Charlie Brooker, the British screenwriter, zombie reality TV expert and culture commentator for the Guardian, is doing a series of articles on Japan. I wouldn’t usually care but I quite like Charlie Brooker’s style of criticism, usually directed at television culture, which is ascerbic and filthy but also well educated and very fond of the medium (TV) that he mostly writes on. His cultural commentary can be a lot of fun and occasionally insightful, and certainly his first article on first impressions of Japan contains a few, such as his description of a lot of Japanese TV:
Imagine watching an endless episode of The One Show with the colour and brightness turned up to 11, where all the guests have been given amphetamines, the screen is peppered with random subtitles, and every 10 seconds it cuts to a close-up shot of a bowl of noodles for no apparent reason. That’s 90% of Japanese TV right there.
However, I’m concerned that he’s going to fall back on the same tired tropes that always get trotted out to describe Japan by westerners, especially those just visiting or who don’t have at least a passing familiarity with the language, and especially especially British and American commentators, whose level of introspection about their own cultures is, in general, profoundly lacking. The common tropes tend to be a combination of weirdness, exoticism, and a sense that you’ve stepped back in time to an earlier cultural period in the west, which almost certainly never actually existed. He certainly doesn’t start or end well, with both the opening and closing sentences describing Japan as “another planet.” He goes on in the first paragraph to say
while the world around you is largely recognisable, it somehow makes little sense
This is the classic expression of the cosseted western view. When did western cultural commentators decide that their own country is the arbiter of what “makes sense”? Once you’ve lived in Japan for a little while you start to see a lot of things about western life that definitely make no sense: when I watched TV in the UK and saw adverts for furniture, for example, inevitably some idiot actor would flop onto a couch and put their fully-shod feet up on it. Since I’ve lived in Japan I’ve come to realize that this is a truly disgusting habit, and it makes no sense that we in the west ever conceived of wearing our shoes into the house as a good idea. Perhaps, then, instead of phrasing things in terms of a culture that is full of “sense” (the one Brooker came from) and one that isn’t, Brooker could talk merely in terms of difference? And while he’s at it, learn to take his shoes off inside.
So already Brooker has established Britain’s cultural mores as the background from which all else deviates, and has portrayed the Japanese as alien and strange (incomprehensible, even). His green kit-kat comment follows the same pattern: kit-kats as representative of British cultural norms, are rendered green in Japan for no apparent reason. It’s left to the people in comments to mention that the chocolate is green because it is tea flavoured, a common practice in Japan, but from the body of the text we’re left to assume that the Japanese just like to make western chocolate green for no reason. Here we see the essence of the depiction of the other as strange: present something they do as an idiosyncratic or incomprehensible phenomenon and avoid a description of the extremely simple reason for the action.His description of TV also contains an element of this: those subtitles aren’t random, Charlie, because by definition sub-titles are not random. They are the words that the person speaking is saying. As the Suicidals once famously said: “Just beause you don’t understand it don’t mean it don’t make no sense.” In this case, the thing you don’t understand is this thing called “language” and you should ask yourself how you would feel if an Asian were commenting on the “randomness” of elements of your own culture’s TV without knowing a single word of English.
This perhaps also is what underlies his segue to a full two paragraphs of quite gross description of Japanese toilets. Why are the British focused on toilets? And whatever gave Brooker the impression that, as a member of a nation whose public toilets (not to mention its chocolate!) are universally poor-to-terrible, he is the best person to judge Japan’s extremely high standards of hygiene? Of course, toilet habits are a fundamental example of the way in which cultures differ, and a culturally introspective look at Japanese toilet habits could be an ideal opportunity for a Londoner like Brooker to discover that actually, his own culture has a lot to learn on this front. But instead it’s again a way of depicting the Japanese as weird and different, and these two paragraphs manage to incorporate a nod to the classical/modern binary of Japanese life, a good bit of British toilet humour, and bemusement at Japanese weirdness, all in one. To his credit Brooker finishes it with a sentence about machines overthrowing humans that serves to reunite Japanese and British as having cultural commonality; this is nice. But there is no chance to compare this with a British pub toilet – I bet Brooker doesn’t dare take a crap in your average British pub toilet, as just the stink alone would hurt his brain.
The remainder of the article, however, is good stuff, giving impressions of TV from the perspective of someone who apparently doesn’t speak any Japanese. Once he’s on his favourite ground (TV commentary) Brooker ditches the cultural-analysis stereotypes and manages to give a fairly nice description of how Japanese TV looks if you don’t understand Japanese. He also is much more introspective here, making jokes about crazy Japanese game shows without missing the point that reality TV is just as degrading and terrible a phenomenon. The use of the word “yelping” is a bit unfortunate in the context of a man in a country where he doesn’t understand the language, but overall it’s good. I think he’s wrong about the content of Japanese TV ads though: they aren’t mostly about food, they’re mostly about hair products.
Anyway, I’ll be watching this series of articles by Brooker with interest to see if he can rise above his colonialist heritage to give a genuinely interesting analysis of Japanese cultural life. I think he can do it, though I’m doubtful about whether he’ll be at all aware of how much he privileges his own cultural viewpoint. Japan is an almost completely blank slate to the British – the “far East” is something they know almost nothing about, in my experience. If he can give them a slightly deeper insight into Japan than “they’re weird and nothing makes sense” then he’ll have achieved something. Here’s hoping …
Compromise and Conceit 
January 26, 2012 at 9:25 am
Given I love Japanese culture in the same way I love the rules for Runequest [1] [2], I can understand you complaint that bringing your cultural assumptions into observations is a poor starting point [3], but you persist in saying stuff like “rise above his colonialist heritage” as if that explains his behaviour. He’s being an unthinking twit because he’s behaving like a naive teenage who just describes stuff they don’t understand as “random” not because his Empire controls India.
You can use this test to see if the word is appropriate: Rudyard Kipling was unashamedly colonialist to the point where he wrote a poem about the “White Man’s Burden” [4]. But he at least appreciated that the poor brown people had a culture of their own and brought something to the table rather than assuming that they were mysterious aliens.
I sort of suspect that the colonial administrators (or Flashman) throughout the age of the British Empire probably understood a lot more about foreign cultures than Charlie Brooker does, even if they didn’t mouth the platitudes that a Guardian commentator would about respecting other cultures.
[1] I have a paper thin understanding of both, though at least there’s a chance I’ll bother reading the Runequest rules one day (if I open the book) – apparently they’re in English.
[2] I hope you appreciate how I keep your blog related to gaming 😉
[3] Which is why sub’d anime is vastly superior to translated anime. I want all the phrasing and conceptual strangeness to stay in there so that I can try to understand the culture through the way they approach situations, rather than have the actions and words translated into concepts I’m familiar with.
[4] Which incidentally isn’t a bad poem and if you replaced “White Man’s Burden” with “Western Aid Funding Burden” wouldn’t have anyone blink at it.
January 26, 2012 at 6:02 pm
Once you’ve lived in Japan for a little while you start to see a lot of things about western life that definitely make no sense: when I watched TV in the UK and saw adverts for furniture, for example, inevitably some idiot actor would flop onto a couch and put their fully-shod feet up on it. Since I’ve lived in Japan I’ve come to realize that this is a truly disgusting habit, and it makes no sense that we in the west ever conceived of wearing our shoes into the house as a good idea.
Oh my good Christ, I know. I always have to fight back the urge, when I go into an English home and see people walking around in shoes, “You know where those have been, right? You know you’ve probably stepped in people’s discarded chewing gum, old dog shit, tramp piss, and vomit with those, don’t you? YOU NOW HAVE DISCARDED CHEWING GUM, DOG SHIT, TRAMP PISS AND VOMIT IN YOUR HOUSE! ON YOUR SOFA!”
Also, Japanese toilets are the best in the world. It’s as simple as that. One of the things I miss most is the toilet we had in our old apartment, with its warm seat and cleansing water spray. Ah, memories.
January 27, 2012 at 7:38 pm
Noisms, when I was writing this I actually ahd in mind another amusing thought: I imagined your average Victorian or Edwardian gentleman going to his friend’s house and fastidiously taking off his hat when he got inside (everyone knows that’s polite!) but keeping on his shit-stained shoes. It’s completely the wrong set of priorities! Doesn’t make any sense. Your thoughts on Brooker’s description of Japanese TV?
Paul, I’m not for a moment trying to suggest that Brooker is consciously enacting colonialist thought, and I certainly agree there’s just a large dose of puerility in the work[1], but I do think that British cultural criticism is an inheritor of this cultural baggage (just as, no doubt, Japanese cultural criticism is an inheritor of some kind of racist baggage). I also accept that every person privileges their own culture when viewing others, but I think that colonialist cultures are more likely to define their own as “normal” and the other as “deviant” rather than seeing the difference as going both ways – hence Brooker is on another planet, not another country. And while I have no doubt that Flashman’s understanding of India is vastly superior to Brooker’s, British knowledge of Asia is very heavily biased towards the countries they colonized and the particular perspectives they got within those cultures; so the “far east” (telling name, that) is a blank slate to the British. Whereas for Americans and Australians, our historical experience of these nations is more mercantile (not entirely, obviously) and thus different.
Also, despite their colonial privilege, British accounts of Japan can still have value – I have referenced Chamberlain’s work on this blog several times, and though in its own way it’s appallingly racist and biased, it’s also at other times very insightful. I’m hoping for the same from Brooker.
It would be really interesting to dig up a detailed comparison of different nation’s interpretations of Japan. Japan is certainly very different to Europe in a way that European countries aren’t from each other, and the way each country’s intellectual establishment approaches that difference is probably a really fascinating mirror of their own biases and insecurities.
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fn1: This is what I like about it, but also one of its main flaws, and when he overdoes it it can be quite awful.