dolphins,” said Hiroshi Hatajima, a 42-year-old office worker from Tokyo. “That kind of special treatment isn’t going to register with a lot of Japanese. We have to eat animals to survive. It’s a cultural clash.” The film, while well-made, “comes across as somewhat propaganda-like,” he said.


Sorry, eating dolphins is NOT like eating beef. I like to think that I can admit that America is not perfect and needs a lot of reforms both politically and culturally. We drive uneconomic cars too much, eat large portions of unhealthy food, and have some dubious policies in regards to international politics and health care.

Anyway, I found Sawa Kurotani, author of “Behind The Paper Screen” column in The Daily Yomiuri, to be another cultural apologist, which is troubling since she is an anthropologist by training. In her latest column she questions the westerns assumptions about “hikikomori” (young people who withdraw from society and stay shut in their homes):

I was thinking of my memory of being shut out, as I read Michael Zielenziger's Shutting out the Sun, which centers on hikikomori, or "shut-ins" who literally confine themselves in their bedrooms and avall social contact for months and years. Zielenziger's analysis, albeit well researched, is not without problems of its own. His perspective on hikikomori is explicitly and implicitly influenced by his own (read "American" or "Western") ideals of individualism, self-reliance and independence, and as a result, he labels hikikomori as a uniquely "Japanese" phenomenon. However, he does make an important suggestion that the uchi-soto distinction and the extreme concern for maintaining sekentei or public appearance tightly surround the private sphere of uchi, and once hikikomori shut themselves in, there is no way out of this self-imposed seclusion.

If I remember correctly, he even surveyed other Asian countries and lo and behold-it IS a uniquely “Japanese” phenomenon. In fact I saw a BBC report which also came to that conclusion-which also supports her western-centric view. But instead of addressing to how to combat it or agree that it is counterproductive to a society that won’t have enough workers in their near future to run its economy, she cites lack of understanding of the culture as the focus of the article.

I think there is something akin between my childish craving for the safety of home and the decision of young adults to cocoon themselves inside their uchi. To put it another way, I suspect that the impulse of hikikomori to shut themselves in may be an infantile reaction to the difficulty of childhood-to-adulthood transition and an avoidance of adult social relationships that are not always pleasant or easy. In fact, many anthropological studies document the difficulty of transition to adulthood experienced in many societies and the ubiquity of elaborate rituals to mark this critical transition. If so, might teenagers and young adults from different social and cultural backgrounds have similar experiences and thus at least a degree of empathy for the plight of Japanese hikikomori? While I had no way of truly testing this notion, I could at least find out what young Americans thought of this. I assigned the book for my "Japanese Society and Culture" class, to see what my students might have to say about this.

Perhaps I should not be surprised, but no one in my class seemed to relate to hikikomori whatsoever. My students were first perplexed, and then upset, that seemingly bright and talented young people would choose to shut themselves up in their rooms and entirely depend on their parents to take care of them. It was very difficult for them to wrap their heads around the idea that there is a place on Earth where expressing one's individuality was discouraged, where being "different" in any way can result in such harsh bullying by their peers. They discussed in disbelief how Japanese parents do not express their affection much and are unable or unwilling to intervene in their children's lives in decisive and effective ways. They are also shocked at how extreme forms of bullying are allowed to go on in Japanese schools.

Their responses are, more than anything else, telling of the social and cultural environment in which these American students were raised. They were socialized with firm beliefs in individuality and independence. They place a great deal of importance in the emotional ties among family members, but they also define such ties as connection between individuals, which need to be regularly expressed and affirmed, and the kind of amae or "indulgence" typical in Japanese family is not considered appropriate for adult children.

I really find this concept of “amae” really counterproductive to critical thinking and autonomy, which many of my students lack in addressing their studies as college students. I would say this is on par with the culture of acceptance in America where it is OK to be fat or that everyone should get to pass because everyone is good at something. These are not productive norms and should be challenged.

Their comments also point to a disciplinarian approach of the contemporary American school system. Despite the common perception to the contrary, American schools, in fact, closely monitor students, ready to quickly intervene and strictly punish any antisocial behavior. Most importantly, they are taught to look outwardly, beyond the safety of private family sphere and the comfort of a narrow but familiar world, and carve out their own niches as unique individuals in a broader social universe. Not that all of my students would achieve these ideals, but shutting themselves in the privacy of their homes is not even a viable option in their worldview.

And that’s not a good thing? If you quit your job and stop going to school in America you’re going to get kicked out on the curb. I can’t think of many other societies that have NEETS (people not in employment, education or training) either. This is another example of the permissive culture and it’s “amae.” In America we call NEETS, bums or freeloaders. 

Nara Souvenirs

For those who didn't see this post on Facebook: chocolate deer bogers and chocolate covered deer turds. See the cute deers blowing them out their noses and asses on the packages.

Nara: Deer Etiquette

I loved these signs warning visitors: 1) to keep their dogs under control 2) not to feed the deer garbage 3) not to tease the deer  

 

This one warns you: 1) not to get too close 2) that angry deer are dangerous!

Nara 2009

I just spent the last weekend with colleagues in Nara, in Kansai near Osaka and Kyoto-former capital of Japan, for the JALT College and Universities Educators Conference. The picture above of the giant buddah is from the world famous Todaiji temple, an UNESCO site. I haven't been there for about 12 years, so I didn't remember much about the town but the monuments are still pretty impressive.

 

Old Nara JR train station.

 

Beautiful weather on Sunday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Todaiji temple-the largest wooden structure in the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trust In Communication

Interesting article from Kate Elwood's Cultural Conundrums column:

The tricky thing about trust is that it is often related to implicit expectations. No one wants to place their confidence in a robber, obviously, but what are they banking on? Communication researchers Masami Nishishiba and L. David Ritchie note that people typically have a preconceived notion of what constitutes a trustworthy person, based on previous experiences. When getting to know new people, they are measured against this fixed view fairly early on in communicative interactions, either succeeding in fulfilling the criteria for trustworthiness or falling short. Yet these notions may vary according to culture, resulting in skewed assessments.

Nishishiba and Ritchie provided 121 U.S. and 115 Japanese businesspeople with 30 words on cards related to trustworthiness in the workplace and asked them to sort the cards into at least two groups and no more than 10 groups based on similarity. The researchers then conducted an analysis on the selected groups. They identified five Japanese clusters: "organizational commitment," "responsible behavior," "professional competence," "relational quality" and "communication." The four U.S. clusters were "responsible behavior," "professional competence," "relational quality" and "integrity." The three clusters in common--"responsible behavior," "professional competence" and "relational quality"-- had a few differences in word membership but overall were similar between the U.S. and Japanese groups.

However, nothing similar to the Japanese clusters of "organizational commitment" and "communication" could be found in the U.S. data, nor was anything resembling the U.S. cluster "integrity" present in the Japanese data. Nishishiba and Ritchie further examined the semantic relationships among the words in the clusters. They conclude that for Japanese businesspeople the relationship of the individual to the group is key, whereas for U.S. businesspeople, a notion of integrity detached from organizational ties is most vital.

Nishishiba and Ritchie point out that if an American says something like, "I will not sacrifice my personal integrity no matter what," they may be perceived as untrustworthy by a Japanese colleague who views trustworthiness in terms of commitment to the company. Similar negative judgments on the part of Americans may be made about Japanese coworkers based on a different notion of trustworthiness.

Meidaimae Matsuri

I think summers over-when did it start?

Japan Related Links

At the NY Times there's an interesting article about the cultural differences a mother prepares her bicultural Japanese son for when he goes to camp in America:  My Un-American Son.

Here's another from the NY Times about the high quality bakeries in Tokyo: Bread As Fashion, Tokyo Style.

There's a documentary called, Yasukuni, of the controversy of Yasukuni shrine that's now play ing in America-review courtesy of the NY Times.

Predictably, The Cove, a documentary about the dolphin slaughter that takes place yearly in Taiji, Japan is being shut out of Japan. From F*ckedgaijin.

Deadline Hollywood has just received this note from Fisher Stevens [Producer]:

I have been involved with many films over the years as an actor, director and producer. But working on The Cove has been one of my proudest moments in 28 years of being in the business. Getting the opportunity to make an exciting film, and one that can actually make a difference, is why I got into filmaking in the first place. That is why I was so disappointed that our film, after winning awards in the last 13 film festivals it had entered, was rejected by the Tokyo Film Festival, whose theme this year is green. Not that it is that much of a shocker, but the main goal for making the film was to shut down the cove in Taijii, Japan, where 2,300 dolphins are killed every year. Most of the Japanese population has no idea that this is going on. What better way to let them know than to premiere it on the green carpet of this year's festival. We have sold the film in over 20 countries and sadly have yet to find any distributor who will go near the film in Japan. We will continue to do our best to get the film out in Japan but it is a shame that, after being accepted in festivals all over the world, that we couldn't get into this one.

Sincerely,

Fisher Stevens

What I'm Reading About Japan

There's an exaggerated piece on otaku culture in the NY Times Magazine this week:

Nisan didn’t mean to fall in love with Nemutan. Their first encounter — at a comic-book convention that Nisan’s gaming friends dragged him to in Tokyo — was serendipitous. Nisan was wandering aimlessly around the crowded exhibition hall when he suddenly found himself staring into Nemutan’s bright blue eyes. In the beginning, they were just friends. Then, when Nisan got his driver’s license a few months later, he invited Nemutan for a ride around town in his beat-up Toyota. They went to a beach, not far from the home he shares with his parents in a suburb of Tokyo. It was the first of many road trips they would take together. As they got to know each other, they traveled hundreds of miles west — to Kyoto, Osaka and Nara, sleeping in his car or crashing on friends’ couches to save money. They took touristy pictures under cherry trees, frolicked like children on merry-go-rounds and slurped noodles on street corners. Now, after three years together, they are virtually inseparable. “I’ve experienced so many amazing things because of her,” Nisan told me, rubbing Nemutan’s leg warmly. “She has really changed my life.”

It gets the take down at Mutant Frog:

Seeing as it comes from America’s most prestigious and influential news outlet, the article has already been widely read (see here for a Japanese translation of a Korean-language summary), and reactions have ranged from uncritical acceptance of the reporting (wtf is wrong with Japan?!) to absolute incredulity (she just ripped off an Internet meme and borrowed from WaiWai so this “phenomenon” is completely overblown and is an example of the NYT exploiting Japan for cheap thrills).

Then there's a separate article in The NY Times claiming that hostessing has become respectable due to the economy-color me suspicious:

The women who pour drinks in Japan’s sleek gentlemen’s clubs were once shunned because their duties were considered immodest: lavishing adoring (albeit nonsexual) attention on men for a hefty fee.

But with that line of work, called hostessing, among the most lucrative jobs available to women and with the country neck-deep in a recession, hostess positions are increasingly coveted, and hostesses themselves are gaining respectability and even acclaim. Japan’s worst recession since World War II is changing mores.

“More women from a diversity of backgrounds are looking for hostess work,” said Kentaro Miura, who helps manage seven clubs in Kabuki-cho, Tokyo’s glittering red-light district. “There is less resistance to becoming a hostess. In fact, it’s seen as a glamorous job.”

But behind this trend is a less-than-glamorous reality. Employment opportunities for young women, especially those with no college education, are often limited to low-paying, dead-end jobs or temp positions.
Even before the economic downturn, almost 70 percent of women ages 20 to 24 worked jobs with few benefits and little job security, according to a government labor survey. The situation has worsened in the recession.

For that reason, a growing number of Japanese women seem to believe that work as a hostess, which can easily pay $100,000 a year, and as much as $300,000 for the biggest stars, makes economic sense.

Even part-time hostesses and those at the low end of the pay scale earn at least $20 an hour, almost twice the rate of most temp positions.

In a 2009 survey of 1,154 high school girls, by the Culture Studies Institute in Tokyo, hostessing ranked No. 12 out of the 40 most popular professions, ahead of public servant (18) and nurse (22).

Then there's this one from Japan Today translated from a Japanese weekly in which women are getting paid to do wifely duties like have sex or make lunch for their husbands:

What’s that you say? Wives charging their husbands for basic services --- like preparing a boxed lunch to take to the office or dispensing a haircut? Or when making love??

Well, think of them as business-to-business transactions, advises Aera (Aug 3).

“If it helps bring order to a chaotic household, something may change in husband-wife relationships as well,” observes a 42-year-old gent identified only as Kimura, who began paying his wife 400 yen to make him an “obento” to carry daily to the office. Considering he receives 50,000 per month for pocket money, taking his own lunch translates into daily savings of about 500 yen.

A 45-year-old chap named Kobayashi pays his better half to trim his hair. “You pay your barber 3,000 yen; I’ll do it for 1,000,” she proposed. Now, of two monthly trips to the barber shop for a total outlay of 6,000 yen, he now pays 2,000 yen and pockets the remaining 4,000.

Risk Management In Japan

Sawa Kurotani explains the excessive fear of foreign epidemics in her column Behind The Paper Screen for The Daily Yomiuri:

As soon as the new-flu outbreak was reported in late April, I began to hear from family and friends in Japan who all expressed concern for my well-being and inquired how much the epidemic was affecting our lives over here in the United States. I appreciated their concerns, but had little to report. Experts appeared on national and local news and warned of the possibility of a global pandemic, and I was aware of a few confirmed cases in my area. But overall, things were pretty normal around here, and there were very few signs of the outbreak in my everyday life. People went about their daily business, and no one seemed to be running to the drugstore to grab masks and hand sanitizers off the shelves, as many did in Japan.

If my Japanese acquaintances were taken aback by this lack of alarm, I was equally surprised by the extreme caution immediately triggered in Japan. One of my colleagues arrived at Narita Airport with a group of students on the very day the outbreak was announced. She and her students went through a detailed health check, and for the first 10 days of their stay in Japan, they received phone calls daily from health officials to make sure that no one was falling ill. I heard of the passengers of an entire flight being detained at Narita while a sick passenger was cleared of new flu, and saw news footage from Japan of people wearing face masks and bottles of hand sanitizer everywhere in public places.

I know that, in our globalized world, distance does not protect us from a pandemic. Even so, it struck me that people in Japan seemed much more concerned about a flu pandemic originating in Mexico than people who live in southern California, a state that is not only closer, but also has much heavier traffic between it and the origin of the new flu.

***

While there may be some cultural differences at work, I largely attribute this to variations in the social environment of Japan and the United States. Living in a densely populated urban environment where most people rely on public transportation, residents of Japan spend, on average, much more time in crowded public places than their counterparts in the United States. Given that daily exposure to unknown pathogens is unavoidable in such a social environment, the best an individual can do to reduce the risk of illness is to observe those precautions more closely.

There are also important geohistorical factors, too. In the Japanese response to new flu and other epidemics, the idea of mizugiwa, or literally "the edge of water," as the first line of defense was key, and many of the initial measures against the flu focused on stopping it at the shore--for example, strict health inspection of incoming flights from affected areas, quarantine of individuals suspected to be infected and tracking visitors for 10 days after entry.

The critical importance of mizugiwa was also evident in the sudden loss of interest in screening for incoming pathogens once the first line of defense was breached and domestic transmission was confirmed.

Mizugiwa as the first--and the most critical--line of defense is valid only in an island nation where external influence always arrives "at the shore." The long history of sakoku (closed country) isolation further reaffirmed this worldview, when a threatening presence from outside was safely kept at a distance--as on Nagasaki's Dejima island, to which foreign contact was restricted during the sakoku days--from the main population.

Related to these geohistorical factors is the culturally important distinction between uchi (inside) and soto (outside), and the association of uchi with safety and comfort as opposed to soto with danger and dirtiness. As Japan's national boundary is clearly demarcated by water (or mizu), guarding mizugiwa equals protecting uchi, the safe haven inside, from external threats, such as incoming pathogens.

The uniqueness of this view becomes clear when we consider continental nations where outside influences come from all directions, not only by sea, but also by land and through rivers and lakes, where boundaries are permeable and connections with the outside are inevitable and even beneficial.

In Europe, these routes made possible active commerce and the exchange of knowledge. In the United States, where the great majority of the population originated from outside the continent, arriving at the shore meant finding a new home and building a better life. If a good life depends on exposure to the outside, one learns to accept certain risks involved in such contact. Until relatively recently, Japan never had to do this.

Kazuyo Katsuma, in her recent book Kaisha ni Jinsei o Azukeruna (Do not entrust your life to your company), portrays the Japanese as unaccustomed to managing "risks." She argues that most Japanese erroneously tend to equate risuku, or "risk," with kiken, or "danger." Rather, she clarifies, risk means the possibility of damage or loss, weighed against an expected return. Implicit in this definition of risk is the process of deciding whether the potential benefits outweigh any possibility of damage or loss, and an active agent (a person or a group) who makes this decision.

Through Japan's rapid modernization, risk-taking decisions in all aspects of life were nationalized and concentrated in the hands of the elite, whose primary function was to make decisions for everyone else. The reaction to new flu was consistent with this pattern.

Here in the United States, much of the risk assessment is left to the individuals, and it shows in the diverse ways in which people reacted to new flu. Each of us decided individually what the realistic chance of catching it was and chose appropriate measures to reduce the risk.

On Japan: What I'm Reading

1. A NY Times article on the impressive architecture of Toyo Ito:

AFTER nearly four decades of work Toyo Ito has earned a cult following among architects around the world, although he is little known outside his home country, Japan. Through his strange and ethereal buildings, which range from modest houses for the urban recluse to a library whose arched forms have the delicacy of paper cutouts, he has created a body of work almost unmatched in its diverse originality.

Over the past decade, as the popularity of architecture has boomed and many of his contemporaries have jetted around the globe piling up one commission after another, Mr. Ito has largely remained on the sidelines. He is rarely mentioned in conversations about semicelebrities like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid or Jacques Herzog. He has repeatedly been passed over for the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor, in favor of designers with much thinner résumés. Even in his native country he is overshadowed by Tadao Ando, whose brooding concrete structures have become a cliché of contemporary Japanese architecture.

Mr. Ito’s status may finally be about to change. On Thursday a stadium he designed for the World Games will be unveiled to a global audience in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Its pythonlike form should produce as much a stir, at least within architectural circles, as did the Bird’s Nest stadium by Mr. Herzog and Pierre de Meuron when it was unveiled a year ago at the Beijing Olympics.

2. There's another article on the new stadium designed by Ito in Taiwan.

3. Slate's Daniel Gross on the declining birth rate in Japan:

But social engineering is proving more challenging. Japan's population peaked in 2004 at about 127.8 million and is projected to fall to 89.9 million by 2055. The ratio of working-age to elderly Japanese fell from 8-to-1 in 1975 to 3.3-to-1 in 2005 and may shrivel to 1.3-to-1 in 2055. "In 2055, people will come to work when they have time off from long-term care," said Kiyoaki Fujiwara, director of economic policy at the Japan Business Federation.

Such a decline is cataclysmic for an indebted country that values infrastructure and personal service. (Who is going to maintain the trains, pay for social benefits, slice sushi at the Tsukiji fish market?) The obvious answers—encourage immigration and a higher birthrate—have proved difficult, even impossible, for this conservative society. In the United States, foreign-born workers make up 15 percent of the work force; in Japan, it's 1 percent. And, official protestations to the contrary, they're not particularly welcome. One columnist I met compared the standard Japanese attitude toward immigrants to that of French right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen. In the 1990s, descendants of Japanese who had emigrated to South America early in the 20^th century returned to replace retiring factory workers. Now that unemployment is on the rise, Japan is offering to pay the airfare for those who wish to return home.

Japan doesn't particularly want to import new citizens, but it doesn't seem to want to manufacture them, either. It's become harder to support a family on a single income, and young people are living at home for longer. And Japan isn't particularly friendly to working mothers—pre-K day care is not widely available, and the phrase work-life balance doesn't seem to have a Japanese translation. (The directory of the Japanese Business Federation, a showcase of old guys in suits, makes the Republican Senate caucus look like a Benetton ad.) The upshot: a chronically low birthrate. Too often, demographic change was described to me as a zero-sum game—rather than being seen as potential job creators, women and immigrants are often seen as taking jobs from men.