The most recent book by film scholar, critic and Ingmar Bergman and Francis Ford Coppola biographer Peter Cowie is called Japanese Cinema: My Personal Journey. It is, naturally enough, a personal reflection on the key themes and works that have inspired the author’s passion for the cinema of Japan; and though it takes the form of a chronological trawl through key films and filmmakers (in fact is comprised of little beyond assessing perceived key films and filmmakers) the title alludes to what is amongst the most prevalent modes of address and engagement in many Western explorations of Japan and its country and culture: namely, the concept of the personal journey. Cowie highlights, hijacks, what has been a pre-eminent model of Western engagement with Japan. Many books and blogs, scholarship and cultural commentary, travel and lifestyle discourse, tend to view and experience the country from the outside. They foreground this experiential dimension as something integral to the perspective, the ‘journey’, of the outsider. There is a perennial sense of looking in, looking from a distance, but interestingly this is configured as the trajectory of someone writing or filming from the inside out. That is, spatial/geographical proximity belies personal distance, and the narratives in many cases trace the narrowing of this gap and attendant growing of a subjectivity on the part of the author. Thus, there is a dual narrative of exploration – of finding out about a Japanese subject at the same time as taking an interior journey, a personal voyage of discovery and examination.

The concept of the ‘personal journey’, especially (though not only) as regards cinema, has generally taken the form of a connection with one’s own culture. Martin Scorsese’s My Voyage to Italy explores the Italian American director’s life through attendant exposure to and immersion in Italian cinema, whilst Bertrand Tavernier’s My Journey through French Cinema likewise examines key works in the development of filmmaking in France to the extent that they have impacted and influenced the notable director. There is a prevalent sense of exploring something that belongs to the author/director, that is their heritage, their identity, their past, present and future, and something that makes their art (and themselves) comfortable, stable, known and knowable. In Japan similar work has been undertaken. However, even when Japanese directors have produced comparable material (such as Oshima Nagisa’s documentary for the BFI’s 100 Years of Cinema project in 1995), they have tended to approach the topic in a critical, distanced way. Similarly, films about filmmakers – including significant directors making films about major directors (like Iwai Shunji’s The Kon Ichikawa Story or Sunada Mami’s Studio Ghibli documentary Kingdom of Madness and Dreams) – subsume entirely the personality of the director in favour of the subject. They remain transparent and illusionistic, with little if any trace of the director, marked as they are by the deference typical of the stringently hierarchical structures of Japanese corporate culture.

Consider as a counterpoint Chris Marker’s AK. Ostensibly a making-of documentary detailing the production of Kurosawa Akira’s samurai makeover of King Lear, Ran, this is in fact a complex, essayistic enquiry into filmmaking as a protracted, painstaking, labour-intensive process and a snapshot of extended moments on set, moments of inaction and inactivity. Indeed, it is almost a chronicle of a film not being made; and it relates almost nothing of Ran itself. It is mired in the immediate practicalities of combating weather, rehearsals and other difficulties in only a small fragment of the shoot. A key image features actors as mounted soldiers sweeping through the background of a shot that comes to rest and to focus on an extra standing forlorn: inactive, bored, yawning, in the foreground. It is a picture of the prosaic reality of a film set that is then contrasted with the genius of ‘sensei’ – of Kurosawa (AK) on the set, who is a towering, often remote figure, observed by Marker but directly encountered only in recorded interview snippets and brief moments from his films. Even these latter are viewed on a monitor, as the interviews are relayed through a Dictaphone, thus inscribing a tension between genius and mundanity, between the lofty ideals of an artistic vision and the often-protracted practicalities of its realization. This is much more about Marker’s conception of art and cinematic artistry in Japan than it is a document of a film’s production, and the inference is that (like this director’s other filmic forays into the East, into Japan and China), he is learning about himself and in particular his relationship to his own art and artistry.

As a further point of contrast, what is interesting with regard to Japan, the country and its culture, is the way in which it has figured in the consciousness of foreigners as a known unknown, something familiar in its unfamiliarity (or vice versa), and as a personal space, even though it is frequently filmed or written about as an almost alien land. At a time when global issues of migration and touristic overkill have been felt around the world, and such issues have been especially prominent in Japan, this discourse suggests a means of exploring how we engage with countries, how perceptions shape experiences and how long-argued questions of mukokuseki (stateless-ness, the lack of national specificity of Japanese culture – the culturally odourless) fit in with changes in Japanese society and cultural production.

Alternatively, one may posit that the country stands at the confluence of two poles: of an individual yearning for something that a comfortably familiar idea of an unfamiliar ‘other’ may offer on the one hand, and on the other a nation that has often self-Orientalised itself and that caters to perceptions of Japan by (and for) international audiences. Discourse on mukokuseki, such as the defining work in this area by Iwabuchi Koichi (first conceived around 2002), has not often addressed this point in depth, yet it remains a pointed means of considering how any sense of national odour is influenced as much by outside constructions as by any that have been overtly, officially sanctioned and thereby denoted and defined.

As perhaps Japan’s most prominent soft power, anime and similar mainstream productions, have been a key to this discourse, and the personal journeys of many commentators have drawn on this form as an entry into Japanese culture, in works such as Peter Carey’s Wrong About Japan or Hector Garcia’s A Geek in Japan. However, this is but one facet of the ways in which the country has infiltrated the hearts of those around the world, and opened doors previously viewed not so much closed as simply non-existent (introducing a world hitherto unsuspected). Elsewhere the tenets of popular culture that have been introductory in this way have fed and facilitated the journeys that seen a particularly personal intervention into Japan and society, topography and history as much as its culture. Take several pre-eminent examples. One thinks of Ian Maloney’s The Only Gaijin in the Village: A Year of Living in Rural Japan, Chris Broad’s A Broad in Japan (see what he did with the title there!), Alan Booth’s The Roads to Sata and Looking for the Lost, Todd Wassel’s Walking in Circles and the same author’s blogs at The Fermented Word. These works – varied in subject, tone, story and engagement with Japan – are all situated in and animated by a very specific tension. Indeed, Wassel’s work – concerned with his undertaking a multi-shrine pilgrimage on the island of Shikoku – is explicitly related to the author’s desire to ‘find himself’, to find a purpose after working in Japan as a teacher and becoming disillusioned, returning home to the US and to Graduate School, again finding himself questioning his life and ultimately returning to Japan and to the pilgrimage (first undertaken a decade or so earlier). He relates in detail how he had to alter or amend his preconceptions and fundamentally change his outlook on his adoptive nation.

Does this reinforce concepts of mukokuseki? What seems apparent is the extent to which it reframes the question of Japanese-ness or otherwise and at least complicates any sense of a binarism in order to suggest that any notion of national identity, or odour, is attendant not on organic notions of national identity, essence, character, but rather on perception, experience, perspective. In other words, there is no knowable entity of Japanese-ness simply awaiting discovery or elucidation. Recent work has explicitly questioned the so-called ‘Japan expert’ and signalled an end of days for ‘explaining’ Japan, casting an eye over the country and elucidating its features, characteristics, identity; and these personal journeys in effect replace and contravene such experts – people such as the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and cultural critic Donald Richie. These personal writers (reflective perhaps of general shifts into social media-led individualism rather than academic or expertise-driven: remote; pedagogic) bespeak not a rarefied knowledge so much as a personal experience of the country. They argue for a world not where something has or does not have national flavour or character. Rather, they probe the limits of such a term; they highlight its limitations, the boundaries of a use value that has often (too often) been assumed to carry explicit weight, something that can be taught, transmitted, passed on via learning as opposed to something that is felt, affective. The fundamental malleability of reality has been a (largely unfortunate) by-product of contemporary identity politics – feelings over facts – yet in examples like the above there is a viable framework that allows for a complication of this term: a positivity of application where to learn about a country, its customs and culture, one must be bodily (personally) situated therein. Concomitantly, this is also about a lack in the person/s undertaking the journey. If meaning is unstable as regards Japan then so is subjectivity. It is the primacy of perception that predominates here, such that terms (and activities) like tourism become limited as to how people conceive of their relations to place. And if this proffers little in the way of practical help for real world problems then it is worth remembering, as numerous online posts have stressed, that tourism is fed by publications – by marketing and by discourse.

Interestingly, Carey’s work in Wrong About Japan explores in detail how the perceived alienness of the country and its popular culture is an Orientalist construction, a myth. This has been echoed elsewhere. A recent article in The Guardian in the UK discussed how perceptions of the weird and wonderful Otherness of Japanese pop culture have often misrepresented such culture. It argues that:

              ‘“British television programmes have a tendency to represent Japanese people as stereotypically odd or kooky, without explaining the cultural context,” says Professor Perry R Hinton, an expert in intercultural communication…This kind of othering reveals a narrow-mindedness. As Shinichi Adachi, the Japanese-British film-maker behind YouTube culinary series The Wagyu Show explains, Japanese culture isn’t particularly strange, just more accepting of humanity’s strangeness. “They respect people, even if they don’t understand them. People don’t really care if others have weird hobbies.”’

This perceived ‘narrow-minded’ approach to Japanese culture suggests that a personal conversion is a key part of becoming familiar with the country’s popular culture, to seeing beyond the surface of a perceived Otherness to recognise the meaning/s beneath the surface, perhaps to draw attention to said surface in order to probe the meanings therein: to personalise the seemingly impersonal. In previous generations internationally successful shows such as Takeshi’s Castle – where contestants attempted a range of outlandish physical tasks and trials – attested to the potential for Japanese popular culture to reach beyond national borders and to find an audience who responded to more than just the zany surface. They saw relatable examples of endeavour, camaraderie and resilience in the contestants; they found tension and suspense in the set-up of the same contestants repeating tasks and a genial and inclusive, rather than abrasive or contemptuous, humour, one that shaped an almost communal, inclusive response as opposed to a derisive one.

What is at stake here, and what is both expressed by and subsumed within respective literary and at times filmic iterations (documentaries on art and artists typically from French filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Limousin or essay films like Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil [1982]), is how subjectivity is situated and expressed. Japan is by no means exceptional in this case. It is, of course, not the only country to be traversed, filmed and/or written about by foreigners – indeed travel literature and television has often had recourse to opening-up the world for the edification of foreign cultures, in shrinking the globe and broadening a scope of knowledge. However, travelling within, even encountering, Japan, is a means not (or not only) of exploring the world, but rather of perceptions of the same, of one’s relationship thereto. It does not so much shrink as negate the globe. There are, as is signified by the titles of some books and the assumptions underpinning their narratives, a plethora of views of Japan as a strange new world. Early in his book (about his years spent teaching English in Japanese schools) Broad describes his journey to Yamagata, a rural city in northern Japan where he is to work. He reflects how the landscape of rolling plains and the lack of grass bespeaks for him an almost alien topography. Conversely, Hidden Japan by William Spelton, sees the author discuss (as Alan Booth would do in Looking for the Lost) those areas of the country that he introduces via a look at Tokyo, and how different the Japanese capital remains even to familiar urban jungles like New York or Beijing.

Alex Kerr, also in a book entitled Hidden Japan (a companion piece to his earlier Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan), seeks to uncover traces of what has been lost in the country’s post-war transformation, of what has been overridden by its drive to modernization and Westernization. This is a tension that says a lot about the space for a personal journey, about the fissures between tradition and modernity, inside which what it means to be Japanese (and what the Japanese themselves may hold as endemic therein), remains vague or ambiguous, and in which any viable concepts of national identity require consideration of the inexorable extent to which they remain situated within subjective imperatives and extrapolations. From this perspective ‘Japan’ as a construct, a perception or experience, bespeaks individual attitudes and views rather than any ‘objective’ truth or reality. Indeed, the latter is repeatedly denied or at least frustrated. This is an extrapolation and inversion of Orientalism – Edward Said’s concept of the ways in which Eastern cultures were exoticized and thus Othered – and it serves to place the imperative not on grand (national) frames of reference as a way of making meaning but on the individual him or herself. Said’s thesis is complicated here, and as such there is a suggestion not of subverting said thesis as much as reframing its chief tenets. In an age when tourism has been regarded as a social problem, this presents at least a potential means of complicating extant discourses, and of suggesting a different relationship to Japan in particular. To return to the apparently dreaded T word, it is one where tourism in its simplest sense can be deepened – the problematic discourses thereon that have recently seen social problems such as illegal short-term property rentals dumped on the doorstep of over- tourism – and a different relationship to foreign spaces underlined. 

In part 2 of this blog I will explore further these tensions and relationships. Stay tuned.