In part 1 of this blog I began outlining and exploring some of the ways in which non-fiction about Japan by writers of different genres, styles and personal backgrounds may be taken together to demonstrate a distinctive form of engagement with Japan. This potentially has many ramifications for the ways in which the country (in particular amongst subjects for travel literature and cultural discourse) figures in the popular consciousness of those in the West. One notable feature of many of these consequences is that ostensibly fictive imperatives are brought to bear on non-fiction work. It is notable that interpretation and ‘reading the text’ are viable practices that accrue potentially in non-fiction as much as fictional texts. Wiliam Scott Wilson’s Walking the Kiso Road, for example – an account of the author’s traversing of the historic road, has an intriguing preface wherein the author recounts time spent prior to his journey on foot, days of travel, food, drink and respite taken prior to his hike along the eponymous historical route through the mountains and villages. This recollection closes with the author thinking about those many people who have stayed where he has stayed and travelled where he will travel, and he notes thereafter that he ‘fell into a deep and undisturbed sleep’.

Given there is little that seems overly necessary from a narrative perspective in this short prologue, there is a fascinating sense that the subsequent engagement with the specificities of a series of diverse rural landscapes throughout Japan arises from a dream, a deep-rooted longing for what Japan may provide for the traveller, perhaps an idealised sense of an Otherness that corresponds to a need, even a lack, in the subject. This is not, one hastens to add, a literal facet of the book. One certainly does not wish to patronize or dimmish this eminent writer and translator’s efforts. It is merely to suggest how this particular foreign country seems almost inexorably embedded in the unconscious, how it is resonant as a detailed picture and a blank canvas, and seems to respond to a deep-seated need to test views, perceptions, attitude, actions and beliefs: to challenge knowledge and the self.

Similarly in Alex Kerr’s Lost Japan, there the whole point of the book is to consider, to lament, the extent to which the natural beauty of the country has been destroyed. The author thus spends a significant proportion of his narrative describing memories, writing in a way that encapsulates landscapes of the mind, constructions, subjectivity. Literally, like a novelist, he is conjuring a world that exists not in ‘reality’ and uses approaches, techniques and touches (metaphor; simile, etc) to thus end. Japan is not, as with Wilson, the Orientalist Other by which the value or superiority of the Western subject is asserted; indeed, the point of works like Carey’s or Broad’s is to imagine a third or liminal space, one wherein individual desires or needs are met. However, there is a subtext in this imperative. The non-Japanese, the Gaijin, is using Japan as a path (literally in Wassel’s case) to becoming Japanese. The exotic Other becomes indexed to self-discovery and even self-improvement, the chief interest being that a process of this kind of personal betterment means stepping outside oneself and, through this, drawing attention to limitations in how one conceives of oneself, especially in relation to social context. Thus, questions of national identity are to all intent and purposes superfluous, indeed questioned, here, as the point is to stress the primacy of perception, of how the personal, the national, etc are viewed and how such perceptions colour identity. Chris Broad outlines the extent to which there is a particular relationship between foreigners and Japan. He relates how his YouTube videos of life in Japan had received strong adverse reactions from various self-appointed ‘guardians’ of Japan and its culture, and part of this reaction seems to have been based on a sense of ownership of a particular idea of the country. This is a curious approach to take to videos that are not (as argued) about demeaning or disrespecting Japan as much as they are highlighting, and to an extent, celebrating particular foibles as regards language and social customs.

Once again, it is the tension between looking from afar as opposed to being within that is paramount, and the sense of a Western subjectivity is to the fore here. This has numerous specificities in different forms of both written and visual culture. Travel literature in particular is notable to this end as it is typically constructed around exploring the subject as opposed to the author. The essays of Andre Aciman, for example, are often built around the author’s travels, in cities such as St. Petersburg, Rome and New York, which are undertaken in an attempt to discover something about these places, about their history, personal significance (for the author or nation) or for literary or cultural representation in general. Cities, towns, roads, villages – countries – from this point of view exist to be discovered, traversed, understood, known. They remain essentially static, monolithic, a space through which the traveller travels and about which s/he learns before moving onward. Compare stories of walking like Wassell’s or Wilson’s with ostensibly comparable texts such as Shadow City: A Woman Walks in Kabul (about an Indian journalist’s travels on foot around a city that has had a turbulent history and remains a problematic place for women) or Walking to Jerusalem (which covers the author, Justin Butcher’s, journey to the eponymous city) and see observations and facts in place of questions of memory, identity, individual development. Indeed, the subtitle of Walking to Jerusalem – Blisters, Hope and other Facts on the Ground – suggests the extent to which the city as much as the author remains the subject, the focal point. This is not to offer an evaluative comparison to the detriment of these books, admirable – engaging, moving, informative – as both certainly are. It is only to highlight the fact that similar journeys in Japan function differently. These latter do not omit facts about the country, its culture, people, cuisine, climate, etc. However, they are related in a way that prioritises their effect on the writer and observer and become at least as much about them as about what they are observing.  

In Japanese travel writing, which has a long tradition beginning hundreds of years ago (in literature and poetry in which travel was a prominent motif), the prevalence of long stretches of physical movement became, if not a way of life, then at least a norm therein. Meredith McKinney has noted that writers often valued lifting themselves out of the realms of personal reflection and placing their observations within a defined artistic lineage or tradition. Walking was, at this time, undertaken out of necessity rather than for pleasure. Travel was a way of life for many, and writing about it, often in a poetic manner, stresses the loneliness and longing for home inherent in such journeys. Thus, there is a marked sense of the limitations of personal engagements with travel, and thus these older traditions stand in almost diametric contrast to modern foreign explorations of the country. This difference then bespeaks both the comparative luxury of modern globalisation (of travelling, emigrating, with ease) as well as a concomitant erosion of borders, geographical borders and attendant notions of national identity.  

Film criticism of Japanese cinema has often been written at the confluence of a personal experience (i.e. explicitly Western) of a film or a filmmaker and an acknowledgement of a fundamentally different system of signification as a way of negotiating perceived otherness. Thus, a pronounced reading of the extremes of signification inherent in Japanese cinema, its fundamental alterity, is made manifest. Cowie’s ‘personal journey’ and its implicit sense of an individual perspective animated some of the earliest, perceived most important, works to cover the subject. Noel Burch’s To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (note the definite article here) is a notable book, whilst shortly thereafter both David Bordwell and Darrell William Davis conceived of a specific style within Japanese cinema. For the latter a perceived ‘Monumental Style’ could be observed, one that served to buttress and adumbrate Japanese national identity during a time of modernity and conflict with the West, and he like the others noted above framed this difference in terms not of opposition but rather of a connection, in this case to the generalised art cinema that was then a fashionable mode to define and delineate (see Steve Neale’s work in particular). This sense of a distinctive, singular, ‘Other’ cinema, one whose nature as such owes at least much to the rapturous delights of discovery on the part of hungry Western critics, is writ large in much discourse. It positioned films from Japan within a context of so-called art cinema that was at this time just being canonized. When Japanese cinema was introduced to and popularised in the West following Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon (1951) and its scooping of the top prize (the Golden Lion) at the Venice Film Festival, there followed a flurry of excitement, a pronounced thrill of the new. It was something that some studios and directors in Japan began to cater toward (pander to) and that shaped which films were made and how they were produced – their narratives, styles, etc – and by extension this determined what was deemed Japanese abroad. For example, a nugget of received wisdom suggested that directors like Ozu Yasujiro, whose speciality was the home drama (in other words stories of the present, of normal, everyday characters, relations, families) were not exportable as they eschewed such packageable Japanese-ness, whilst lavish period dramas (jidai-geki) such as Gate of Hell (1953), Ugetsu monogatari (1953) and The Empress Yang Kwei Fei (1955) were produced by filmmakers like Kinugasa Teinosuke and Mizoguchi Kenji at studios like Daiei with at least one eye on the international marketplace.

This sense of a packaged, encoded, commodified Japanese-ness spoke to foreign tastes and perceptions as much as it did to national practices or proclivities. It served to open up fissures between diverse and in many ways discrete cultural forms, and film scholarship like Burch’s helped to cement this tension. Opening with a chapter entitled ‘A system of Contradictions’, To the Distant Observer goes on to explore how Japanese cinema’s singular style developed from its system of written language, its history and lineage of artistic practices, before elucidating how some Western social commentary and political discourse bears indelible links to those from Japan. The questionable determinism of this approach is perhaps easy to discern, especially as Burch goes to great lengths to outline antithetical practices both in the West and elsewhere in Asia. The question of language is an interesting one to ponder here, the use of imported Chinese characters (Kanji) that were complemented by two specifically Japanese syllabaries (Hiragana and katakana) with phonetic imperatives suggesting a fractious and complex sense of expression in Japanese art, culture, society – indeed human interaction – that situated the country in a matrix of points of view both domestic and international, familiar and different. Similar imported influences marked art, architecture and religion (amongst other practices) and these were adopted and adapted within Japan to create something of a cultural or social hybridity.

In other words, questions of originality have often been regarded as problematic in Japan. It is a nation where, as Avanish Saravanan has noted, ‘Japan [became] famous for the hybridity of many of the prominent elements of its culture [to the extent that] […] it is difficult to determine whether something is truly “Japanese”’. The oft-repeated implicit search for a unique film culture or style within Japan is, both within and without the country, an undertaking always apt to shed light on the perceiver rather than the perceived, to which Saravanan amply attests. The intention therefore of the paper is to illuminate how a “differences-focused” approach in texts could promote a stereotypical and potentially facile view of Japanese culture rather than encouraging a more meaningful and informed understanding, one that appreciates the context in which the ‘uniqueness’ of Japanese culture has hitherto been presented and the extent to which this is an erroneous assumption. With this in mind the question of what is or is not distinctly Japanese has a multi-faceted charge, and it is a charge that this cultural discourse frames and indeed makes accessible – even if this accessibility and attendant visibility can lead to disavowal.  

The thrill of the Other yet the desire to elucidate that Other in terms familiar to the writer, and by extension his or her audience and social context, had already animated a number of different texts. Chief in this regard is, perhaps, Ruth Benedict’s popular anthropological study The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Published, rather opportunistically, in 1946, it sought to ‘explain’ Japan to Western readers, to immerse readers in a distinct and different culture and in effect to orientalise Japan for Western readers. This in addition to general symposia at the time of different Western nations stands beside a differing approach in Japan. The Japanese tended to approach the pervasive question of what constitutes national heritage and how this can be conceptualized, the factors central to any meaningful construction of specificity of nationhood, in a slightly different way, and indeed often sought to essentialize the people but less so its culture. In the context of what has been termed post-nationhood alluded to above – an age where distinct nations are increasingly antiquated concepts due to factors such as ever-increasing immigration and global mobility – these are important constructions to bear in mind as a means of suggesting how inorganic are any concepts of defining nationality and culture in essentialized terms.

And construction is the watchword here, with attendant notions of the presentational and the artificial. What, then, is one to take from this construction of Japan? There is clearly a liminal space between a unique, alien, inscrutable culture on the one hand and, on the other, a bricolage of different influences, imports and even ostensibly antithetical materials that are then combined. The fissures that are facilitated by this apparent binarism are then filled in with the personal journey of the critic, writer or filmmaker. Their sense of developing Japanese-ness reifies their particular status as commentator, as writing from a perspective both of knowledge and individual expertise but also of individual subjectivity, as arbiters not necessarily of what Japan means or represents so much as what it means to them. Broad’s implicit sense of separating himself, however self-deprecatingly, from those guardians of Japan that he encountered suggests his own different take on what Japan stands for, which ‘Japan’ is being covered or constructed and what this construction bespeaks about wider attitudes.   

Japanese cinema in the West, during the different eras (the 1950s and late 1990s especially) in which it was internationally canonised, was attendant on works like Gate of Hell and, later, Kitano Takeshi’s Hana-Bi (1997) that could package and commodify Japanese-ness. Again, this is not unique to Japan (think of British or French heritage cinema); but it is notable the extent to which this apparent desire to package Japanese-ness, to commodify an experiential engagement with ‘Japan’, stresses what the viewer believes he or she knows about the subject. In so doing it panders to that presumption of knowledge, cosies up thereto as a means of reframing Orientalism (the otherness of the object) in order to sell the exotic as familiar, as known to viewers/consumers. The country becomes reducible to signs in which knowable difference, something exotically different yet not unknown in the general popular consciousness. A recent rend in people choosing Japan as a place to get married – to stand before cherry blossoms and Mount Fuji as they exchange their vows – reinforces this idea. These people want ‘Japan’ to perform its allotted role in a wider performance: of love, romance, union.  

So, the concept of the personal journey negates facts, figures and data. It obfuscates history as it is often (mis)understood and in its stead proffers a vision of the country predicated more on the viewer than the viewed. Japan, ‘Japan’, is explicitly positioned as a collection of ideas, practices, processes, traditions. It is a collation of signs where the relationship between signifier and signified remains fundamentally unstable, and where because of this instability there remains a potential for Japan to become what anyone desires it to be. Ultimately, where walking has recently been argued to be ingrained in Japanese culture – as a historical practice, a means of spiritual discipline and of communal connection, and a poetic reverie – it is fitting that walking figures prominently in this modern thematic. It almost a metaphor here, a figurative simile for being spatially situated within an unfamiliar space that nonetheless you find yourself opening up and responding to, being transformed by. It entails a personal journey through the impersonal, the alien, the Other and by doing so breaking down this Otherness. If Japan is, as the protagonist of James Clavell’s epic novel Shogun is repeatedly told, a place where one has to fundamentally change one’s mindset in order to thrive, then reconciling oneself to this Otherness, making the journey personal, indeed in some instances Turning Japanese: understanding Japan as a state of mind and being, to say nothing of body, of being situated physically within the country for an extended period of time. Most writers mentioned here have lived and worked in Japan, continued to explore its specificities from the inside. ‘Turning Japanese; I don’t really think so’! But I do think that shedding light on what may be understood by the term, and the problems and limitations of defining a nation (any nation) by simple or sweeping precepts, is even more important; and this the so-called ‘personal journey’ most certainly accomplishes.