The Meaning of Japan

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
actually i suppose the UK has the same thing going on - the rest of the world sees us as tea-sipping hugh grant types who not so much wouldn't as couldn't hurt a fly?
 

version

Well-known member
Someone told me once that kawaii culture was kind of a counter-culture originally, a rebellion against being austere and conformism. That person wasn't Japanese and I haven't read anything about it personally.
I've heard that stuff was encouraged by the US to gloss over the bombings and reduce the place to an nonthreatening fantasy land.
 

martin

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It's funny though I think of both Japan and Germany as benign, unthreatening cultures - which is what they WANT me to think

GERMANY?!?? Weird. I always saw them as the enemy. A country as dark as Hitler's heart.

Every now and then I think I'd be right at home in Japan, but of course they'd never really accept me. And I think behind all the impeccable manners and cutesy behaviour, their bureaucracy wouldn't hesitate to crush you if you stepped out of line (politely, mind).
 

martin

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I've heard that stuff was encouraged by the US to gloss over the bombings and reduce the place to an nonthreatening fantasy land.
There's a bloke at Hiroshima Peace Museum who has a US flag painted on his leather jacket and plays 50s RnR songs on guitar. I'm pretty sure he's there to remind US visitors, "It's OK, we still like you."
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
There's a bloke at Hiroshima Peace Museum who has a US flag painted on his leather jacket and plays 50s RnR songs on guitar. I'm pretty sure he's there to remind US visitors, "It's OK, we still like you."
"And we were sort of asking for it, tbf."
 

john eden

male pale and stale
There's a bloke at Hiroshima Peace Museum who has a US flag painted on his leather jacket and plays 50s RnR songs on guitar. I'm pretty sure he's there to remind US visitors, "It's OK, we still like you."
Fits with the anti-German movement (of Germans) too.

Despite awkwardness being hard-wired into the English there is no equivalent for the crimes of Empire.
 

DLaurent

Well-known member
I love Japan and its history in an orientalist way, never been there. My mates brother learned the language fluently and now works in Washington for a Japanese company. Being into their history, and having studied the Meiji restoration before and after, I know why they became a cultural idol, the West was from a point onwards a big part of the Japanese imagination too, but I don't know why this might seem to be fading. Probably because of other things going on in the world.
 

DLaurent

Well-known member
From Sansho the Bailiff. Old Japan but Shakespearean in the scope of it's tragedy.

sansho.jpg

I also found an old Ozu silent film I scored using a Kontakt Koto instrument and themes from old Japanese folk music. I wish I hadn't let the middle section drag on for so long but it's still a great film, apart from the score.

 

luka

Well-known member
it does feel as though once you pass the mountain ranges that guard the periphery of China you enter into a completely other condition. everything from Ireland to those mountains you could trace as a continuum, or everything from north africa all the way through the middle east and into muslim central asia. then something completely new happens.
 

luka

Well-known member
when we imagine this condition we think of stillness, of a more finely tuned consciousness, the clarity of tea
 

luka

Well-known member
when we dream of India we dream of tropical profusion gods with a thousand arms but when we dream of the East we dream of emptiness. Ripples radiating around an absence.
 

luka

Well-known member
this reaches its zenith in Japan where the food is distinctive for its clarity of flavour and we dream of a culture which organises itself around that limpidity and subtlety each sound surrounded and framed by silence
 
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DLaurent

Well-known member
Rice Beer is an acquired taste but Asahi Super Dry, I think Japans most popular beer, is my favourite tipple.
 

luka

Well-known member
aspiring to the condition of that note. bing! its clean distinct edges and orderly vibration
 
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luka

Well-known member
it's something that we recognise and match up to states we have ourselves attained, or rather glimpsed at the border of the territory
 

luka

Well-known member
or think you glimpse in another in their manner of speaking moving sitting in the light behind their eyes
 
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