Such a wonderful post. I think I read it but was too preoccupied to comment at the time.
I first arrived in Japan at the end of 1974, when the oil shock was putting an end to the economic miracle (1960s Tokyo was exactly the time of Japan's Economic Miracle, contrary to your initial sentence.) I think much of the mood and feeling of that time was still around when I arrived so it feels familiar to me.
Nathan's comment, "For years I had been troubled by the possibility that I possessed the wherewithal to distinguish myself only as an exotic foreigner in an insular island country. I was determined to prove myself on home ground" also sounds familiar. As a gaijin you are cocooned in your foreignness, never proving yourself by world standards but only as the much-indulged Westerner. I don't know if things have changed in recent years, but that was pretty much a general feeling then.
Buruma's quote, "What I did fear was to catch a dose of gaijinitis, and become obsessed with the often imaginary slights that go with being pegged to one’s ethnicity. And so I said goodbye to Japan", speaks to the same insecurity, being constantly analysed as an "outsider" rather than on your own terms.
As a foreigner in Japan I developed my own reactions to the pigeonholing, and to Japanese claims to "uniqueness", which in retrospect feel to me like a defence mechanism to shield their culture from standards set by the West.
It was so lovely to wake up this morning to this comment. I read these memoirs as part of a memoir class that I was taking working on my own Japan story. So I was also struck not just by how much these memoirs resonated with Japan back when there was not a lot of English or mass tourism in any way but also just that the writing of memoir itself was so different. All three books are old fashioned in tone and concept —more like a autobiography than current day American style memoir, which reads more like a novel and tries to argue or say something… it’s kind of relaxing just to read a book or somebody’s telling you about their life and it’s usually somehow extraordinary, but not over the top…. Did you read Polly Bartons memoir about translation in Japanese language? It’s called 50 sounds. If you ever read it, I would love to know what you think. I don’t think it was ever discussed at language, hat, or language log.
"50 sounds" (五十音, of course!) sounds like a very interesting book! At the moment I'm not reading books for pleasure, firstly because the Internet consumes and ravages the time that once might have been spent doing leisurely reading, secondly because I've condemned myself to reading in that often arid field known as "linguistics".
To continue what I said above, I think I partly belong to the group that "left Japan", partly related to the reasons that Nathan and Buruma give. However, I never wanted to "prove myself"; it was more dissatisfaction at the clubby narrowness of the modern Japanese version of the world. One reason I left for China was to gain a broader perspective on "East Asia" beyond the Japanese one, as well as understand one part of the roots of modern Japanese culture. China was a shock in many ways and it took a long time to reconcile my feelings and views (try working in a Sino-Japanese joint venture!). Gaining a balance is difficult.... Still, I have now figured out that I feel more comfortable in agrarian-urban cultures than in steppe-nomadic ones!
Sorry to repeat myself but you could write such a fascinating memoir. I've never met anymore who spoke these three languages. Kevin (from the translators group--you might know him) translates Korea, Chinese and Japanese. I am reading the most interesting book right now called How to Speak Whale. Am especially enjoying the chapter on google translate and machine learning of natural languages.... it is pretty interesting.
Korean, Chinese, and Japanese are a natural group, especially for their cultural closeness and commercial opportunities. At one time I was interested in learning Vietnamese, as the other member of the Sinospheric languages. But I ended up doing Mongolian, which is, I think, more interesting for its grammatical closeness to Japanese but non-membership of the Sinosphere. It’s a glimpse of what Japanese MIGHT have been like if Japan hadn’t adopted Chinese culture wholesale.
I always seem to get flung to the north where my natural inclinations tend to the south. My first stint in Japan was at Hokkaido University, which is strong on Northeast Asian / trans-Asian languages. And then, when I was in China, I ended up going north after living in Hainan and flirting with Vietnamese.
I forgot to mention one of the phenomena of the 1980s -- the "gaitare" or "gaijin tarento" (gaijin talent, a type of foreigner who gained great fame in the Japanese entertainment industry through their ability to speak Japanese and their willingness to perform that role shamelessly). The most famous gaitare were Kent Gilbert and Kent Dericott. Japanese often liked to compare me to them since I was a relatively outgoing gaijin who spoke the language fairly well.
I saw Kent Dericott just once in a live setting. I was struck by the way he sat at the centre of a long table of Japanese and confidently, completely, and utterly dominated the conversation. I am sure he is rich now from all the money he made, but I absolutely loathed people like that. Even though their heyday was a bit (but not much) after Nathan and Buruma's time, I think you can understand how they might have become inclined towards leaving the country given Japan's tendency to lionise performing gaijin.
When my ex-husband was working in southern Africa I met one of his colleagues who met and married a woman from Burkina Faso and then they traveled back to his hometown and very rural snow country , somewhere in the northern part of Honshu. She immediately picked up the language reading and writing and her speaking was outstanding so of course NHK used to follow her around and feature her and feel good pieces about this woman who became such an important part of her community because the people where she lived absolutely loved her and she was PTA president and other things in the neighborhood. Her case is so different from the “talent” they are talking about! I know they have those in Korea and China as well they are definitely in a different category. I haven’t been back to Japan since 2011 and I don’t think I will go back or it’s unlikely. I wonder if I would recognize that because from everything I’ve heard mass tourism has definitely arrived. In the entire two decades I live there I don’t think I ever saw a tour bus full of foreign tourist before and except for in Asakusa I really never saw groups of tourists. So things have changed and I wonder if they still have the gaijin tarento
I have been back a couple of times recently, but not for long enough to feel confident commenting on whether Japan has really changed. However, the impression I've picked up is that, while much remains the same, there has been a change in Japan's openness to people from other cultures. I suspect that this is partly due to the greater number of Japanese travelling abroad, not on package tours but as independent travellers. People seem to be travelling more often to more different destinations, and many even spend time living abroad. People are just much more familiar with foreign travel and foreign countries than they would have been back then. I don't think package tours from abroad would make a difference, but the greater number of foreigners (not just Westerners) living and working in Japan has possibly also played a role.
Another difference is social changes. So many women are postponing marriage and childbearing and living their lives how they want. That means that they are no longer confined in that traditional box. Lots do travel overseas. As for men, the fact that society can no longer guarantee them a satisfactory salaryman life (the career escalator) has also changed the way they live, although this has possibly led to the opposite phenomenon of growing numbers of otaku.
All the above is idle speculation, given that I don't actually live in Japan and haven't for many years, but I do think that Japan is now very different from the "high economic growth" era of the 1960s that Nathan and Buruma saw. And, of course, that society was a product of much longer processes, including the nation-building frenzy of Meiji Japan with its creation of a Japanese "identity", the ultimately disastrous attempt to defy the Western powers and extend Japanese control to the Asian mainland, and the sudden subjection to the United States in the postwar period that led to the obsession with the economy.
I think there's something to be said for mastering a language and culture without losing oneself to it. It may depend on how comfortable one can be as an outsider. Thanks for bringing these three memoirs together, as more than the sum of their parts.
Tremendously interesting perspective! Thank you, Leanne, for reading these books and putting them together in context like this. Also timely for me personally, as I am leaving Japan next year and am in the painful process of culling my bookshelf.
Thank you so much for reading! His book really stood the test of time I recently reread it and I felt everything was still really valid and interesting even though so many years have passed so much has stayed the same in Japan.
Very interesting reading. I read Buruma's work of Japan & Germany. For me too, Japan is something of the past. I do remember riots in Tokyo, smashed windows and snake-dancing students and police lashing out at them. A few years later, I found myself in the same room with a Japanese high-jacker, doing the interpretation for Swedish police. An eerie feeling.
Such a wonderful post. I think I read it but was too preoccupied to comment at the time.
I first arrived in Japan at the end of 1974, when the oil shock was putting an end to the economic miracle (1960s Tokyo was exactly the time of Japan's Economic Miracle, contrary to your initial sentence.) I think much of the mood and feeling of that time was still around when I arrived so it feels familiar to me.
Nathan's comment, "For years I had been troubled by the possibility that I possessed the wherewithal to distinguish myself only as an exotic foreigner in an insular island country. I was determined to prove myself on home ground" also sounds familiar. As a gaijin you are cocooned in your foreignness, never proving yourself by world standards but only as the much-indulged Westerner. I don't know if things have changed in recent years, but that was pretty much a general feeling then.
Buruma's quote, "What I did fear was to catch a dose of gaijinitis, and become obsessed with the often imaginary slights that go with being pegged to one’s ethnicity. And so I said goodbye to Japan", speaks to the same insecurity, being constantly analysed as an "outsider" rather than on your own terms.
As a foreigner in Japan I developed my own reactions to the pigeonholing, and to Japanese claims to "uniqueness", which in retrospect feel to me like a defence mechanism to shield their culture from standards set by the West.
It was so lovely to wake up this morning to this comment. I read these memoirs as part of a memoir class that I was taking working on my own Japan story. So I was also struck not just by how much these memoirs resonated with Japan back when there was not a lot of English or mass tourism in any way but also just that the writing of memoir itself was so different. All three books are old fashioned in tone and concept —more like a autobiography than current day American style memoir, which reads more like a novel and tries to argue or say something… it’s kind of relaxing just to read a book or somebody’s telling you about their life and it’s usually somehow extraordinary, but not over the top…. Did you read Polly Bartons memoir about translation in Japanese language? It’s called 50 sounds. If you ever read it, I would love to know what you think. I don’t think it was ever discussed at language, hat, or language log.
"50 sounds" (五十音, of course!) sounds like a very interesting book! At the moment I'm not reading books for pleasure, firstly because the Internet consumes and ravages the time that once might have been spent doing leisurely reading, secondly because I've condemned myself to reading in that often arid field known as "linguistics".
To continue what I said above, I think I partly belong to the group that "left Japan", partly related to the reasons that Nathan and Buruma give. However, I never wanted to "prove myself"; it was more dissatisfaction at the clubby narrowness of the modern Japanese version of the world. One reason I left for China was to gain a broader perspective on "East Asia" beyond the Japanese one, as well as understand one part of the roots of modern Japanese culture. China was a shock in many ways and it took a long time to reconcile my feelings and views (try working in a Sino-Japanese joint venture!). Gaining a balance is difficult.... Still, I have now figured out that I feel more comfortable in agrarian-urban cultures than in steppe-nomadic ones!
Sorry to repeat myself but you could write such a fascinating memoir. I've never met anymore who spoke these three languages. Kevin (from the translators group--you might know him) translates Korea, Chinese and Japanese. I am reading the most interesting book right now called How to Speak Whale. Am especially enjoying the chapter on google translate and machine learning of natural languages.... it is pretty interesting.
Korean, Chinese, and Japanese are a natural group, especially for their cultural closeness and commercial opportunities. At one time I was interested in learning Vietnamese, as the other member of the Sinospheric languages. But I ended up doing Mongolian, which is, I think, more interesting for its grammatical closeness to Japanese but non-membership of the Sinosphere. It’s a glimpse of what Japanese MIGHT have been like if Japan hadn’t adopted Chinese culture wholesale.
I always seem to get flung to the north where my natural inclinations tend to the south. My first stint in Japan was at Hokkaido University, which is strong on Northeast Asian / trans-Asian languages. And then, when I was in China, I ended up going north after living in Hainan and flirting with Vietnamese.
It’s absolutely fascinating! Every time you talk about it I just want to learn more!
I forgot to mention one of the phenomena of the 1980s -- the "gaitare" or "gaijin tarento" (gaijin talent, a type of foreigner who gained great fame in the Japanese entertainment industry through their ability to speak Japanese and their willingness to perform that role shamelessly). The most famous gaitare were Kent Gilbert and Kent Dericott. Japanese often liked to compare me to them since I was a relatively outgoing gaijin who spoke the language fairly well.
I saw Kent Dericott just once in a live setting. I was struck by the way he sat at the centre of a long table of Japanese and confidently, completely, and utterly dominated the conversation. I am sure he is rich now from all the money he made, but I absolutely loathed people like that. Even though their heyday was a bit (but not much) after Nathan and Buruma's time, I think you can understand how they might have become inclined towards leaving the country given Japan's tendency to lionise performing gaijin.
When my ex-husband was working in southern Africa I met one of his colleagues who met and married a woman from Burkina Faso and then they traveled back to his hometown and very rural snow country , somewhere in the northern part of Honshu. She immediately picked up the language reading and writing and her speaking was outstanding so of course NHK used to follow her around and feature her and feel good pieces about this woman who became such an important part of her community because the people where she lived absolutely loved her and she was PTA president and other things in the neighborhood. Her case is so different from the “talent” they are talking about! I know they have those in Korea and China as well they are definitely in a different category. I haven’t been back to Japan since 2011 and I don’t think I will go back or it’s unlikely. I wonder if I would recognize that because from everything I’ve heard mass tourism has definitely arrived. In the entire two decades I live there I don’t think I ever saw a tour bus full of foreign tourist before and except for in Asakusa I really never saw groups of tourists. So things have changed and I wonder if they still have the gaijin tarento
I have been back a couple of times recently, but not for long enough to feel confident commenting on whether Japan has really changed. However, the impression I've picked up is that, while much remains the same, there has been a change in Japan's openness to people from other cultures. I suspect that this is partly due to the greater number of Japanese travelling abroad, not on package tours but as independent travellers. People seem to be travelling more often to more different destinations, and many even spend time living abroad. People are just much more familiar with foreign travel and foreign countries than they would have been back then. I don't think package tours from abroad would make a difference, but the greater number of foreigners (not just Westerners) living and working in Japan has possibly also played a role.
Another difference is social changes. So many women are postponing marriage and childbearing and living their lives how they want. That means that they are no longer confined in that traditional box. Lots do travel overseas. As for men, the fact that society can no longer guarantee them a satisfactory salaryman life (the career escalator) has also changed the way they live, although this has possibly led to the opposite phenomenon of growing numbers of otaku.
All the above is idle speculation, given that I don't actually live in Japan and haven't for many years, but I do think that Japan is now very different from the "high economic growth" era of the 1960s that Nathan and Buruma saw. And, of course, that society was a product of much longer processes, including the nation-building frenzy of Meiji Japan with its creation of a Japanese "identity", the ultimately disastrous attempt to defy the Western powers and extend Japanese control to the Asian mainland, and the sudden subjection to the United States in the postwar period that led to the obsession with the economy.
I think there's something to be said for mastering a language and culture without losing oneself to it. It may depend on how comfortable one can be as an outsider. Thanks for bringing these three memoirs together, as more than the sum of their parts.
This is really interesting, Leanne! Buruma has been on my list for awhile.
Yes, please come!
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Tremendously interesting perspective! Thank you, Leanne, for reading these books and putting them together in context like this. Also timely for me personally, as I am leaving Japan next year and am in the painful process of culling my bookshelf.
Thanks so much!! Are you leaving to move home now?
Yes. My husband's retiring so we're moving to Adelaide.
A new world!! I hope I can visit you someday! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Please do ❤️!
Thank you so much for reading! His book really stood the test of time I recently reread it and I felt everything was still really valid and interesting even though so many years have passed so much has stayed the same in Japan.
Very interesting reading. I read Buruma's work of Japan & Germany. For me too, Japan is something of the past. I do remember riots in Tokyo, smashed windows and snake-dancing students and police lashing out at them. A few years later, I found myself in the same room with a Japanese high-jacker, doing the interpretation for Swedish police. An eerie feeling.