Living in Japan will make you hate it

A lot of my friends have been forwarding me this article, published yesterday on the Kotaku gaming blog. “I totally heard your voice while reading it,” one guy said.

It’s a long, very critical article about life in modern Japan, written from the perspective of a foreigner who has been living there for about five years and is falling steadily out of love with the place. I lived in Japan for only a single year, and fell out of love almost immediately. Hence the familiar tone.

It’s a really well-written piece, insightful and targeted and savage in all the right places. Aside from some of the author’s more insular rants near the beginning (born from his unique frustrations as a non-smoking vegetarian), the article projects, very coherently, a frustration with Japan that I believe inevitably consumes any reasonably intelligent western ex-pat after sufficient time has passed.

It’s insightful to the point of being somewhat esoteric, in fact. I question just how accessible the article would be to someone who has never experienced a prolonged period of Japanese societal immersion. Japanese culture, and the flaws and frustrations contained therein, is a topic surprisingly hard to articulate. It’s a nation defined by behavioral subtitles and lots of strange, unquestioned assumptions, that although seemingly minor in scope, achieve totalitarian magnitude in practice.

I like this passage:

In many Japanese offices, you’re required to scream “Good morning!” at the top of your lungs, clapping your hands to your thighs, as soon as you enter the office area every morning. Everyone in the office then shouts “Good morning!” back to you. At my orientation for one company, the Human Resources Girl — whose face (figuratively) literally screamed “Hall Monitor” — was going over the “Good Morning!” protocol. Her explanation weird despite its terseness: “This is how adults interact in Japan.” Most of the people at the orientation, like me, were under twenty-five. “Before we move onto the next item, does anyone have any questions?” I seriously and portentously asked a question, then, which I thought was hilarious: “If we’re the first one in the office in the morning, do we still have to scream ‘Good Morning’ and clap our hands to the sides of our legs?” Her answer was immediate, and humorless: “Yes.” “Well, I mean, there’s no one else around to hear it, right?” “You still have to do it. It’s the rule. Every employee must do this. That’s why we call it ‘protocol.’” This instant was actually the very first time I begin to ponder the logistics of actually going ahead and being homeless. You know, cardboard, up against concrete, is not only not uncomfortable — it’s pretty good for your spine!

I pushed further: “What if I am the second person in the office, and the first person is someone with whom I have, previously, managed to successfully cultivate a congenial personal relationship? What if it’s a person whose first and last name I know, with whom I share interests and hobbies, and we’ve previously agreed that we think this ‘Good morning’ shit is some serious bullshit, and we just agree to be like, ‘Hey, what’s up’ to one another in the morning and we’ve also agreed that hey, if anyone else asks, we’ll just go ahead and say ‘Oh yeah, that dude totally screamed “Good morning” to me this morning’?”

The HR girl didn’t even blink: “You still have to carry out the customary ‘Good Morning.’”

Reading this without a larger Japanese context to compare it to, you would probably conclude that Japanese office bureaucrats are prissy and rigid. Or at least prissy and rigid to yakky American know-it-alls. The real lesson of this interaction, however, is even more sweeping: the Japanese have no respect for logic. Logic and rational argument are simply not values which hold high currency in Japanese society, where the supreme priority, above everything else, is maintaining social cohesion, be it through lies, oppression, absurdities, or whatever else. That sounds like a very harsh and judgmental thing to say, but it’s the truth, and a truth that is hard to appreciate the full significance of when you’re just hearing it via bitter anecdotes from some dude on the internet.

The author repeatedly links his criticisms to related insights about the Japanese video game industry. At first I thought this was a tad sophomoric, but it does make some sense. To my generation (and I assume his) video games have been our primary exposure to Japanese culture. Though they are obviously imaginative and fun, they also all contain a fair bit of irrational weirdness in their storylines, gameplay mechanics, and expectations of the player, but as a child you’re already expected to put up with a lot of nonsense in your life, so you don’t analyze the contradictions of your video games too seriously. Living in Japan can truly be an eye-opening experience in this regard, however. Things slowly fall into place. You slowly begin to realize that the weirdness present in the games you uncritically accepted as a child are really the manifestations of the fundamental weirdness governing all of Japanese society. And I don’t mean the flying raccoons or one-eyed umbrella ghosts or whatever, I mean the fundamental ways in which these games are structurally designed and intended to be consumed. I’d elaborate further, but the Kotaku guy does a better job.

Someday I’ll write a more lengthy analysis of my own time in Japan. But for now, most of what want to say is being ably said by Tim Rogers.