In thinking about a blog for my first days in Japan I realized there were two obvious traps I wanted to avoid, first the pseudo-profundity and generalizations that come from first impressions and second, the genre of “those cuh-razy Japanese!” That being said, I have to share one little slice of Japanese pop culture I encountered early on.
Japanese television is notoriously bad and I’ve seen some things it is hard to resist finding ridiculous, but my attention was really grabbed when I came across the image of a row of dogs on an indoor tennis court, each sitting on a circle marked with a large paw print and accompanied by a man in a black body suit, hood and all, like ninja. Before each dog was a grill on which was being grilled a whole fish. The contest required the dogs simply to make no movements despite the beautifully grill-marked temptation before them. The winner was an adorable, young black lab, whose owner cried when the dog won. Other skill tests followed, including pushing a cart while standing on hind legs, with a plate of noodles mounted at the front of the cart as the “carrot.” This sequence included shots of the dogs training with wheelchairs and baby carriages.
This serious part of the show, so to speak, was broken up by comedic interludes, including a math contest between a dog and a child (with an instant replay of the dog barking four times for “2 x 2”!), and a tuxedoed man mixing a “cocktail” for a woman and a dog seated at a bar (the dog drinks only when appropriate). At one point the action cut to a panel of what I took to be celebrity judges, seated before a background of fairly enormous yellow, green, and pink plastic flames.
So: those crazy Japanese! But from jetlag and the malaise of early alienation I’ve also tuned in to a different kind of crazy, in the form of CNN International. My “favorite” moment so far came during a different kind of contest, one in which the news anchor moderated a debate between two women taking the respective sides of prosecutor and defender in some in-the-news legal cases. While discussing the possible role of one of the teenage boys being questioned in the on-going missing persons case in Aruba, the “prosecutor” came up with this gem: “You can’t jump to the conclusion that he didn’t do anything wrong!” I won’t go into their speculations on what the recently arrested suspect in the Idaho missing persons case –a registered sex offender—may or may not have done to the children he seems to have kidnapped.
A lot of the fun of cross-cultural observation comes from observing the ways in which people take seriously things that don’t seem very important to the observer. It’s less fun to watch the ways in which people trivialize things that are important. Part of belonging to a culture is, if not loving, then feeling implicated in its idiocies, in all the ways in which it spends its time, money, and emotional and intellectual energy on things that are not in any obvious sense worthwhile pursuits. Best in Show and Lost in Translation–two movies that seem to me definitive of, in a loose sort of way, for better or worse, a certain generation—both deal with the touchy liminal areas between self-seriousness and self-irony, the ways in which shampooing dogs or cocking a smile for a whiskey commercial are both so funny and so lonely. The deep affection viewers feel for Christopher Guest’s comedies is a reflection of the obviously sincere affection he feels for the absurd people who populate the funny little subcultures he mockuments. Lost in Translation is a trickier case, but I think the ultimate success of the movie –if it works for you—is tied to the extent to which Bill Murray stops experiencing the cultural difference of Japan as just an intensified enactment of his own alienation and learns to laugh with, instead of hollowly at, Japan, even if, perhaps even because, they might be laughing about different things.
Printculture members can review, edit, and delete their comments, create a member page, and don't have to fill in the silly form below. Sign up or log in.
